Mystery Oreos: The Taste of Pure Imagination

Preposterous Ploy or a Pleasing Puzzlement?
A cynic would explain the appearance of Mystery Oreos this way: the flummoxed flavor wizards at Oreo, suffering a food chemist's version of writer's block, failed to think of any new ideas for novelty flavors and, in a fit of desperation, settled on some undefinable but pleasant-tasting combination of extracts that they would offer consumers, saying "you tell US what it is!"  It's certainly a viable conspiracy theory but, as with many such fever-dreams, it is not supported by the evidence.  Here at the Food Kingdom, all available staff (and other volunteers) have tasted these mystery cookies and they taste quite definitely of something.  We just can't agree what that something is.

Oreos has revved up the excitement by offering a grand prize of $50,000 for one person who correctly guesses the mystery flavor, and 5 $10,000 runner-up prizes.  But don't get too excited.  There will likely be thousands of entrants who guess correctly, and the winners from that pool are selected by random drawing. This is more of a sweepstakes than a contest.  Unless the correct answer is Blueberry-Banana Ecto-Cooler Crunch or something.

Blind Tasting
Mystery Oreos can't be evaluated by the same method that we've used to assess previous limited-edition flavors.  Usually, one of the judging criteria is the fidelity of the cookie to the treat that it's attempting to resemble.  With a mystery flavor, we don't even know the target, so it's impossible to say, in advance, whether it hits the mark.  Instead, we can simplify our questions to two: does it taste good, and does it seem to resemble something that exists in the world?  That search for that second answer is what has made this a rewarding tasting experience, as our minds and taste buds have trod together the alleyways of remembered pleasures, chance and contingent associations, and weird threads of synaptic connection between sensation and identification, aiming at knowing and barely missing, all the while caught in a sensual swirl of cookie and cream.

They don't look like much.  Except for a slightly lighter shade in the wafers, and a thicker helping of creme, Mystery Oreos look just like regular Oreos.  But just as reading a novel is often more vivid than watching the film adaptation, removing visual clues from the equation equips the mind of the taster to conjure wonders that colors and identifying labels might well suppress.

Fruit Is Definitely Involved

While our Food Kingdom panel hotly disputed the specifics, all but one on the panel agreed that these were fruity.  Essential fruit oils infuse the slab of creme inside the cookie, and that portion of creme is extra thick, necessarily I think because, in the absence of coloration and the guidance of an official flavor designation, the flavor needs to be extra strong to be identifiable.  Having said that, the cookie itself, which is slightly lighter in color than that of a classic Oreo, also has a hint of fruit.  I'm going to go out on a limb and declare the flavor to be orange or orange creme.  That was the flavor that just popped into my head the moment I tasted it, and while other suggestions from the panel were provocative and intriguing, subtly influencing my perceptions on subsequent tastings, and allowing for the aforementioned adventures in dreamlike speculation, I still kept coming back to something citrusy and, specifically, orangey.  Cointreau.  Grand Marnier.  Orange Milano.  These were the phrases that kept recurring over and over to me.  So orange it is, my (and Jen G's) official guess.  But there are others.  Let's hear from the panel now.

Other Official Guesses

Peppermint (my Aunt Lynn): I really didn't expect this guess, but she was quite insistent and I had to admit that, when I put myself in the right frame of mind, I could see where she was coming from.
Pros: It needs no additional coloring for it to be correct, and it's counterintuitive.
Cons: Oreo has already come out with a green mint variety, so this wouldn't be particularly new.

Fruity Pebbles (Maureen F, James N, and Brian S): Mo says that was her gut reaction and she's sticking with it.  Brian, damning with faint praise, writes "It has that fruity cereal taste.  It's good but not something I want to eat more than one of in a sitting." James N was more expansive, emphasizing the nostalgia they evoked and concluding that "it had enough faux fruitiness to taste different.  Ultimately, I wouldn't buy [these] over the original flavor, but I may buy a box of Fruity Pebbles next time I'm at the store!"    
Pros: The multicolored creme filling would be awesome! Like rainbow sherbert!
Cons: It's sort of an "all of the above" answer.  Is that a cop out? Also, consider the licensing costs of getting the naming rights from Post cereals.

Froot Loops (Trisa B and Inés P)
Pros: Again, one can certainly "taste where she's coming from."
Cons: What's with the breakfast cereal thing?

Bubble Gum (Kelly R)
"Bubble gum was the first thing I thought of.  Either that or Froot Loops"
Pros: Major points for originality and, when you consider how artificial the whole thing is, it makes perfect sense.
Cons: Ewwwwww....really?

