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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