Oreo Week Has Begun! Testing is in Progress. Please Check Back at 2:00PM EST

Birthday Cake, Cupcake, Cinnamon Bun, Red Velvet, Pumpkin Spice, Oh My!

The Quesalupa Explained: It's Actually a Taco-ized Stuffed Crust Pizza

The Food Kingdom is coming relatively late to the Quesalupa phenomenon that was unveiled to the nation on the eve of the Super Bowl.  Reaction from many quarters has been been a fairly muted disappointment, with the most common complaint being that the Quesalupa doesn't really taste that much different from the Chalupa, which preceded it.  Some people actually miss that warm fluffy dough inside.

The Food Kingdom roundtable has reached a similar conclusion about the Quesalupa, but I want to go a bit further and explain the reasons behind its shortcomings, organizing the critique around the central paradigm mentioned in this post's title.  It all makes sense when you consider that the Quesalupa is, in many ways, a stuffed-crust Mexican pizza.

What Do I Mean It's a Stuffed-Crust Mexican Pizza?
Consider the major taste elements in the Quesalupa, which you can see in the picture below.  First let's start with the obvious: the stuffed crust itself.  The Quesalupa certainly passes the test of "matching the picture" as far as the gooey stretchy cheese inside the shell.  Unlike the abominably dishonest Nestle 100 Grand (formerly 100,000 Dollar Bar) which promises stretchy caramel that elongates as you pull the bit section away from your mouth but actually breaks off cleanly no matter how delicately you bit into it, the Quesalupa really is filled with warm stretchy cheese and that gets it off to a terrific start.  But just like with a stuffed crust pizza, the cheese and crust don't taste like much all by themselves.  So let's dig beneath the shell and see what else awaits.

A cheesy, melty auspice as we break open the Quesalupa for the first time.

Inside the Shell
Inside the shell are many other things you would indeed find topping a Mexican pizza.  Shredded cheddar?  Check.  Diced tomatoes?  You know it.  Lettuce is a bit of a wildcard, so leave that aside. Seasoned ground beef?  Absolutely.  So you see the thesis is all coming together.  And so the base-model Quesalupa is a perfectly decent hand-held Mexican pizza in ways good and bad.   Just like pizza, it's quite tasty when perfectly fresh and the hot gooey cheese meshes with the tender crisp crust and the fresh interior toppings.  But just like most people don't care for cold pizza, a cold Quesalupa has the same liabilities.  When the gooey cheese settles down to room temperature, the stretchy cheese suddenly becomes brittle.  It no longer fills the four corners of the mouth, but rather breaks off in ruddy, gummy bits.  So all Quesalupas should be eaten fresh, which is to say you should either eat them in the restaurant or only order one, or perhaps two at the most if you eat quickly.  By the time you get to a third, the interior cheese will have hardened and the steam given off by the hot cheese will have migrated by capillary action through the shell transforming it into mere...wet, greasy, bread. Ewww...

Seasoned beef, diced tomatoes, lettuce, sour cream.  Aside from the stuffed crust, it's standard-issue Taco Bell.

But What About the Chicken and Steak Versions?
An interesting irony obtains with the Quesalupa and many other Taco Bell items: the premium ingredients don't always translate to more taste.  In principle, do we prefer steak over ground beef, and real chicken strips over ground chicken?  In isolation, surely we do, but in the case of a multi-ingredient item like a Quesalupa, the answer isn't so simple.  Remember that steak and chicken strips are lost in a melange of many other components; not just the tomatoes and lettuce (which can water down flavors), not just sour cream and cheese (which can soak up and obscure flavors) but the spongy bread and cheese of the shell itself.  Those steak juices?  They've soaked into the pores of the bread.  The sizzling oils and browned tastes?  They've blended with the white cheese into relative anonymity.

This lonely steak is going to need some help

 So the tastes endemic to the meats aren't going to be making a very strong statement.  The flavors are going to have to come from the sauce.  Remember once again the pizza analogy.  How would a pizza with no sauce taste?  Pretty bland.  In the case of the seasoned beef chalupa, the meat comes with its own sauce.  But the chicken and steak ones need the hot sauce.  With their help, a fresh Quesalupa can be a richly satisfying and bold experience.

Taco Bell Fire Sauce Brings it to Life!

This is the Third Chalupa. Notice How the Cooled Cheese Has Stiffened the Shell

Conclusions
The Food Kingdom has a lot of work to do before the Quesalupa retires from the menu, at least temporarily, in 12 weeks.  There is also a shredded chicken version which we haven't yet tried. But more importantly, the Quesalupa is customizable with all of the add-ons you see below.  We suspect that bringing more crunch and more heat, with pico and jalapenos, or onions and chipotle, or perhaps some more salty, earthy notes with bacon and black beans, could make the Quesalupa a lot more interesting.  If all that white cheese doesn't get in the way....