Lemon Creme (R. de Moraes)
"It reminds me of ladyfingers with a light lemon frosting"
Pros: Mr. de Moraes has a discerning palate that is picking up the definite citrus note
Cons: His full description is basically likening this cookie to a pre-existing citrus cookie, which Nabisco will not be happy to hear.

Audience Participation!
Now it's your turn.  Let's see how many interesting guesses we can gather together in one place.  Please send your official guesses (after you enter the contest please, I don't want to be accused of stealing your idea!) to foodnfreak@gmail.com with the subject line "Mystery Oreos."  I will compile the answers and share them in a later post so we can all learn together.  Please let me know how you'd like to be identified or whether you'd prefer to be anonymous.  Happy tasting!

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Apple Pie Oreos: In Praise of the Fake

Our Chemical Romance
Mark Twain quipped that "a 'classic' is a book that everybody praises but nobody has read" and so it is today with the cult of the all-natural.  We all claim to desire all-natural foods, but when General Mills replaced the artificial food dyes in Trix with the drab natural hues of strawberries, turmeric, and beet juice, customers revolted and the joyous artificial rainbow was restored.  Keeping a convenience food all-natural is relatively easy when all you're doing is producing a canned, dried, or frozen rendition of an actual dish; it's easy to put real cheese on a frozen pizza and real beef in Hormel chili.  What are canned peaches in essence but, well, canned peaches?  But if you want peach-flavored bubble gum or grape lollipops or kiwi-mango gummi bears, you've got to break out the chemicals.  Intuitively we understand this and the reasonable among us don't object when our pack of Starbursts discreetly allows that it contains "natural and artificial flavors."  Those mysterious flavor compounds that imbue taffy with the essence of banana are uncannily effective.

Honestly, which would you pick?  The technicolor tribute to industrial engineering that is Trix Original or the East German all-natural version?

Synthetics: As American as Apple Pie
Nabisco has been applying, and continues to apply, this lesson in their dozen-plus-per-annum excursions into new and novel flavors, and their proudly artificial Apple Pie Oreos are a vindication of that approach.  Would it have been technically possible to dry out real apples, puree them, and fold that puree into the creme filling that's sandwiched between two graham-flour wafers?  Indeed, it would have been, but the creamy texture would have been disrupted and the apple flavor would have been quite faint.  One problem with natural flavors is that they're not very concentrated.  A wedge of apple requires all of its substantial bulk to transmit a potent punch of apple flavor.  It's too busy being an apple to taste of an apple in a pungent way.  That's why a real apple pie has to be about 85% apple by weight in order to taste strongly of apples.  With Apple Pie Oreos, Nabisco needed a creme filling that constitutes about 33% of the cookies weight to supply a blast of apple that would suffuse the entire cookie, and for that they needed to break out a full battery of ersatz compounds.

The package art neatly demonstrates the challenge that Nabisco faced: compressing the taste of layer upon layer of apple slices into a thin sliver of sweetened shortening.  Science knows the chemical components that make up the apple flavor profile.  One bite of this punchy little cookie and you'll f***ing love science.

The Canny Choice to Emulate Pie

Oreos' choice of novelty flavors haven't always been the wisest.  Root Beer Float and Banana Split may have been the most egregious follies, for they both attempted to emulate items known for being cool and refreshing with a cookie that is, by it's nature, room temperature and crumbly.  Aiming to simulate pie is genius because of the tight relationship between the original and the copy.  Pie crust is made of flour and shortening.  Oreos are dry, sweetened flour wafers filled with sweetened flavored shortening.  The use of graham flour in the wafers also makes a lot of sense, for it makes the cookie looser, more crumbly and granular, so that when the sweet apple-flavored shortening mixes with the coarse graham crumble, it's like tasting the melted butter that bastes the layers of flaky pie crust.  With all these elements attended to, the only x-factor was how convincing the artificial baked apple flavor would be.  I'm happy to report that the rich apple creme tastes extremely realistic.  No, there are no juicy chunks of apple, but when you've been chewing on a real bite of apple pie, those chunks collapse into a undifferentiated mash within your mouth fairly quickly anyway.  These cookies don't taste like a bite of fresh apple pie -- they taste like a bite of fresh apple pie 10 seconds later.  A lovely image, I know, you're welcome.

Redolent of golden, oozing baked apple coated in caramel-like sauce, nestled in rich, buttery, brown-sugary crust, Apple Pie Oreos reminded me of another junk-food favorite: Taco Bell's Apple Empanada which, while delicious, also has hardly any real apple in it.  What's their excuse?

