After Three Swings, Mac n' Cheetos Strikes Out

Cheeto Pride Before the Fall
At least they won the first 24-hour news cycle.  When Burger King announced their new Mac n' Cheetos a few weeks back, the internet exploded with squeals of delight, and it's easy to see why.  BK was promising to marry two of America's guiltiest pleasures, creamy mac and cheese and intense, orange-dusted Cheetos into one portable snack, solving in one step a problem that we didn't know we had: the ability to take the melty rich taste of macaroni and cheese on the go.  One promotional product picture embodies this aspiration, showcasing  drippy cheese sauce running like a stream through a shapely cluster of macaroni, all safely encased in a radioactively orange fried shell, glistening with just the right amount of fryer oil.  Even if you would never dream of purchasing them, they were an understandable object of desire.  This is the kind of innovation of which a broad spectrum of Americans could feel justly proud; a bright orange object we could all agree on. It's interesting how the hype has died down, isn't it?  That's because the not-too-well-kept secret of Mac n' Cheetos is that they completely miss the mark, falling somewhere between a botched experiment and a con job.  I tried these woeful fried critters three times just to be absolutely sure they were as bad as they first seemed, before concluding they were inherently awful.  Let's dig in and dissect the anatomy of this failure.

Implausibly bulging at the seams with more pasta and sauce than they could reasonably hold, this promotional shot of shiny, crispy, creamy Mac n' Cheetos pieces shows us what we wanted to see.

Trial #1

The excitement showed no sign of abating when I called ahead to my local Burger King on the day of the product's debut to make sure they were available.  "Do you have the new Mac n' Cheetos?" I asked, and was answered with a breathless and beaming "We sure do!"  By this time it was 10:30 at night, so I was a little apprehensive that they might not be at their best, but like so many people I just couldn't wait to get my hands on munchable mac and cheese.  So off to BK I went.  The first warning sign came when I placed my order and the cashier remarked "Oh, yea, Mac n' Cheetos, they're good when they're fresh."  The response in kind would have been to turn tail in a huff and call out "I guess I'll come back when they're fresh", but who wants to be that person?  And besides, I was hungry.

Back at the Food Kingdom home base, the air is pulsing with excitement.  On their very first day of availability, the Mac n' Cheetos nuggets, "dangerously cheesy", are ready to burst onto the stage....

On biting into a Mac n' Cheetos piece for the first time, the first thing you wonder is where the sauce is.  The promotional photo shows a creamy, runny cheese sauce, and the package cries out that they are "dangerously cheesy" but reality is a depressing diptych of truths: they're both dry and strangely hollow.  As the photo below shows, there are no identifiable or distinct macaroni elbows but rather a mushy mass of anonymous, overcooked pasta.  The sauce has hardened and shriveled, and about 30% of the interior is empty space.  The taste is empty too; not repulsive or anything, just bland.  Ketchup can enhance lesser macaronis and cheese, and the same is true here, but this first foray leaves nothing to get excited about.

Behold the desiccated and paltry interior.  Note also how thick the fried coating is.  Far from a thin barrier that barely contains a bulging mass of pasta and sauce, it actually takes up as much space, and provides as much bulk, as the pasta itself, adding to the feeling of dryness, and making it hard to taste what cheese there is.

Trial #2

On the second time around, you could tell that Burger King's rank-and-file had stopped believing in this dish, and it felt as though they weren't even trying to prepare it well.  Though the product had only been on the market for a week, they seemed already to have run out of custom cardboard product holsters, or they didn't care to use them, and were instead throwing the breaded pasta mini-logs into the paper sleeves reserved for "chicken fries".  And although they were ordered at the height of the lunch rush, they didn't taste any fresher than they did the first time.  Again they were dry and again the interior seemed to be equal parts air and filling.

The thrill is gone: how sad does this look?  And what are those sickly black spots?  They appeared prominently the second and third time they were ordered and raise questions as to how Mac n' Cheetos are actually heated.  One would suspect they are thrown in the fryer, but these look like scorch marks.  Are we supposed to think of them as "flame grilled" in some weird way?

Though ordered at the height of the lunch rush, this piece seems almost petrified, as though it had been sitting under a heat lamp for hours, its moisture evaporating away.  Neither macaroni nor cheese sauce is the least bit identifiable.

Trial #3

The third and final time they were slightly better.  This time there were at least some congealed remnants of what once may have been a mildly flavorful cheese sauce.  The weird black markings, resembling grill marks, were once again noticeable, but at least they weren't unsightly.  With enough ketchup they were palatable and reminded me of the cheese fritters that The Magic Pan used to serve. This was still nothing like what the eating public had been led to expect, but it wasn't offensive.  It is time to ask, though, why Mac n' Cheetos fell so far short of everyone's expectations

Where did all the moist cheesiness go?  Some of it probably got absorbed by the breading, and other moisture was probably driven inside the pasta itself as the product steamed within its dry shell.

Assessing What Went Wrong

The Mac n' Cheetos experiment failed in a number of ways, some of them predictable and all of them, I believe, explicable.  Let's take the two biggest failures in turn.

