Burger King's Disappointing Halloween Whopper

This is what we could have had...

Earlier this year, bits of the internet where I hang around were going crazy over a black burger (complete with black cheese) that Burger King was selling in Japan. The "going crazy" part was how people were clamoring for BK to bring that burger over here, because why whould Japan have all the fun, dammit?

Well, in "celebration" of Halloween, Burger King did bring a bastardized version of the black burger home to the US. If they had just given us a Whopper and a cheeseburger with black buns and black cheese and left it at that, everything probably would have been fine. But no, BK did a half-assed job with this and trust me, it's more trick than treat.

...but no. We get this.

Even considering the usual vast difference between what you see in a promotional photo and what you get when you peel back the wrapper, you can see the huge difference between the original black burger and the Halloween Whopper. Flat-black bun dotted with standard-colored sesame seeds. Regular yellow cheese. And A1 Sauce, which might not be so bad if they weren't so heavy-handed with it (I'll get to that in a minute.)

This is, to be quite frank, nothing more than a standard Whopper with a colored bun and some A1 sauce. And those two features - upon which the King could have built a great specialty burger - are the sandwich's failure points.

Let's start with the bun. All the advertising BK has done touts this special black bun "infused with A1 Sauce flavor." Dammit, Burger King, you should have stuck with the Japanese squid ink coloring and left it at that. But no - you needed infused flavor. Well, thanks a lot for giving us bread that tastes like a fainter version of Beggin' Strips dog treats. Yeah. Play-Doh and smoke, exactly what I want to wrap a Whopper in.

And what is it with Burger King and A1 Sauce, anyway? They "infuse" the bun with it, and then the kitchen crew adds more when they put the burger together. And when I say "more" - holy shit, it's a good thing that the Halloween Whopper is not going to break any sales records because if it did there would be a nationwide shortage of A1 Sauce since they must use half a bottle's worth on every burger.

This is why we can't have nice things.

This is far and away the sloppiest Whopper I have ever tried to eat. There is just so damned much A1 on it that when I unwrapped it, the outside of the sandwich was coated with overflowing sauce. Even after I cut it in half for easier handling, sauce just poured out of it constantly. Pick it up, it drools A1. Take a bite, more A1 squirts out the opposite side. Put it down, A1 slowly oozes like some High-Fructose Corn Syrup lava from between every layer. I felt like I should have been wearing a Tyvek hazmat suit to keep all the spatter off me.

Hey, that must be why it's a Halloween Whopper! It bleeds like an extra in a slasher film!

Thanks to all that cheap slather, there isn't much else you can actually taste in a halloween Whopper except for the sauce. That's either good or bad, I guess, depending upon your feelings about A1.

My personal recommendation is that you skip this slop and satisfy your Burger King craving with a regular Whopper. Or, if you simply must experience the black bun, ask for them to hold the A1.

(I've read that the coloring agents BK used in the American version of the black bun partially survive the trip through the human intestinal tract and will turn your turds green. I hope this is true. It will be this sandwich's only redeeming feature.)

Hometown Buffet, Manchester CT

My wife and I were driving through Manchester, Connecticut last Friday, kinda-sorta looking for a place to have supper, when we happened to notice a Hometown Buffet. When Lynnafred was a tyke, there was a Hometown Buffet in Enfield and Friday nights were Hometown Buffet nights. The food was not horrendous, little Lynnafred could always find something she liked on the steam tables, and - best of all - it was cheap to feed a kid there (they used to charge $1 per year of an under-8-year-old kid's age. Hell of good deal.)

Even though Manchester has a myriad of dining options, we decided to eat at Hometown Buffet for the worst of all possible reasons: nostalgia. We had no idea that we would soon be having a supper that was just one small step better than eating vienna sausages right from the can, with our fingers, while standing over the kitchen sink in the dark, crying.