Conclusions, But No Consensus

My enthusiasm notwithstanding, these don't seem to be for everybody.  These cookies attracted much attention within the Food Kingdom offices, with Maureen F., James N., and Brian S. all having a go.  Maureen, hopefully by mere coincidence, is out of the office today, but James and Brian both keyed in on what they perceived to be excess sweetness.  Said Brian, "it does have a hint of apple taste but it's way too sweet for me.  It doesn't taste at all like an Oreo, which is not a good thing.  Agreed James, "[it] tasted a lot more like apple pie than I expected, but it was also overpoweringly sweet.  I'll stick with the classic Oreos" showing that for some, making a pie out of Oreos is more successful than making Oreos out of a pie.  Dear reader, you shall have to sort this out for yourself, which you may do for what is apparently a limited time.

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Pumpkin Pie Rice Krispies Treats: The Squash is a Smash

With the Falling of the Leaves, a Man's Fancy Turns to Spice
Once upon a time, you could sense the imminent arrival of autumn from the presence of gaily-colored bags of Halloween candy on the shelves.  But since that seems to happen now by late July, we must look for other harbingers, and chief among them has been the appearance of pumpkin spice themed products.  Despite the widespread backlash against the inclusion of that mix of allspice, ginger, cinnamon and nutmeg in everything from air fresheners to Cheerios, our nation's marketers are generally not deterred.  And this brings us to the newest entry in the pumpkin pie sweepstakes, Pumpkin Pie Rice Krispies treats.

Out of kind consideration for the fact that these are a limited edition item, Kellogg's made sure to make these treats available exclusively in 40-bar packs.  The gang around the office was delighted.

Now With Real Pumpkin Flesh!
You may have noticed that these are not merely "pumpkin spice" Rice Krispies treats, but "Pumpkin Pie Rice Krispies Treats" and there is everything in that name.  This chewy square doesn't just attempt  to conjure up a pumpkin pie of the imagination through the influence of affiliated spices.  Rather, a look at the ingredient label confirms that these contain actual dried pumpkin.  This might seem a dubious choice to someone who imagines all of the "good" flavors in pumpkin pie to reside in the sugar and spice, which mask a bland, neutral starch base.  But Kellogg's is not out of their gourd; they know what they're doing.

The subtle coloration of this variety gives away the presence of finely-ground dried pumpkin.  Rather than a manila off-white hue, this bar is a deep dirty-blonde color.  The spiced whipped cream is represented by a creme-anglaise-colored icing drizzle.

What the Pumpkin Adds
The real pumpkin transforms this child's treat, a favorite of class parties and high school bake sales, into an adult delicacy.  The pumpkin adds the gravitas of a weighty bass note atop which the pumpkin spices enact a syncopated dance, while the icing – representing the whipped cream – contributes a pleasingly dissonant note of dairy that, in its slight sourness, almost suggests creme fraiche more than straight-up whipped cream.  I may have found this sitting on the shelves of the local Wal-Mart, but with more frou-frou packaging, this would be equally at home in a Whole Foods, or even a Dean & DeLuca.

Conclusion: A General Unanimity of Opinions

Our reliable Food Kingdom tester James N. is not generally a fan of pumpkin spice products, but commented that "this one was very subtle, and honestly barely hinted at pumpkin at all, to me. But it was pleasant, nonetheless."  But the most heartwarming reaction comes from Maureen F., as related below in our two-image photo essay below. 

Poor Maureen was so repulsed by the Red Slurpee donut that she volunteered to try a few years back that she hasn't tasted anything for the Food Kingdom since....

Maureen is much happier with Pumpkin Pie Rice Krispies Treats, writing "I enjoyed [it]. It tastes like a frosted ginger bread cookie, which puts me in the autumn mood."

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Girl Scouts Thin Mint Breakfast Cereal: A Fresh and Restrained Start to the Day

Divergence
Let's get one thing straight from the beginning: Girl Scouts Thin Mint cereal is not just a bunch of miniature Girl Scout cookies waiting to be soaked in milk, nor would we wish them to be.  It's easy enough to eat cookies for breakfast if that's what we want to do.  Nonetheless, there's not as much setting them apart nutritionally as we'd like to believe.  Gram for gram, their respective carbohydrate and refined sugar contents are nearly identical.  When you factor in the lactose sugars naturally present in milk, it's increasingly clear that most breakfast cereals don't provide the balanced nutrition and steady, consistent food energy that we've long thought.

But the Food Kingdom has never been, nor shall ever be, a nutrition blog, nor a platform from which to lecture on healthy living.  So our focus shall rightly be, assuming we're fine with powering up on simple carbs for breakfast, how do these nuggets of cocoa-infused mintiness taste?  Well, they actually bear an impressive resemblance to the original thin mint cookies and they accomplish this task with a surprisingly restrained sweetness, which is ironic considering their previously-mentioned high sugar content.