Overall dryness: To understand why the macaroni and cheese inside the shell was so dry, it's first helpful to understand that there are actually two varieties of mac and cheese: the type prepared on the stovetop and the kind that you bake.   Stovetop macaroni and cheese consists of freshly boiled macaroni, cooked al-dente firm, and still moist and slick from the pasta water, which is immediately blended with a bechamel cheese sauce and served immediately after the cheese and macaroni are blended.  For this reason, the dish is still moist and the macaroni is swimming in thick, cheesy sauce.  Baked pasta, on the other hand, is much drier because the pasta continues to cook as it bakes, drying from the circulating air and from the fact that, even if it's enrobed in sauce when shoved in the oven, that sauce will be absorbed by the pasta as it continues to cook.  That's why baked macaroni and cheese often features a layer of melted cheese on top -- both to trap moisture and to ensure that the product is still visibly cheesy even after the macaroni soaks up the cheese sauce.  Mac n' Cheetos are more like the baked mac and cheese.  The mac and cheese inside the breading may have been saucy prior to cooking, but as it steams, it dries out and also goes limp.  As the sauce is soaked up by the pasta, it leaves voids within the shell and the pasta goes formless and mushy.  Because the crisp outer coating was far thicker than it needed to be, it overwhelmed the shrunken pasta interior and exacerbated the dryness problem.  It's also an open question whether these things are even fried.  The outside never seemed to have the thin film of oil that things get when they come from the fryer.   Instead, it has that crusty dryness that usually comes from spending too much time exposed to hot circulating air.

The Lack of a Bold Cheetos-like Flavor: As far as appearances go, Mac n' Cheetos do seem to capture the spirit of Cheetos with their bright orange color.  But, leaving the dryness aside, that punchy, bright cheese flavor that make Cheetos so addictive was absent, and one wonders why.  I suspect that it's more difficult than people suspect to "bake flavor into" things and that, if BK really wanted to give these that bright orange Cheetos punch, the way to do it would have been to sprinkle them with that trademark Cheetos orange cheese powder.  But to do this would have required segregating them from other fried items like fries and onion rings, lest the powder spill uninvited onto them, and Burger King may not have wanted to add that step of labor to the process.  

Indeed, this whole project was not so much a failure in conception as a case of lazy execution.  Burger  King could have added more cheese taste with a sprinkling of cheese dust but they didn't want to take the time and effort.  They could have begun with a slightly undercooked macaroni filling and an excess of slightly thin sauce, and allowed the ratio of cheese to sauce to even out as the item cooked, the sauce thickening slightly as the pasta came to the proper degree of doneness.  Finally, they could have made more of an effort to serve them fresh out of the fryer, but I'm beginning to think that these were transferred from a bag to an oven and finally to a holding area, compromising any possibility of freshness or tenderness.

Conclusion

Burger King captured a nation's imagination with an exciting idea, and threw it all away.  Expect these to be gone within a month, never to return.

Burgers for Breakfast - The Diner Experience Recreated

Burger King Battles Back
As with many industries, success in fast-food depends on hype, momentum, seizing people's imagination, and of course giving the eating public what they want.  McDonald's proved this recently with all-day breakfast.  The novelty of noshing on pancakes or an Egg McMuffin at lunchtime, the lure of "getting away with something" by buying a cheaper breakfast item rather than a relatively pricey burger-based combo, the frisson of individuality that one experiences from eating one mass-produced item while everybody else consumes another; all these things have rallied the Golden Arches from the doldrums, and their revenues are surging based on first quarter earnings reports. Naturally, Burger King wants in on the action.

So why doesn't Burger King just copy McDonald's and offer all-day breakfast?  Well, breakfast at Burger King just isn't as popular as it is at McDonald's, where morning is the strongest part of the day, sales-wise.  People just don't have a jones for a Croissanwich in the noontime heat, never mind French Toast Sticks.  Managing the logistics of all-day breakfast would represent a sizeable investment in processes and equipment retooling that Burger King likely would never recoup.  So, how to steal a little bit of McDonald's thunder on the cheap, offering a popular item at an unexpected time of day?  The question practically answers itself: burgers for breakfast.

No cheerful backlit sign, no warmly glowing windows welcome the breakfast visitor to Burger King. The dominant mood is morose as our breakfast experiment begins.

The atmosphere is equally depressing once inside as the cranked-up flatscreen blares the morning news to no one.

My Own Private Idaho Potatoes
If you live near a Burger King that happens to run a busy breakfast business then your experience may vary, but my Burger King is situated in an open-air food court of sorts, a huge asphalt expanse off a highway exit ramp, that's home to about seven different fast-food chains that serve the commuter crowd that works at surrounding businesses.  Most workers don't arrive before 8AM, so both of the times I had burgers for breakfast, I was the only one in the restaurant.  The staff hasn't been exactly annoyed to see me, but they've certainly been surprised, even more so when I've ordered burgers.  The corporate office may be pushing this menu option, but employees seem to find it a bit eccentric.  Both times, they've politely warned me that there will be a wait since the burger would have to be made-to-order.  As you'll see, though, this is quite the blessing in disguise.  When you're the only one in the restaurant, the order takers and the cooks are fairly unstressed and are able to provide a welcome amount of individual attention.

Once you place your order and are informed of the delay, you're given your beverage, in my case black coffee, asked if you want hash browns or fries (I chose fries), and simply told to take a seat and wait.  As you can see in the pictures above, it can be a bit bleak, and if I were a more of an assertive and demanding personality, I might have asked that the television, set at full volume, I imagine, so that the staff can hear it in the back, be turned down.  Setting that aside though, the time passes fairly quickly as you read your morning paper or, in my case, a dystopian military techno-thriller.   When I sat down, the occupying forces of a Kazakh battalion in the American South was digging an all-terrain vehicle out of the mud.  By the time our heroes had begun their ambush of the Kazakhs, my freshly prepared Whopper and straight-from-the-fryer potatoes had arrived, delivered right to my table.  On the second visit, I was called to the counter to pick up the order, but in both cases the experience was more like being in a lonely diner off the interstate and less that of interfacing with the food-industrial complex.  The whole thing was poignantly civilized, a bit of culinary-philosophical meditation at the edge of the world.  Yea, ok, but how were the burger and fries?