What's REALLY inside a Hot Pocket? (You know want to know)

Within the Food Kingdom exists a product that is a fiefdom unto itself.  It is so popular that it has a section all its own in the grocer's freezer case.  It's alluring packaging promises a heaven of warm bread, gooey cheese, rich sauce, savory meats, and tempting vegetables.  Frozen junk though it may be, whom amongst us hasn't been tempted to try the Hot Pocket in all its infinite varieties, with new additions to the line seemingly added every week: pizza, cheesesteaks, buffalo chicken, cheeseburgers, tacos, and on and on.

The Hot Pocket package promises a veritable feast within!

Does the Pocket Fulfill Its Promise?
Yes the Hot Pocket always seems to promise more than it actually delivers, and perhaps that's why, as much as we return to it, it always vaguely falls short of its potential.  Today we answer the question of how accurate the picture on the package is, and our conclusions are mixed.

To some degree, the picture on the package isn't really a lie, and here's why?  While each bite into a hot pocket seems to leave us wondering where all the filling went, it actually is possible to reproduce the results we see on the package IF we treat the breading container like a tube of toothpaste, placing our thumbs on the scale, so to speak, and pressing down firmly on one end of the pocket.  This pushes all the filling to the open side.  Why look!  We have somewhat made the promise of the package come true!

Yes indeed!  Our pocket is bursting at the seams! (seems?)

Performing a Little Hot Pocket Surgery

But let's go a little deeper and see what we find. If we butterfly-cut the our Philly Cheesesteak Hot Pocket and look inside, let's see what we get.  At first glance the results are remarkably generous.  We see cheese, red and green peppers, and what appears to be an adequate amount of steak.  But let's really analyze the contents.  The steak seems to cover a wide area but it is actually paper-thin. Now examine all the gaps between each steak fragment and add it all together mentally.  What we actually have here is a single deli-thin slice of roast beef that has been separated into shreds and dispersed such that it seems to cover a wide area, but in fact its a deli-slice that, if reunified into a single piece, would not even cover the surface area of the pocket.  This explains the mismatch between what your eyes see and what your mouth tastes.

Paltriness or adequacy from our naked Hot Pocket?  Tis all in the eye of the beholder.

Conclusions
It would seem that our investigation has exposed the Hot Pocket as a minor piece of fraud, but let's consider the value proposition a little more closely.  This is after all a mere snack item, something you enjoy when you really only want a nosh, something less than a meal but on the filling end of a mere snack.  The Hot Pocket fulfills the mission of tiding our hunger for something warm and savory reasonably well.  Let's also remember the average $2.50 price point for two Hot Pockets and ask if we really have a right to expect more than that for the price.  If the manufacturers were really able to supply more beef than we see here at that cost, one would wonder at how bovine the origins of the material was, and have concern for the animal welfare practices of a manufacturer that could deliver that much animal product so cheaply.  So in sum, the Hot Pocket does deliver as much tastiness and belly-filling capacity as we have any right to expect for the hit to the pocketbook.  Score one for Nestle, I guess.  Rock on, Hot Pocket.

The Magic of the Cooking of Humans: An Office Bake-Off Memoir

The realm over which the monarch of the Food Kingdom presides is notional merely, and hence he labors during the day at undisclosed office location.  The office recently held its 10th annual employee bake-off, a tooth-and-belly-ache-inducing affair to be sure, but only because the entry's high quality is reliably uniform and a judge always wants to consume more than is wise.

This was an excellent year, even by the event's usual high standards, enough so that it's worth posting comments and pictures of the entries here on the blog, even though this writer is aware of the danger of mission creep infecting this industrial-food-oriented blog.  Without further ado, then:

Best Overall: Peanut Butter Pie
This is not the first peanut butter pie ever to be baked, but it may well be the best, blending fresh whipped cream top layer with an intense peanut butter cream underlayer, the latter enriching the former and the former lightening the latter.  Inasmuch as every peanut butter flavor yearns for a counterpart in chocolate, this pie brought the house with big chocolate chunks that led with a crunchy impact, then melded with the other elements as it melted.  The only ding on this was the store-bought graham cracker crunch, more sandy and particulate than buttery and coherent as a graham-cracker crust should be.

How high can the peanut fluff go?  If you don't dig in, you will never know.

Best Taste: Marble Brownies

The entry, though well executed, didn't have the looks to promise great things, but under the hood was a pleasingly mild cocoa base lightened with a intriguing sweet-sour dairy/cream cheese note. It may not have been anything fancy, but people couldn't stop eating them and when the calls for taste scores was made, it was 9s all around.

Marble Brownies: Nobody could eat just one, stomachaches be damned

Best Appearance: Carrot Cake
It's a commonplace to signify a carrot cake's identity with a goofy cartoon carrot made of frosting or marzipan.  These self-contained cakes announced themselves with a whimsical carrot curlicue that delighted the judges and built anticipation as to the taste.  Though no slouch in the taste department, it is possible that the presentation may have slightly undermined the cake's palatability.  While every element: cake, flaked coconut, cream cheese frosting, a ground nut border, was well executed, this was a dense array of accoutrements that surrounded a relatively small area of actual cake, so some bites were a little out of balance, with the outside elements dominating the inside.

Utterly charming little carrot cakes.