If this cereal flies off the shelves, it won't be on account of imaginative packaging.  The box looks like it was created by a first-year graphic design student during a General Mills summer internship.

Of Food Architecture and Technology

During the product-design phase, General Mills's food scientists must have struggled with how faithful to be to the "Thin Mint" concept, and whether to size each cereal piece to scale.  If they were to replicate the proportions of an actual Thin Mint wafer, the resulting cereal unit would either be impossibly wide, never able to fit more than two-at-a-time on even a large spoon, or impossibly thin and liable to go immediately limp and pliable upon contact with milk.  Necessarily then, the shape of the cereal piece would have to be more puck-shaped than wafer-shaped.  The end result feels disconcertingly large in the mouth and more aggressively crunchy than delicately crisp.

The next challenge to address would have been how the chocolate-mint flavor should be transmitted to the cereal.  The most obvious choice, to bake the chocolate mint flavor right into the cereal, was the route not taken, probably because of the high cost that using that much cocoa would entail, and perhaps because baking chocolate right into the cereal "dough" would convey a complete lack of nutritional concern.  And so the chocolate-mint flavor is applied to the surface of the cereal as a sort of impermeable lacquer coating.  This choice turns out to be wise for two reasons.  First, it ensures that the tongue consistently makes contact with a resolutely chocolatey surface in every bite; at no point is the chocolate mint flavor not being transmitted directly to the taste buds.  Equally important, this chocolate-mint lacquer is an impressive moisture barrier, preventing milk from seeping into the porous foundational substrate of ground corn before the cereal piece is completely pulverized.

"Enlarged to show texture," as the caption on the box says.  Here see the tar-like resin of dark chocolate and cool mint adhering resolutely to the robust disks of cornmeal. If they remind you a bit of Spree candy in their shape, you're on to something.  They feel that way in the mouth too. You wonder, as you bite down, if they're just a bit too big and and a bit too crunchy for comfort.

The best way to appreciate the daunting size of stout cocoa kibbles it to compare them to Cheerios.  I measured their diameter as 46% wider than those toasted oat rings, and they're a good deal thicker too.  Add to that the fact they have no hole in the middle and they have at least double the mass of their General Mills teammate.

It's All About the Flavor

We could go on a good deal longer about the intricacies of Thin Mint cereal's texture and mouthfeel, about its longevity in milk, and much more.  But, as with any adaptation of a culinary classic, what we really want to know about is its fidelity to that model.  Does the product capture the magic essence of the food it imitates?  The bottom line is that Thin Mint cereal absolutely does that, uncannily well.  If you close your eyes and roll a piece around on your tongue, it's very much like tasting the cookie.  The cornmeal flavor will reveal itself in the aftertaste of a carefully scrutinized single piece, but of course this is not how we will actually be eating these.  Rather we'll be inhaling spoonful after spoonful and savoring the cool, moderately sweet, and rather subtle and adult combination of creamy milk, rich chocolate, and refreshing mint.  There are surely myriad worse ways to start the day.

Here at the Food Kingdom, we do not succumb to the deceptive manipulations of food styling, and so you are not seeing opaque glue intermingling with the cereal, but real whole milk, which is considerably more translucent.   Note how the milk glides along the surface, repelled by the shield of chocolate lacquer.

Conclusions
Commercials for this kind of product often advise "enjoy as part of a balanced diet" and we dismiss that as so much ass-covering, liability-shielding, corporate doublespeak.  But whatever one thinks of the motives behind such counsel, it happens to be sound.  We would not advise that this become your Monday to Friday morning staple, but if a grown adult has Grape Nuts and berries on Monday, oatmeal and apples on Tuesday, egg whites on a whole-grain muffin and turkey bacon on Wednesday, and plain yogurt with fruit and chopped nuts on Thursday, then why on earth can't they have Girl Scout cookies for breakfast on Friday?  Oh, reason not the need, and enjoy yourself.  Have some chocolate!

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Caramel M&Ms: Not Duds, But they Taste Like Them

Inevitably Caramel
Over the past few years, M&Ms has been releasing new novelty flavors almost as fast as Nabisco has been offering special-edition Oreos, powered by automation and efficient factory processes. So it's surprising that they waited this long to create a chocolate candy with caramel inside.  After all, you'd expect caramel to be a more popular variety than coconut, candy corn, birthday cake, honey-nut, coffee-nut, or strawberry-nut (?).  Any yet all those varieties saw their day in the sun (and did not melt) before caramel M&Ms hit the market.