In the slowly gathering morning light, black coffee and a Whopper with cheese (fries obscured by the thick and copious wrapping paper) await consumption.

The Early Bird Catches the Fresh Lettuce and Tomato
From the very first bite, the benefits of ordering a burger with lettuce and tomato early in the morning became clear.  Think about it: most restaurants do their prep work right when they open; at no time will the lettuce be crisper than when it has just been taken out of the walk-in refrigerator, its cells plumped with the water in which it's been rinsed, before the heat of the kitchen and the passage of time has even started to turn it limp.  At no point will the tomatoes taste fresher than right after they've been sliced, probably only an hour earlier.  Even the bun is at its freshest, for it only left the plastic storage bag minutes before when the cook opened it for the unexpected order.  You can even see this in the picture above, as the burger's posture is high and erect, steam having not caused any component to sag.  This is the Whopper as it was meant to be, with the hot stuff piping hot and the cool stuff cool and crisp.

The interior of the bun is fluffy, the June tomatoes are thick and ripe, the crisp lettuce is piled high, and the beef is flame broiled.  What would you rather munch on between sips of black coffee, this or a limp and stodgy Croissanwich?

The fries too could not have been better, for they were fried to order, slid into their holster the moment the doneness indicator on the fryer chirped.  It's worth noting that these are the recently redesigned fries, thicker cut and without much, if any, coating so that they boast a delicate crispness on the outside and fluffy moist starchiness within.  On both visits I also noticed that they were minimally salted, allowing me to season them to my preference with salt and a sprinkle of black pepper, just as I used to do at the Tastee 29 Diner on Route 29 in Fairfax, VA.  Completing the diner experience was the black coffee, which interacts with the brown caramel notes of broiled meat and golden fried potatoes in a different way than soft drinks.  As I alternated, in pensive solitude, between bites of fresh custom-seasoned fries, strong coffee, and a hearty but garden-fresh burger, it occurred to me how rare this private, intimate experience was.  It was a feeling entirely new in a fast-food restaurant and one that could become addictive for as long as BK decides to keep this experiment going.

Because the fries are thick-cut, you get more real potato taste than usual, and they stay hot longer because of the lower ratio of surface area to interior space.  Finally, because they are very modestly salted, it's possible to season them to taste with just the right amount of salt and pepper.

Conclusions
Burgers for breakfast are the best-kept secret going in fast food right now, and I encourage anyone with memories of eating burgers at Denny's or a diner at 3AM to activate nostalgia before what I predict will be low profitability prompts BK to pull the plug on this venture.  Don't doubt it til you've tried it.

Hostess Milky Way and M&M's Brownies: Can the Brownian Knot Be Cut?

The Hostess Hitting Streak Grinds to a Halt
Hostess had been on a tear since their miraculous resurrection by Greek-American billionaire turnaround artist C. Dean Metropoulos, using their newly-modernized manufacturing processes to crank out novel new items like the delish Caramel Sea Salt Cupcakes.  But their two new themed brownies, coated with M&M's or with caramel frosting and Milky Way pieces, fall flat.   Or perhaps it's better to say they simply fall prey to the seeming impossibility of creating a truly great brownie in a factory setting.  We'll have more on that later, but first let's talk about the factors that were at least under Hostess's control.

Untruth in Packaging
As a general principle, anyone who complains that a food product doesn't look like the picture on the package just needs to grow up.  Companies have a right to photograph their products in the best light possible and the package depictions will always be somewhat idealized; you mustn't mistake the cardboard carton housing your microwaved pasta dinner for a representation of reality.  The perfect chunks of chicken in the picture will always be a little plumper than what comes out of your oven, the gloss of the sauce a little smoother, the colors in the vegetables a little brighter.  But with these two brownies, Hostess crosses the line into deception, promising a totally different kind of brownie from what they deliver.  Let's first look at the Milky Way brownie.

The picture on the box promises that the base brownie will be smothered in chewy, gooey caramel, with hefty chunks of Milky Way candy thrown on top for good measure, adding textural diversity and an added boost of milk chocolate taste.  What you get instead isn't even caramel, but a gritty, sandy icing.  It might be the same icing that Hostess puts on their Sea Salt Caramel cupcakes, but while that icing works in the context of a thick cupcake, it's a real letdown when the consumer was expecting a rich caramel-turtle-like taste experience.  As for the Milky Way pieces, they're not the chunks that you see in the picture, but cast-off fragments, shards and particles of Milky Way dust.

Hostess promises chewy, stretchy caramel atop its brownies, but actually delivers a crumbly caramel-flavored icing sans sumptuousness, stretch, or even richness.

The M&M's brownie isn't quite so dishonestly presented, for at least it boasts a goodly amount of the candy-coated chocolate pieces, more in fact than are shown on the package.  Once again, however, Hostess gives us a substantially different icing than you get in the photo.  On the box we see a velvety sheet of glossy chocolate draped over the brownie, with a rainbow of chocolate pieces gently nestled into the soft, accommodating dimples of fudge that the icing affords.  The real icing, in contrast, is a dry and brittle crust of cocoa-stained confectioners icing.  Rather than draped, it looks laser-printed and bolted on, a rigid encasement more than an enticing adornment, and since the brownie underneath is a dry biscuit-like slab of cocoa bread, the whole act of eating it is a pleasureless affair.