There's no way for me to gently segue into a description of the food here so I'll just get right to it. The front and center table has always featured the Hometown Buffet staples: Meat loaf, oven-roasted chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy, mac and cheese, baked potatoes, yeast rolls, and cornbread. Mass-market mac and cheese is far too salty for my present tastes, which is just as well because the edges were drying out and slightly darkened as though it had been made a while ago and finally made it to the table. I took a chicken wing and a small scoop of potatoes which was an immediate cause for regret. The spuds had developed a skin and a long sheet of it lifted along with scoop. No gravy for me, either, since I couldn't decide whether to take some of the thick grey part or watery brown part. The meat loaf must have been pretty good though, because there were nothing but crumbs in the pan, and as soon as more would come out it was immediately scarfed up by hungry (and probably undiscriminating) hoards. In all fairness, the rolls and cornbread were decent.

A side table had other mains - baked salmon which had a strong chemical aftertaste, some kind of whitefish (might have been haddock but it was so thoroughly cooked that I couldn't even tell if it was organic matter, let alone what species,) fried fish of similarly indeterminate origin thickly coated with a greasy batter crust.

I was just sitting down to start eating when Maryanne said, "Don't eat with that fork." It took me a couple tries, but I finally found a fork and knife that I could wipe clean enough to eat with. This hygienic lack was not confined to utensils. At the beverage station, there were various spills here and there on the counters, and straw wrappers and napkins littered the floor.

Finding something to drink was even harder than finding a clean fork. I poured a sip's worth of iced tea so I could see if it was sweetened or not. I never found out, since the tea smelled as if it were brewed from used toilet paper. "Filtered water" must have been filtered though a jug of bleach. Perhaps, though, this is a characteristic of the water in Manchester because all the water-based beverages available had that bleachy chlorine flavor hanging over every sip. Luckily, there was chocolate milk. (In the background is a view of Maryanne's plate as she attempts more or less successfully to rip her cut-resistant chicken into bite-sized pieces with a dull knife.)

I was lucky enough to score a piece of Darkly Cooked Bread Triangle. I say "lucky" because many of the children there, mistaking it for pizza, were eating it as fast as it could be brought from the kitchen.

Desserts were no better. Bizarrely, the soft-serve machine left a dangling turd of ice cream from the nozzle no matter how hard customers tried to claim every bit of the treat as it extruded from the machine. Slices of cake were dry and crusty. A pan of apple cobbler looked like it had been served by beating it with a golf club. Maryanne and I tried some kind of

cheesecake that might have been an Elmer's Glue Chiffon.

Many of the staff were completely unprofessional, loudly chatting with each other about the drinking they planned to to after work as they were setting out food at the steam tables, customers milling around them. They made no attempt to censor any of their profanity-laced language, even around the kids. (A notable exception to this was the young woman clearing plates from our table, who was pleasant, friendly, and patient even to the most difficult patron despite being responsible for busing tables across half of the dining floor. We gave her a great tip. She deserved every penny.)

Maryanne and I were actually laughing as we left the restaurant. Not because of the awesomeness of the experience, of course, but because we were astounded that an eatery widely known for it's mediocrity could stay open at such a low quality level. I guess my grandfather was right: there really is an ass for every seat.

Out of the Can: Senora Verde's Beef Tamales

The pale- and incredibly foul-looking cylinders of evil pictured above are the contents of a can of Senora Verde Beef Tamales,  directly as emptied onto a paper plate. Some of them retained their paper sleeves as the can was tipped, others slipped from them like vile giant larvae shedding their outgrown skin. They were supposedly packed in "sauce," but that proved to be merely a watery tomato-flavored bile with a thick film of bright red grease floating on top. The "sauce" was easily disposed of, but globs of the grease stuck sort of randomly to everything else (including the plate, my fingers, and the walls of the microwave when I heated up this mess at work.)

Fast and cheap beef tamales don't have to be bad. I've picked up packages of them at the dollar store that were pretty decent. But these...things...were hideous.

Despite the illustration on the label showing a thick meaty center surrounded by a layer of corn, the tamales that actually writhed from the can were much more heavily maize-based. It was difficult to tell exactly where the cornmeal stopped and the meat began, but it was immediately apparent when I cut through the center of one that the beef filling was little more than a thin line running down the middle of each flaccid cornwobble. 