Our playful M&M buddies are stretching two halves of the caramel-stuffed chocolate, implicitly promising a chewy, elastic caramel experience.

Getting the Right Ratio
In fairness, parent company Mars, sensing the immense potential appeal of these candies to caramel-mad America, might have just been spending a lot of extra time getting the formula right.  Previous attempts at promising varieties had failed at achieving the ideal ratio between the chocolate and the substance it encased.  Crispy M&Ms had so much crisped rice inside them that they seemed to be mostly air, their chocolate taste evanescent and insubstantial.  Pretzel M&Ms, which seemed like a home run on paper simply had insufficient mass to convey the impact of a solid, crunchy, salty pretzel coated with chunky, creamy rich chocolate.  Apparently the best way to experience a chocolate-covered pretzel is to, well...eat a chocolate-covered pretzel.  So it was with great skepticism that I popped the first caramel M&M between my molars and chomped down.  How much caramel would there be, and what kind?  The runny kind, like in a Cadbury Caramello?  The stringy, stretchy variety from Rolos? Something chunky, chewy, and thick like a Brach's caramel?

As the cross-sections show, Mars decided to be generous and bold with the apportionment of caramel.  The durable, buttery caramel within, almost like soft toffee, remains in the mouth long after the chocolate has dissipated.

Sturdy Caramel Lingers Longer

As it happens, the caramel that Mars chose resembles a Milk Dud more than anything else.  It's very firm, just shy of hard, and dominates the candy's identity.  Unlike a plain M&M, in which the shell contributes crunch but the milk chocolate dominates the flavor profile, or a peanut M&M where the peanut splinters, fragments into coarse particles, and then evenly distributes itself throughout the chocolate, a caramel M&M is dominated by the caramel center, which stubbornly holds its shape and maintains its buttery flavor notes long after the surrounding chocolate has melted and worn away.  The splinters of shell, which would normally be carried away by the melted chocolate as it slides down the gullet, instead embed themselves in the caramel stickiness and remain in the candy's orbit like a belt of detritus in a planet's gravitational field. 

This is why the taste of caramel actually grows stronger the longer you chew.  At first there's a bit of taste confusion as every component of the candy sticks to the shell and hence every flavor: the caramel, the chocolate, even the usually-unnoticed flavor of the shell glaze, is experienced simultaneously.  But as the less tenacious, more transient flavors melt away, the ball of caramel, flecked with bits of shell, rings the bells of your taste buds more clearly and cleanly.  On its own terms, it's an excellent bit of buttery, salty-sweet chewiness and it makes the candy filling and substantial.  Unlike every other previous variety of M&M, you can't pop these one after the other, devouring the package in a few minutes.  You can,  and probably should, eat them one at a time, and can count on the process lasting anywhere from 10-20 minutes.

Though nobody would actually eat them this way, the consistency of the caramel is such that you truly can stretch it.  The thick, robust caramel is elastic yet firm enough to hold its shape.

Conclusions

Caramel M&Ms take some getting used to.  Like an old V8 Mustang, they seem a little crude and lacking in finesse at first, as there's no elegant dance of simultaneous co-dissolution among the chocolate, the caramel, and the shell.  But for raw choco-caramel pleasure wrapped in a crisp candy shell, these little M&Ms deliver mightily.

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Cookies & Creme Oreos: Not Bad, Just Pointless

They Are What We Thought They Were
When we brought the new Cookies & Creme Oreos into Food Kingdom studios, everybody who saw them had the same reaction: "Oreo-flavored Oreos?  What's the point of that?"  After all, wouldn't an Oreo-flavored Oreo, just taste like...a regular Oreo?  Ah, but we here at the Food Kingdom held out hope that maybe there was something more to it.  Maybe there's something about the way the cookies and creme mesh together in Cookies & Creme-themed desserts, some mystical transformation that happens therein, that can't be captured in the original cookie itself, and maybe that mystical essence has been imported back into the original, like an injection of magical Cookies & Creme stem cells that would rejuvenate the tired original and make it taste more truly like itself than itself.  But no. Cookies & Creme Oreos are not even the Turduckens of cookies.  They just taste like Oreos with Oreos lurking inside them.

Clever packaging attempts to disguise the banality of its contents by suggesting they'll taste like Cookies & Creme ice cream.  But it's far easier to put cookies into ice cream than to bring the taste of ice cream into a cookie.