Which icing would you rather eat?  And don't say it makes no difference.  Perhaps if Hostess hadn't done such a great job of meeting expectations in recent months, this bait-and-switch would feel like less of a betrayal.

Why Are Boxed Brownies So Difficult to Get Right?
All of the above complaints notwithstanding, Hostess's primary sin here may not be faulty execution so much as a lack of wisdom in once again trying to bring a shelf-stable packaged brownie to market. This is something that food companies have struggled to get right for decades and each time they fail. Intriguingly, these individually-wrapped brownies almost always fail in nearly identical ways.  Here's a list of the most common offputting traits.

The Scent of Dried Prunes - Next time you try an industrially baked brownie, hold it up to your nose and inhale deeply.  Usually a strong aroma conveys a mixture of wet coffee grounds mixed with dried fruit of the raisiny or prunish variety.  Though these brownies don't actually contain dried prunes, that was once a featured ingredient in a low-fat brownie from nearly two decades back which attempted to reduce the amount of fat by replacing shortening with prune puree.  Amazingly, that brownie didn't taste significantly worse than these.

A Uniformly Damp Texture - Why are brownies so popular in the first place?  Apart from intense chocolate taste, I'd argue that the other great attraction is their two simultaneous textures: crackly on top and around the edges, soft, dense and fudgy on the inside.  Packaged brownies never seem to be able to replicate this.  The medium-dense crumb on the inside is unchanged at the edges, and the cake square is limp and flabby throughout, robbing each bite of the excitement that comes with variability.

This picture gives a good view into the depressing sameness of texture that is common in packaged brownies.

I've often wondered why, with the arsenal of food technologies at our disposal, we should have such trouble creating a boxed brownie that's crunchy on the outside and chewy on the inside.  One theory, though, is moisture migration.  When you wrap the brownie, you create a closed system where all the moisture inside the brownie simply has nowhere to go.  If it escapes into the air, it's still trapped inside the package and will get reabsorbed into the brownie's outside skin.  If the moisture is trapped in the center, it will eventually migrate through the cell structure of the brownie into the edges.  We forget that even the best homemade brownies only hold their double texture for a few hours uncovered and only a few days under plastic wrap.  After that, they dry out.  So if you're a manufacturer whose brownies will ship long distances and sit on shelves for long periods, you have two options: create a brownie that's uniformly dry or uniformly damp; that choice you have, but the uniformity is not optional.  It's a decent theory, but just as I was considering it, a co-worker brought a complication to this idea into the breakroom: brownie bites.

This supermarket brownie bite was everything that the Hostess brownies weren't.  Check out the crumbly, crusty, uneven skin and the dark tender interior.

Somehow brownie bites, those miniature cupcakes of baked brownie batter, manage to overcome all the aforementioned difficulties and taste just like a brownie should; fudgy and soft in the center, light and crackly at the edges.  Does this mean that the packaging theory is invalid?  I've actually written to an industrial food scientist to get a clear answer on this, and I'll update this post should I get an answer, but my instinct is to say no.  I think brownie bites succeed where industrial brownies fail because of a different delivery and consumption schedule.  Brownie bites are usually made by a local commercial bakery and shipped the same day to the retail outlets that sell them in under a week's time.  If they were to sit on a shelf for several weeks, they would probably dry out completely. Brownies such as Hostess sells have to sit for many weeks, if not months, and have to be formulated differently so that they stay reasonably fresh and moist for a much longer window of time.  Hostess has figured out a way to make this work for Twinkies and cupcakes, but brownies are still a struggle.   Still, there are tantalizing hints out there to a better way to make an industrial brownie.  Consider, for instance, Keebler Soft Batch chocolate chip cookies.  Those are crisp on the outside but soft and chewy on the inside.  What are they doing that industrial brownie bakers might duplicate?  The consumer desire is out there.  We'll see how the nation's food scientists respond.

Frost in Translation - Hot Fudge Sundae Pop-Tarts

A Victim of the Flavor Craze

When Pop-Tarts were first introduced in 1964, it was a simpler time, especially with respect to flavors.  We may overstate the case if we say that ice cream came in chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry, but flavors were within the realm of the possible and plausible.  Baskin-Robbins had 31 flavors, but the era of extreme mix-ins and candy bar fusions lay far ahead on the horizon..  Yogurt generally came in fruit flavors like strawberry, peach, blueberry, raspberry, and boysenberry, unlike today where "Key Lime Pie" flavor has rendered plain old lime passé, and you would never dare release an apple yogurt when "Cinnamon Apple Crumble" is an option.  Today we like our flavors to be aspirational, and we fondly hope that a simple consumer bakery item will transcend itself to become something it could never be and was never intended to be.  The era of dessertification is upon us. That way lies folly, and it brings us to the sad case of the Hot Fudge Sundae Pop-Tart, a confused embarrassment of a product that fails utterly to conjure the treat to which it alludes.

Cool creaminess and hot fudginess, magically shrunk down to a foil-wrapped, shelf stable pantry item! Or so Kellogg's food scientists hope.

Complexity Kills

Pop-Tarts as they were originally conceived are elegantly straightforward in concept, essentially jam and crackers turned inside out.  Kellogg's engineers had simply to acquire a competently produced fruit jam, refine it slightly by eliminating irregularities like seeds, thicken it by reducing the moisture content, and then encase that fruit reduction within a crackery pastry. The frill of frosting became an added option several years later.  This base recipe didn't require any its ingredients to substantially deviate from their essential nature, for jam is jam and crackers are crackers; bringing them together was child's play.  