Honorable Mention: Tropical Rum Cake Trifle

The intrepid contestant that would enter a trifle into a bake-off in which appearance factors into the score tempts fate because it is almost axiomatic that trifles degenerate into wretched oozing slurries of miscellaneous fruit and cake fragments.  The entrant of this trifle defied this fate with winsome creativity. Each judge was presented with their own little jam jar full of trifle, the lateral support from the glass walls ensuring that every spoonful had a little custard, a little cake, a little fruit.  Perfectly balanced, the trifle had a discrete adult taste thanks to just the right amount of rum.

Apologies for the poor angle, but are they not obviously adorable?

Swedish Rolls

The new IT guy of Nordic descent brought a traditional and skill-intensive entry to the mix with these spiral-shaped rolls.  A mature offering, not too sweet but definitely not savory, I contemplated with fondness the prospect of enjoying one with a cup of chamomile tea.  Even after a day they were quite good, and one imagines they were even better a mere couple hours removed from the oven.

Not a lingonberry not any gravlax in sight!

Oreo Bars

Imagine everything you love about Rice Krispies Treats: the lightness combined with richness, the chewy marshmallow binding, and now turbocharge it by transplanting oreo fragments where the crisped rice would normally be.  You get a rich but not filling new favorite snacking delicacy.  Had there been a way to aesthetically ornament this, it would surely have been in contention for a prize.

The Oreo apocalypse never tasted so good.

Fudgy Chocolate Brownies

Okay, so no points for originality, but this was still a classic rendered with no false notes.  Creamy rather than glutenously chewy there were strong elements of butter, cocoa, and vanilla.  Nobody whines about having to eat a good brownie.

You could put this next to the definition of brownie in the dictionary.

Toasted Coconut Cream Pie

For as rich and creamy as it was, the pie held its shape well and its crust stayed crisp, crunchy, and buttery.  Delivering everything it promised, this pie got strong marks for taste, including at least one 9 score.  Some judges marked it down for a flavor of almond extract that was a little big strong, and a texture that was more creamy than fluffy.  But the rich custardy filling had judges coming back for second helpings after the judging was over.

If you wanted coconut taste, you were in luck.

The Bottom Line

This year corporations will spend millions for their food technicians and scientists to create exciting and addictive flavors that can be churned out of an assembly line to a waiting queue of hungry motorists and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.  But all creativity is human creativity and it resides in all of us.  Technology fascinates but human cooks rock.  Here's to another 10 years of the office bake-off.

Idiocy in Labeling: An Ongoing Series

Here at the Food Kingdom, we love us some Trader Joe's, but: how is it possible for fruit to be dried and juicy at the same time? This is synesthesia taken to disturbing new heights.

Juicy AND Dry?  I don't want to know how that's possible

Just in time for Valentine's' Day: Dunkin's Cookie Dough Donut

If, at a more innocent time in the not-so-distant  past, you had proposed that a doughnut -- wrapped around an uncooked cookie and formed into the shape of a heart – would be considered an idea vehicle for the expression of affection, you might well have attracted some quizzical looks.

And yet, this Valentine’s Day, Dunkin has released two special donuts to commemorate the holday: Brownie Batter (uncooked pastries appear to be a theme, suggesting I’m not sure what) and Cookie Dough, reviewed here.

Dark chocolate makes for a promising beginning!

The donut base is the standard-issue Dunkin donut: a neutral vessel with very little sweetness and appealing note of yeasty sourness.  The first bites are promising, for in addition to the cookie dough filling, the donut is generously coated with dark chocolate icing and dark chocolate chips that impart a sophisticated and sensual richness.   Your chocolate-loving valentine would be will pleased by this.

The trouble begins as one nears the center and begins to experience the “cookie dough” filling.  The filling isn’t really dough, but more of an unctuous dough-flavored syrupy goop.  It could be no other way, for any filling has to be piped into the donuts interior, after baking, necessitating a thinness and fluidity that could not be achieved by actual dough.

Ick. Cookie dough ooze.

Dunkin has attempted to nonetheless approximate the texture of cookie dough by including granules of undissolved sugar into the goo.  I wondered, as I tasted this, how they kept the sugar granules in suspension such that they wouldn’t dissolve in the liquid mixture.   My best guess is that the filling is so super-saturated with sugar that no additional particle can dissolve into solution, and indeed  the sweetness is so overwhelming that this possibility seems plausible.  What the result cannot be, to me, is anything approaching palatable.  The tan ooze permeates every corner of the mouth as it converges on the center of the donut, flooding the zone with strong notes of artificial butter and brown sugar.

One wants to give Dunkin some points here for ambition and creativity but to me it’s all too much.  The heart-shaped cookie dough donut is a misconceived embarrassment.  At press time, the "brownie batter" donut was not available at my local Dunkin location, but a review shall be forthcoming at such time as it may be purchased, certainly in time for aspiring romantics to make informed Valentine's Day decisions.

- Full disclosure: Another taster present at Food Kingdom studios at the time of testing found that this concoction really hit the spot, though she allowed that the major influencer might have been her substantial breakfast time hunger.