Are They Different in Any Way?
This isn't to say that these cookies are absolutely identical to regular Oreos.  There is more "stuff" inside and they have introduced little flecks of chocolate wafer into the creme.  Indeed, if you smear some off your finger and smooth it between your tongue and the roof of your mouth, you can even feel the texture of these little cookie bits, still crispy inside their carrier current of sweetened fat.  Unless you're a little eccentric, though, you're not eating just the inside of these cookies; you're eating the whole thing, at which point the exercise of pre-blending cookie and creme inside the filling becomes pointless.  What Nabisco has done for the customer here is something they could easily have done for themselves -- remove the creme, take a little bite of wafer, chew it a bit, and then stuff it back inside.  If you're hungry for this sensation and are willing to pay 30% more for the privilege of having it done for you, you now have yourself a product.

A close view shows that there is more creme inside than in a regular Oreo, perhaps to suggest an affinity with Cookies & Creme ice cream.   In reality, though, these are just Double Stuff (or perhaps 1.5 Stuff) Oreos with a small cosmetic difference.

So Why Are They Messing With Our Heads?
There are lots of good reasons that Nabisco keeps releasing novelty Oreo flavors: new and allegedly different flavors keep the brand in the spotlight, generating plenty of buzz and word-of-mouth advertising.  Also the company can charge a premium for the limited-edition flavors.  The artificial scarcity created by their limited-time availability makes people willing to pay the same price for fewer cookies in a smaller package, even though these temporary flavors can't plausibly cost any more to manufacture.

Conclusions
I will confess that if you try really really hard, close your eyes, tell yourself that these don't taste like Oreos but like Oreo Ice Cream, and if you make an effort to chew slowly and let the creme filling melt in your mouth, you can kind of sort of convince yourself that you're tasting the echo of that frozen treat.   But that's playing the marketers' game, allying your imagination to their powers of suggestion for the sake of producer profit, but not consumer surplus.  Remember, "Key Lime Pie" yogurt is just lime yogurt, "Strawberry Shortcake" chewing gum is just strawberry gum.  And "Cookies and Creme" Oreos?  It's just plain old Oreos, all the way down.

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Better With Butter? Tasting for Changes in Burger King's "New" Croissanwich

Butter Rebounds
There's no question that butter has been making a comeback lately in the fast-food world.  Over a year ago, McDonald's replaced margarine with real butter as the spread on their Egg McMuffins, and now Burger King has responded by reformulating the croissant in their Croissan'wich, replacing palm-oil margarine with butter.

It's difficult to pin down one key reason for these developments, but here are my best guesses for why this is happening.

• For starters, almost everyone agrees that real butter just tastes better.
• While there's no consensus that butter is healthier than margarine, the evidence is ambiguous enough that the proscriptions against butter from an earlier era now seem overstated.  Including moderate amounts of butter in an otherwise healthy and balanced diet is almost certainly healthier than slathering margarine on large quantities of processed carbohydrates. And besides, butter is "natural"!
• It has never been more affordable to companies to add milkfat and other milk-derived products to their menus, as wholesale milk prices have plummeted since late 2014.

The relatively colorful menu board stands in stark contrast to the grey drabness of almost Orwellian proportions that characterizes the rest of the BK dining room in Chantilly, VA.  Absolutely no color correction has been applied to this photo.

Phantom Flakiness

But does adding butter yield any benefits to BK's croissant-style bun?  The two areas where one might expect to notice a difference would be flavor and flakiness.  Let's discuss flakiness first.  At the outset, it's important to stress that we shouldn't expect any difference in this domain, because butter possesses no advantages over any other kind of fat that is solid at room temperature or below. In any flaky baked good, be it a pie, a croissant, or a puff pastry, flaky layers are achieved by, well...layering solid shortening in alternating bands with a relatively unrich dough.  You start by laying a slab of cold shortening between two thick bands of dough and rolling the dough/butter sandwich out until the layers have become a bit thinner.  Then you fold the thing in half and repeat until you have even thinner layers.  You continue this process until eventually you have dozens and dozens of super-thin layers of butter and dough stacked upon one another.  When heated, steam puffs up the gap between each layer of dough, and the effects of heat eventually fix these cavities in place, leaving the bubbly air pockets that croissant-lovers so cherish.  As you can see, though, none of this is butter-dependent; you could do it with Crisco or lard if you wanted to.

Judging merely by appearances, Burger King's Croissan'wich seems to boast a genuinely flaky croissant, puffed up and full of air pockets. But this is a mirage, as further reading reveals.