Consider, by contrast, how many mutations in form and function are required to transform a hot fudge sundae into a Pop-Tart.  Vanilla ice cream, a cold solid, is required to transform into a hot liquid filling.  Hot fudge, a smooth and velvety liquid, is pressed into service as a hard glazed drizzle on the pastry's exterior on the one hand, and secondarily as the main flavoring in the cracker-pastry that makes up most of the Pop-Tart's mass.  Ignore for a second that a traditional hot fudge sundae has no baked elements at all.  This chocolate cracker is nonetheless supposed to anchor freakish adaptation, despite having almost nothing in common with the thing imitated.

A look inside gives us our first sign of trouble.  Look at the ratio of dry, crumbly chocolate cracker to the vanilla filling that presumably represents the ice cream in this ill-considered adaptation.

Does It at Least Taste Good?

All of these complaints about authenticity might be downgraded to quibbles if our Hot Fudge Sundae Pop-Tart made for a sweet indulgence of some other sort, so let's now concentrate on that.  Because Pop-Tarts are consumed at room temperature roughly half the time, we'll discuss the taste in both heated and unheated forms.

At room temperature is where this "hot fudge sundae" falls flattest, as you might well imagine.  Without the flavor-spreading asset of heat, the vanilla "ice cream" filling is at its meekest, leaving the chocolate cracker-pastry to dominate.  Since this pastry crust was always indeed conceived as more of a cracker than a cookie, its transformation from neutral to a chocolate flavor is inevitably awkward.  It tastes as though industrial saboteurs dumped a barrel of Nestle Quik powder into the mixer at a saltine factory.  As for the icing, decorated with brown swirls and rainbow sprinkles, it tastes no different from the standard, eerily immovable "hard icing" that has encrusted frosted Pop-Tarts for as long as the item has existed.

After some time in the toaster, the Hot Fudge Sundae Pop-Tart is slightly more successful.  The vanilla filling still  does nothing to remind us of vanilla ice cream, but we are at least reminded slightly of certain dishes that are hot, contain ice cream, and involve chocolate baked goods.  Indeed, "Fudge Brownie Sundae Pop-Tart" would have made a much more credible name and would have rendered this at least a qualified success.  When the warm vanilla filling combines with the warm chocolate pastry, one alternately tastes something like a warm brownie moistened with ice cream or, if one insists, plausibly even a hot fudge drizzle.  As a matter of fact, as I write this, I am tasting a toasted Hot Fudge Sundae Pop-Tart for the third time, and they do grow on you.  But let us not dwell on how one might warm to these over time.  Let's discuss how they might have been better.

When heated, the vanilla center asserts itself a bit, seeming to expand and blend with the now-softer cocoa crust.  In the end the resemblance is more to a brownie sundae than the titular sundae that is free from any baked-good content.

The Road Not Taken

There were other options available to Kellogg's in designing this flavor and it's puzzling that these weren't pursued.  Here are just a few things I would have expected and liked to have seen.

Actual hot fudge - It seems so obvious.  In addition to a vanilla filling, why not add some fudgy chocolate to the interior so that when the Pop-Tart is heated, some true gooey fudge, intertwined with the vanilla, comes dripping out.  For something with "hot fudge" in the name, the absence of anything resembling it is a mystery.

A vanilla pastry - Chocolate is such an intense flavor that concentrating it in the filling would have lent plenty of chocolate punch to the pastry.  Vanilla, on the other hand, is so mild that it needed heftier representation.  Saturating the pastry itself with a smooth French Vanilla accent might have lent balance and authenticity to this creation.

A maraschino cherry center - Sure the cherry atop sundae is just one tiny touch, but it's still the distinctive capstone that lends pizazz and personality to the treat.  It would have been a cute and whimsical surprise to put just a little bit of cherry jam somewhere inside the tart.  Guessing when the sudden burst of cherry would come would have added some suspense and a sense of discovery.

Conclusions

As the opening paragraph suggests, this Pop-Tart made a horrible first impression, and it could have done much more to resemble the dessert that it imitates.  But as I continued to eat while I wrote, its modest virtues came to the fore and its definite flaws receded in importance.  In the end, the Hot Fudge Sundae Pop-Tart is an interesting attempt, even as it's a symptom of continuing flavor overreach in the packaged foods industry.

Introducing Dutch Treats and Filipino Flavors

An Attitude of Gratitude
It may be a corny maxim that, when you send things out into the world, things come back in return.  But writing for The Food Kingdom has already produced dividends of deliciousness sufficient to justify the claim that claim.  Two large parcels of food recently arrived at the Food Kingdom offices, one from the Netherlands, the other from the Philippines.  Today we begin unpacking these bundles of food-joy and describing their contents, beginning with the Honeycomb Crunchie and Mango Balls.  But before the edibles, let's meet some individuals.

A Trip to See Family in the Philippines
When not tasting Oreos five at a time while consulting a thesaurus for adjectives, the Food King works in a video production office with talented people like this fellow, Rich.  Among other things, Rich does amazing art, as you can see.

Rich isn't quite as cool as this picture would suggest.  His art is actually more spectacular than this reproduction would suggest.

Rich is married to Carmen, who recently traveled to the Philippines to visit family.

Carmen did not bring back a bird, but she did bring back dried squid, mangoes, and more.

A glance through the photo album of Carmen's trip actually makes one want to visit the Philippines as a culinary tourist, for some of the foods there must be enjoyed on-site to be appreciated.  Super-fresh produce appears to be available at plentiful open-air markets and meals like breakfast place a focus on vegetable and fish preparations that we might well emulate here, taking a break from biscuits, bacon, and breakfast cereal.