Sometimes I get a product that looks terrible, but then redeems itself with an enjoyable flavor. Not so with these tamales. Eating them only made the experience worse. The texture was disgusting - slippery and about as resilient as melty gelatine - and the greasy globs that clung to everything gave a tallowy coating to the roof of my mouth. The tallow carried through in the flavor, but there were also backnotes of rancid corn and slightly "off" canner-grade beef with the overall sourness of tomato sauce that has just started to go bad.  I managed to eat two or three bites before tipping the whole pile of shit into the bin, which is two or three bites more than anyone should ever have to eat of these goddamn yellow turds.

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Review: Farmer's Pride Pickled Bologna

Late last week, I got a heads-up from Steve Wood, who writes Connecticut Museum Quest, a top-notch Connecticut blog that is about so much more than just museums. He alerted me to a new product at Ocean State Job Lot: Farmer's Pride Snack Bologna (which just so happened to be featured in OSJL's "internet coupon" selection.)

Holy shit, pickled bologna! How could I resist?

Lynnafred found the jars at our local Ocean State. She picked one up - it was the size of a largish peanut butter jar - and peered at the "bologna" within: they were in the form of huge, fat Vienna sausages (and according to the ingredient panel, they're composed of pretty much the same stuff.) The jars were plastic and sealed with soft plastic lids, and as Lynnafred looked through the brine at the bologna she said, "Eww. These are grey. Are they supposed to look like that?" After looking at a dozen other jars, and finding all of them containing somewhat greyish weiners sealed within, we concluded that the answer was probably Yes, they are supposed to look like that. The coupon said that there was a limit of 12 jars per family, but we curbed our enthusiasm and held ourselves to the purchase of a single jar which, at $1.20, seemed to be a fair price.

Let me start the actual review by saying that I can not believe that Farmer's Pride pickled bologna is a regularly-produced consumer good. Every single component of this product screams "DISPOSE OF CHEAP SHIT!!"  The jars are flimsy plastic, the lids seem to be made of the same quality plastic as imported dollar-store toys from China, the labels look like they were run off on a laser printer. Most of the jars at the store had sticky label residue clinging to the non-labeled areas, telling me that these snacks were probably rejected by the company which originally contracted them, leading the manufacturer to hastily peel the original label and rebrand them for the "remainder market" (i.e. dollar stores and job lot joints like OSJL.) And then, of course, there is the actual bologna itself:

That is one nasty-ass piece of tubesteak right there. Check out the gradations of coloring, from a kind of brownish-grey at the ends to rather pinkish in the middle. I swear I used no filtering or image manipulation to change those colors - that is exactly how they come out of the jar. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to capture the true beauty of the grey lines that run from tip to tip on the wieners, especially where the meat was in contact with the sides of the jar. These things are truly ghastly to look at.

At least when we cut into the wiener we found that the grey color doesn't go all the way through - once you get a little way into the surface, everything kind of turns pink again. I guess that means that they're okay to eat. Honestly, eyeballs are all we have to go by for safety, because there are absolutely no olfactory cues here. No scent of spices, no aroma of meat - nothing at all except the pungency of strong vinegar stabbing at our nostrils like fleets of aromatic daggers. The manufacturer (Monogram Meat Snacks LLC, USDA EST 795) could not possibly have made the brine any more unpleasantly sharp.

And the wieners are just as unpleasant to eat as they are to look at. The texture is firm and smooth, but there is little flavor beyond the powerful vinegar brine, which is so acidic that it actually produces a burning sensation in the mouth and throat. And - worst of all to me - the meat leaves a disgusting tallowy film coating the mouth and tongue. These things are grossly misnamed - they should be called "Farmer's Shame."

As with so many other oddball snacks we've tried over the years, Farmer's Pride Snack Bologna proved to be pretty popular with the dogs, though I didn't dare give them all they wanted due to the acidity of the pickle (the last thing I want to do is spend an afternoon scrubbing dog puke out of the dining room rug.)

So there you have it. Cheap, shitty, only marginally edible, and obviously close to the end of its shelf life - Look for 'em at a dollar store near you - and pass them up in favor of almost anything else you find.




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Review: J&D's Bacon Croutons

Almost two years ago, I swore I was never going to buy and review another fake-bacon-flavored product because every one of them I'd ever tried tasted more like shit than bacon. And yet, here I am again, this time with a package of J&D's Bacon Croutons.