As the photo above shows, Burger King's "croissant" does achieve full flakiness, which makes the actual taste experience of biting into a Croissan'wich supremely puzzling.  It doesn't taste like a croissant: it has always tasted, and still does, like a hamburger bun.  Because the sandwich steams within its paper wrapper, the warm vapor inevitably dampens the sandwich and gives it a deflated feel, all appearances notwithstanding.  But the primary culprit, I think, is the lack of an egg wash, a final step that's present in the baking of all true croissants.  It's the crisp, micro-thin egg glaze which hardens during the baking process that insulates a real croissant from the incursion of moisture,  provides an exoskeleton that preserves its structural integrity, and adds a delicate crunch to counterbalance the chew of the pale dough within.  Real croissant dough is also more glutenous and stretchy, so the air pockets create something with a true durable shape, not the simulacrum of structure that dissolves on contact with the tongue.




A Sodden Butter-Bomb

Prior to this reformulation, I'd always referred to Croissan'wiches as "sodden grease bombs" a reference to their damp, dense, deflated, and oily aspect.  The addition of butter can't be dismissed as irrelevant, but since the taste seems largely unchanged, so shall my chosen moniker remain.  The photo below best captures the sad reality of the Croissan'wich.  Even if adding butter had somehow transformed their version of the croissant (and I did taste it all by itself to isolate that part of the equation), the croissant would still be fighting an uphill battle against its fillings.  The hot mound of undistinguished proteins – fluffy powdered egg patty, salty smoked ham, gooey American cheese -- combine to form a solid gummy mass that masks any delicacy or subtlety of flavor one might find in the breading.







Look closely at the powdered egg patty -- if you dare.  Unlovely though they are, Burger King actually plops these down on their big breakfast.





Conclusions

Even with real butter, the Croissan'wich remains what is has always been; a cheap way to settle a grumbling stomach and nothing more.  If you have a business conference with a 7:30 check-in and a 12:30 lunch break, the Croissan'wich will hold you over.  But none of your pleasure centers will be stimulated, none of your memory neurons engaged for even a moment.  Oh, and a final comment about Burger Kings in general: they really some of the most dreary and cheerless places imaginable.  McDonald's went about refurbishing most of their interiors a few years ago such that they now have a pleasant, Starbucksish, almost upscale feel.  Burger Kings are still strictly utilitarian.  I'll share a last picture from my most recent visit, a shot of the coffee I was obliged to pour for myself because Burger King gets so little breakfast business that isn't from the drive-through that they can't be bothered to pour coffee for sit-down customers.  And again, you are seeing natural color, or lack thereof, of the counter and the decorative trim.  I did not retouch or desaturate this photo in any way.









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Pringles LOUD Crisps: The Power of Powder

These Days, We Like it Loud
Pringles is latching on to the latest trend in snacking, discarding delicacy and embracing a maximum-firepower approach to its newest products.  Maybe it's because an aging population is losing its tastebuds or maybe its because thrill-seeking is the new frontier for snack foods, but these days you can't seem to go wrong with amping up your tastes to be spicier, saltier, bigger, and bolder.

For Pringles, the result is the new LOUD line, a collection of rustically thin corn crisps with extra-audacious quantities of flavored coatings.  Actually putting these things in your mouth could make a thoughtful taster a little nervous when they consider that they are essentially ingesting many teaspoons of powder; after all, we don't typically eat seasonings straight out of the spice jar, and surveying these thick-coated crisps, resembling victims of a spice-laden dust storm, induced in me a temporary shudder.  Nonetheless, we at the Food Kingdom pressed on.

Rugged and encrusted in their flavor mixtures, these crisps are ready to roar.   But how much powder is too much? (Clockwise from the top: Fiery Chili Lime, Spicy Queso, Mighty Margherita Pizza, Salsa Fiesta, and Super Cheesy Italian)

A Foundation of Coarse-Ground Corn
The taste of all five crisps we sampled were heavily influenced by the foundational note of stone-ground corn that forms the base layer of the crisps, though two of the five are billed as "grain and vegetable crisps" and feature a mix of corn, rice, barley, oats, potatoes, carrots, peas (!), and dried spinach.  Whereas traditional Pringles crisps are build upon a fairly neutral white potato base that allows the sprinkled-on flavor to dominate and define the taste of the end-product, the corn and grain tastes are earthy and assertive.  The hearty crunch of the slightly thicker-than-usual crisps demanded a "loud" response from the flavoring component.  Now we'll turn to each individual flavor and survey the mixed results.

Super-Cheesy Italian
These aim to mimic the flavor of cheesy garlic bread, and the ingredient list gives us reason to hope for success, boasting real olive oil, garlic, onions, and cheddar and Parmesan cheeses.  These all come through, albeit mildly, and if you really concentrate you can taste the yeast extract asserting a faint bready note.  The problem comes when these flavors from the coating mix with the flavors residing in the chip itself.   We know we don't want peas in our guacamole: do we want them in our cheesy garlic bread?  What about oats, barley, rice, and dried spinach?  Though none of these blunt flavors are all that individually strong, collectively they have the force to interrupt the overall flavor flow.  In the end what we wind up with is less cheesy garlic bread and more of a decent veggie pizza on whole grain crust with pesto sauce.  For his part, James N. threw his away after one bite, commenting "It tasted like the very worst fake Parmesan cheese on a bad weird crispy shell." 