A Filipino breakfast of fresh vegetables (left) and danggit (right), dried fish fried up crisp like bacon.  Having savored fried salmon skin, I think I have an idea of how good it must be.

It's a shame that an extra plate of breakfast veggies couldn't make it through customs, but Carmen was kind enough to accomplish the next best thing.  Perhaps inspired by the recent package of American snacks we sent off to the Netherlands recently, she brought back to the Kingdom a big bag representing the best of Filipino packaged food.  So let's try some Mango Balls.

They're Not Gummies
Bluster and boasting aside, I'm a bit of a food coward, so I started with what I assumed to be the most innocuous item in the bag, saving the dried squid and fascinatingly named "cheese-soaked snacks" for what the package called Mango Balls.  They're individually wrapped and so I assumed they would be mango gummies, the kind you see from Japan in the international supermarkets.

The gentle colors and shiny plastic seem to promise a mellow, mango candy experience.

Actually, Mango Balls are exactly what the name (duh!) implies: big balls of dried mango.  This was a discombobulating revelation, overturning all expectations, but it wasn't a bad thing at all.  If you love mango, and I do, and you should, then there's no reason to regard these as anything other than nature's candy, for that's what dried fruit is.

It looks vaguely like a gumdrop coated in granulated sugar, but this deep-orange fragrant ball is pure unadulterated mango.

An interesting thing happens, though, when you dry mango.  The very slight bit of tartness that's present in a fresh mango, which usually gets lost amongst the sweetness, the luscious texture, and the chin-dripping juiciness, gets concentrated.  The fruit acquires a pronounced tartness and becomes something almost like an apricot.  The exterior is interesting too, because it looks as though the balls have been coated with little sugar crystals.  But if the packaging is to be believed, these balls are nothing but mango with no added ingredients.  I'd speculate that the sugar crystals on the outside somehow precipitate out to the surface during the drying process.  The bottom line is that these things are addictive and a very different experience from the dried mango you usually find in America, which are usually hard wedges, sometimes freeze-dried and sometimes almost candied, but in a bad way, like they've been dipped in syrup and then left out to dry.  Ewww.  These are different and illustrate how distinct methods of preservation yield different results.

Look closely and you can see the little fibers that are naturally a part of sweet, tender mango flesh.  In a fresh mango these can either be quite visible or imperceptible, depending on how you cut it and upon how ripe the fruit is.

Can You Buy Them?
Yes! For convenience's sake, you might first check to see if your local international supermarket carries them, but failing that, you can buy them from Amazon.

From Manila to Ridderkerk
We first met Kelvin Wilson a few weeks ago when we sent him a huge box of American snacks so that he might vicariously visit this country through, of course, its junk food.  Kelvin has been busy since then, preparing an even bigger box of food that expresses his complicated culinary heritage.  It's "complicated" because Kelvin was born in England but moved with his family, economic migrants of a sort, to the Netherlands when his father found work in a Dutch shipyard.  Now this mixed heritage is passed on to his children, Lucas, Robin, and Alice Leaf.  So it was a mental itinerary strewn with Cadbury's as well as stroopwafels that Kelvin travelled, along with Lucas (who loves Skittles, by the way) when seeking to repay my transatlantic hospitality in kind.  And. did. they. ever. In the photo below, you can see the Crunchie on the top layer at the lower left.  Let's investigate what's within that golden wrapper.

My eyes fairly popped out of their sockets when I saw how much was packed into the box.  Kelvin tells me that postage was the same whether he sent 5.5 kilos or 9.1 so he had no reason to hold back.

The Honeycomb Crunchie

If a generality may be offered about European sweets based on what I've tasted thus far, one might be that Europeans like air in their candy.  The Aero, to be reviewed later, is chocolate injected with air bubbles for a cloud-like taste, and schuimblokken ("foam blocks") are very firm chunks of sweetened dextrose (believe me, it tastes better than it sounds) that snap when you bite down on them, but then instantly dissolve into a chalky wisp in your mouth like cotton candy.  Even the untamed, weighty-sounding Lion Bar isn't hefty in the way that a Snickers is.  So it is with the Honeycomb Crunchie, which is a kind of hard toffee that's been frothed up to a crunchy yet light consistency, then enrobed in chocolate.

It looks filling with its sharp, volumetric angles and seemingly impressive mass.  But the Crunchie crunches, but then dissipates into a chocolatey honey-caramel dream.

I'm calling this bar the "Honeycomb Crunchie" to distinguish it from the many variants that its popularity has prompted, like the Champagne Crunchie, the White Chocolate Crunchie, and even a Bourbon Crunchie that was briefly introduced into America until being pulled from the market due to a boycott by western factions of the Southern Baptist Convention.  But the proper name for this flagship version is simply Crunchie.

What Exactly is This "Honeycomb"?
According to the ingredient list, there is no actual honey in the honeycomb but the toffee, due to its aeration, has a golden color that's reminiscent of honey and the power of suggestion is strong enough that I would have believed the toffee to contain some honey if you told me so.

No, the gradient from deep brown to golden yellow is not an accident.  This is what happens to toffee when it's whipped up into a honeycomb structure and allowed to harden.  This may be weird to the American tooth and tongue, but it's worth your while to try it.

Once you've penetrated the sweet waxy milk chocolate coating, the toffee's texture is the most fascinating thing about the Crunchie, for the stuff is truly hard, almost to a tooth-threatening extent. At the same time, because of the aeration, this honeycomb is paradoxically dense yet light, the  texture a combination of a malted milk ball and a Butterfinger.  It might be compared to calcified meringe, or better yet, you might put it this way: if you were to build a village entirely out of candy, Crunchies would be the cinder blocks.

Wikipedia tells me, and I have no reason to disbelieve it, that the huge slabs of toffee are cut down to individual serving sizes with focused jets of oil.  This makes sense for the same reason that we cut cheese with fine wire slices.  You don't want to shear or fracture the brittle toffee, so you want your cutting method to be minimally invasive.

Can (and Should) You Buy It?
Yes! You should buy it, for the Crunchie, beloved in Britain since its introduction in 1929 is unlike anything you'll find in the United States.  Its crunch is a little transgressive, a little dangerous, but the classic chocolate-toffee flavor combo will please anyone who loves classic candies.  You can find it for rather inflated prices at import-shops, but if you don't mind buying a box-full (and why would you?) Amazon once again comes through.  Here at the Food Kingdom, we still have a huge bag and box full of Dutch Treats and Filipino Flavors to make our way through.  Stay tuned in the coming weeks for more of the best of each.

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Wendy's Jalapeño Fresco Chicken Sandwich - Fast Food Champ of the Scoville Scale

It Had to Be Wendy's
Every fast-food joint has a personality that drives the content in their creations.  McDonald's test-markets endlessly, fearful of releasing something not approved by committee.  Burger King goes for the splashy, the gaudy, and almost relishes giving offense, which is why no one else could have thought up the Fully Loaded Croissanwich or the Angriest Whopper.  Taco Bell prides itself on generating a new menu item every other week, provided it's just some recombination of the twenty-something preexisting ingredients in their trough.  Wendy's has always been marked by a "why not?" restlessness with the status quo: why not chili, and why not put it on a baked potato?  Why not smoked gouda on a burger, why not a spicy chicken sandwich?  And centrally, why not try to make fast food just a bit fresher, with ingredients one notch better than the competition.  This nervy synthesis of the fast food spirit and "real food" ethic gave birth to 2016's best new sandwich thus far, the cheesy, juicy, and almost mouth-searing Jalapeño Fresco Chicken Sandwich.

It's for real. Despite another somewhat shoddy job of assembly, the underlying quality is evident in a thicker-than-usual chicken fillet and coarse chunks of fresh peppers.

Quality Components
In many ways, this sandwich reminds me of a custom-built mountain bike from a high-end retailer.  The ultimate quality is almost an inevitability because of the high grade of the constituent parts which, unless incompetently fastened together, virtually guarantee a top-flight experience.  Wendy's long ago mastered the art of cooking a chicken fillet until crisp but not too crunchy on the outside, and juicily plump inside.  This consistent feat was perfected at the same time that their original spicy chicken sandwich rose to be one of their top-sellers.  Starting from this rarified baseline of spiciness and succulence, creating a new sandwich was simply a matter of adding new tastes without detracting from the old.

"Five Layers of Spice": Deconstructing the Myth
While this sandwich is delicious, and complexly and eye-wateringly so, the promotional material that's advertising "five layers of spice" needs debunking.  Layering is all the rage these days, as celebrity chefs like to speak of "layering flavors" to create nuance, but heat isn't additive in the way that Wendy's is implying.  While adding more and more salt to something will indeed make it saltier, adding more and different ingredients, each of which contains some spice, doesn't have the additive effect of making the end product hotter. If you were to add more and more jalapeño peppers you would indeed have that effect, but any dish can only be as hot as its hottest ingredient, and in the case of the Jalapeño Fresco sandwich, Wendy's actually piles on certain less-hot items that serve to dilute the hot peppers.  Let's examine each individual layer in the 5-spice strata and understand the contribution it makes.

An angrily orange spiced fillet plus four additional sources of heat seem to threaten a sandwich that will pin you to the mat and make you beg for mercy.  But some of these scary additions are a little tame.

A Spicy Chicken Fillet - This is the aforementioned baseline that gets the sandwich off to a peppery start.  So far, so good.

Colby Pepper Jack - Take a look at the picture above and decide for yourself.  Do you see any prominent flecks of pepper? You don't particularly taste any either.

Red Jalapeño Infused Bun - As with the red bun of the Angriest Whopper, the bread here works more to absorb heat than contribute to it.  You can see a few red pepper bits, but they're sparsely scattered, and besides, there's a good reason why any bread has a hard time being hot.  Capsaicin, the volatile compound that attaches to the tongue's VR1 pain receptors and neurologically tricks the brain into perceiving heat-like pain, can only activate those receptors if they are free to attach, which is why raw peppers give you the hottest experience of all.  But capsaicin is soluble in both fat and starch, and any capsaicin that binds to the starch in the bun is tied up and unable to activate the tongue.

Ghost Pepper Sauce - This cheesy sauce truly is hot, but nothing like its name would suggest. Until 2011, the "ghost pepper" (the popular name for bhut jolokia) held the world record for the hottest pepper in the world on the Scoville Scale, the standard measure for expressing units of capsaicin heat.  At 350,000 Scoville units, it was 100 times hotter than a jalapeño and could literally induce a heart attack or other severe shock-induced event if eaten raw.  There's no way that there's any significant amount of ghost pepper in this fatty cheese emulsion; if there were, Wendy's would probably face lawsuits.  However, despite the capsaicin blocking properties of the Velveeta-like sauce, it manages to be about as spicy as movie-theater nacho cheese, which it pretty closely resembles.  Together with the spicy chicken fillet, we've got some pretty serious fire burning from the get-go.

Fresh Jalapeños - Again, as was the case with the Angriest Whopper, it's the plain old "boring" jalapeños that steal the show, and since these are fresh rather than the Whopper's pickled peppers, they help the sandwich live up to the "fresco" in its name.  Rough-cut, generously heaped, and as bursting with juice as if picked fresh from the field, these emerald stars light up the cheesy firmament in which they're embedded and vault the sandwich to brilliant life.