A close-up of Super Cheesy Italian shows the fascinating texture of these complicated chips. By process of elimination, I figure those big red specks must be bits of whole corn.  The peas and spinach add a lot of color and, frankly wreck the mood.  The garlic bread of my fondest memories was greasy and yellow with little specks of green from the parsley. These put one more in the mind of pesto and pea soup.

Mighty Margherita Pizza
This was an inexcusable piece of hubris on Pringles' part, resulting in the weakest entry.  The only people that would have an interest in this chip would be people familiar with and fond of the taste of the real Pizza Margherita, and these people know that its appeal comes from the freshness of its ingredients.  A dried version would always be a faint echo of the real thing.  So yes, there's real tomato powder on these chips, along with real powdered basil, but these preserved products taste very little of the genuine article.  Curiously, there's no mozzarella cheese (no cheese of any kind, actually) on these chips. Perhaps the realized that the cognitive dissonance of "dried and powdered fresh mozzarella" was a little too jarring.  This chip also features the grand and vegetable blend as its base layer and, as before, this native flavor competes too much with the flavors meant to evoke Pizza Margherita.  James N. concurs, writing "As I opened the Margherita pizza one I shook my head, 'pizza chips are never good.' and this one did not prove to be the exception."

Tomato powder is plentiful here, accumulating in little drifts on the curves of the sickly green crisps, and calling to mind the petrochemical plant in Antonioni's "Red Desert".

Spicy Queso
This one's a winner and it shows that often the most straightforward flavors are the best.  This chip marries the taste of a perfectly respectable tortilla chip with that of movie-style nacho cheese, resulting in a delightful movie-nachos experience.  There's very little subtlety at work here, just copious amount of day-glow orange powder, potently spiked with the taste of jalapeños.

As sensually shaped as a Brancusi sculpture, these chips radiate a mellow orange glow that's matched with the rich processed-dairy notes of the powdered nacho cheese and kept perky and alive by the kick of hot peppers.

Salsa Fiesta
These chips easily have the most depth of flavor of the five and also taste the most realistic, which is a bit ironic considering that they boast "natural and artificial flavors."  The taste of lime juice and cilantro is unmistakeable yet neither are mentioned in the ingredient list.  The depth, I think, comes from the dried black beans and paprika, both dark rich flavors that create layers of taste, as their base notes are accented by the brighter flavors of onion, tomatoes, and herbs.  This chip isn't just loud, it's also harmonious.

They don't look like much, but they're the most convincing salsa-on-a-chip experience you can buy.  Long ago Doritos had a "Salsa Rio" flavor that perfectly captured the flavors of pico de gallo, but it hasn't been on the market for two decades and none of their other salsa flavors have come close. 

Fiery Chili Lime
This moniker is two-thirds true.  The flavors of Asian sweet chili paste are strong here, as is the convincing taste of artificial lime juice.  But for something that claims to be fiery, the heat level is relatively low, especially compared to the Salsa Fiesta chip we just tasted. We saved this one for last, convinced we should proceed as one would with a flight of wines, starting with the mildest flavors and progressing to the strongest.  This chip should actually be tasted third at your tasting party, or at least fourth. The overall flavor is more potent than that of the Spicy Queso chip, but the spice is milder  Quibbling aside, these chips are zesty and addicting.

These chips win the prize for most artfully sprinkled, as the flavors cluster unevenly, veering from deep crimson at the most intense spots to a blending of reddish orange and yellow that recall a Tequila Sunrise...which would actually go nicely with these at your next happy hour, if they'll let you bring your own munchies.

Conclusions

Of the five flavors on offer, the three with a pure corn base were easily the most successful.  The grain and vegetable chips just have too many "off" flavors to complement any added flavorings, and should probably be skipped.  James N. also adds that all of the flavors suffer a certain lopsidedness of flavoring, for which there is visual evidence in the clustering of the powder on the chip surface, as seen above.  He explains further, "all of them suffer from having a very poor balance of flavoring. One bite would be fairly mild and then the next bite would be coated in the flavor powder and just overwhelm. Maybe that’s what makes them loud, but it’s also what makes me not want to eat any more of them."  Nonetheless, for as long as these are around, we do have some full-throated new additions to our chorus of snacking options.

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