Shot through with heat-bursting green nuggets, the ghost pepper sauce oozes like lava from deep within the sandwich's molten core.

Red Onion Ties It All Together

Unmentioned until now, it is the hefty slice of red onion that makes the crucial difference in the sandwich, tilting the balance toward the natural and the fresh and cutting against the current of the manufactured and artificial (like the orange synthetic cheese) that could have easily overwhelmed it.  The essential oils and vegetal notes of the onion and the same elements in the peppers remind me somewhat of the Thai dish larb gai or perhaps a spicy ceviche. It's a far more homemade feeling than you usually get from fast food.

Conclusions

With its splendid multitude of tastes, the meaty and cheesy, the soft and the starchy, the juicy and the spicy, the sprightly and the unctuous, this power-packed delicacy raises the bar for your drive-thru forays.  It's hot enough to threaten some, but isn't more than most people can manage.  If you can handle those Thai dishes with two peppers next to them on the menu, you should love this.  Congratulations to Wendy's on pushing the envelope.

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Oreo Update: Strawberry Shortcake Oreos (and S'More!)

Are They Still Even Oreos?
The proliferation of new flavors under the Oreo banner has created a sense of mission drift in the brand, and new Strawberry Shortcake Oreos reinforce the point. When the dense, blandly sweet Crisco-creme in the middle becomes a whipped and fruity filling, and when the dense cocoa discs of the original become a sweet graham cookie, one has to ask whether the Oreo name is overleveraged.  If a strawberry shortcake cookie is desirable, is the Oreo format that best way to bring it to fruition? Or have we reverse-engineered a cookie using Oreo assumptions when a better tasting treat might have better been achieved starting with a clean slate?  We'll address all of this in our review.

Another day, another limited edition. The picture of tender cakes, juicy berries, and creamy whipped topping makes many promises. Are they ones that a crumbly cookie filled with flavored fat can keep?

A Faux-Fruit Blast

The unveiling of a new Oreo flavor is always an event at Food Kingdom offices, so this was a group tasting, with James N., Brian S., and other curious onlookers gathered round the package as we prepared to breach the cellophane.  One side note: as the photo above shows, this edition did not feature Nabisco's patented re-sealable container that allows you to peel back the top face of the package, remove a portion, and close it back up.  There doesn't seem to be a rhyme or reason behind when this super-convenient innovation is available.  In any case, as the breaking of the seal let the air escape from inside, the hopes of the crowd were similarly deflated, for the scent was of a strong synthetic strawberry, the kind you find in Hubba Bubba bubble gum or some similar juvenile frivolity. From that moment, none of the tasters really took this cookie seriously.  This shows the importance of image and market positioning, for we instinctively respond more positively to "Strawberry Shortcake Oreos" than we would to "Jolly Rancher Strawberry Oreos" which these could be just as plausibly named.

The venerable "Red 40 Lake" gives the strawberry filling its pink blush.  Note the light, whipped texture, intended to suggest whipped cream tinged with strawberry juice.

Craftsmanship Carries the Day

The above criticisms notwithstanding, there are enough thoughtful design touches to persuade me that these are not just the brainchild of a bored factory manager tweaking the standard Oreo recipe with a different artificial color and chemical flavor in search of an innovation bonus.  For instance, using graham flour in the wafers creates a more tender and crumbly texture due to a lower gluten content.  This, along with what tastes to me like some extra shortening in the dough, produces a more cake-like texture, reminiscent of the buttery crumbs at the bottom of a golden cake pan.  The creme filling is also whipped to a fluffy consistency that allows it to spread and mingle with the cookie crumbs as you munch.  When this cookie is halfway chewed, you do get the distinct impression of real strawberry shortcake, albeit one with a sprinkling of Kool-Aid powder on top.

A Chain Reaction, with Marshmallows

Apart from the modest enjoyments afforded by tasting these techno-berry delights, the ingredient list inspired us to conduct some experiments of our own.  We were all struck by the choice of graham flour in the wafers, since neither biscuits nor sponge cake traditionally use it, and it got us thinking: could strawberries and graham crackers prove a fresh and winning combination?  Might strawberry s'mores be an inspiring variation on the original?

Among the myriad combinations attempted, the strawberry banana s'more was the clear winner.

Pure strawberry s'mores actually proved not to work very well for the simple reason that you can only fit two strawberry slices inside a graham cracker sandwich before the assemblage completely falls apart.  Strawberries can only be placed on top of the marshmallow, not underneath because the strawberries give off so much juice when warmed that the bottom graham cracker gets soggy if in direct contact with the berries.  Bananas, on the other hand, give off very little liquid when heated, so the best combination of all was two slices of banana beneath the marshmallow and one strawberry slice on top.  The preferred heating method is a toaster oven or broiler because the radiant heat of both work from the outside-in, tenderizing and browning the exterior of the marshmallow while keeping the interior reasonably solid, maintaining the structural integrity of the serving.   Microwaving is certainly faster, but the microwaves immediately penetrate into the core of the marshmallow, rendering it soupy, goopy, and unstable.

Choco-banana s'mores were also tasty, but lacked the fresh sweet and sour punch of the strawberry-banana combination.

Conclusions

Strawberry Shortcake Oreos are interesting enough to be worth the $2.99 to throw them in your shopping cart.  But they also serve as an object lesson that reflecting on your food, and following those thoughts wherever they lead, is the most satisfying choice of all.