You are probably familiar with J&D's; they're the folks who to took a cheap, smoke-flavored seasoned salt and made a fortune thanks to the genius marketing tactic of calling it "Bacon Salt" instead of the more honest "Ashtray Full of Autolyzed Yeast Salt." Then they capitalized on their success by marketing Bacon Lip Balm (which felt and tasted like campfire-tainted Vaseline), Bacon Microwave Popcorn (which tasted like smoke and baby puke), Jones Bacon Soda (probably the most vomitous Jones Soda flavor since Brussels Sprouts), and Baconnaise (an allegedly bacon-flavored mayo which no one can ever pay me enough money to put in my mouth.)

Well, they make these Bacon Croutons too, and in a fit of insanity, I bought a bag.

True to the J&D's credo there is no actual bacon in their Bacon Croutons, only the smoke flavoring, salt, spices like paprika, and of course autolyzed yeast which they rely on to remind your tastebuds of what bacon doesn't taste like.

At first bite, these croutons are not that offensive. The texture and crunch is perfect, and although they're a little salty, it's not overwhelming. The smoke, though, is very aggressive and - as is typical with everything I've ever tried by J&D's - bottom-of-the-barrel cheap-tasting. (For chrissake, J&D's, you're a real company, not two buddies mixing up crap in your garage. I'm pretty sure you can afford to develop a better-quality smoke flavoring process.) Anyway, the smokiness gets nastier and less-tolerable the more you munch, until about three croutons in none of us could stand to take another bite.

Too bad, because the taste of bacon is really awesome in salad. I just wish that there was some other way than shitty ashtray-croutons to add bacon flavor to my bowl of crunchy greens. Wouldn't it be great if it were possible to buy REAL pre-made bacon that you could just chop up and add to the salad bowl at the same time you were cutting up tomatoes and lettuce and cucumber? Or - and this is even better - if someone made real bacon that was already pre-cooked and crumbled so you could sprinkle it on stuff? Wow, that would be a dream come true! WHAT??? THESE PRODUCTS ALREADY EXIST? WELL HOLY SHIT WHY WOULD ANYONE BUY THESE SHITTY CROUTONS THEN???

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Assorted Mexican Candy

Left to right: Duvalin, Pica Fresa, Mangopers lollipops

So, the other day I made this huge mistake and bought an assortment of Mexican candy from T J Maxx.  It didn't seem like it would be such a bad idea - didn't look all that bad, and the ingredients promised spicy chile peppers!  (Yes, I have a weakness for hot spice, and the spice/sweet combo was just very appealing.)

Unfortunately, the three candies I brought home became the Trifecta of Disappointment.

Duvalin Bi Sabor Strawberry-Vanilla is advertised as a "cream candy." It comes in little tubs, with little plastic sticks to aid consumption.  The closest I can come to describing it is "cheap frosting."  It was exactly as if I had bought little sample containers of pre-made cake frosting.  This, of course, is not unheard of in North American supermarkets (Betty Crocker makes Dunkaroos, which are nothing but a small serving of cookies and a tiny tub of frosting to dunk them in. But at least there are cookies there to somewhat cut the frosting jolt.)  Knowing that Duvalin Bi Sabor is so frostingesque should tell you just about all you need to know about it.  I can't really condemn it - there are plenty of people who would just love the stuff - but I kind of expected something more along the lines of a taffy, so there ya go.

Pica Fresa are little balls of individually wrapped starch gum rolled in "hot" chili powder. They taste kind of like what you'd get if you coated Twizzlers in cayenne pepper (but took away much of the heat.)  They would have been better if they were hotter. And a little chewier.

Mangopers mango flavored lollipops were the absolute worst of the bunch, by a huge margin, given their utter horridness. They appeared to be made of mango-flavored hard candy coated in ground chile pepper, but honestly, I'll never know. The coating was so nasty - the stalest possible chile powder seemingly blended with a heavy dose of salt - that I never even made it to the candy within.  Truly bad stuff.

Never again.

When is "All Natural" NOT All Natural?

Cabot Sour Cream claims on its label to be "All Natural!" but a look at the ingredients panel tells a different story - it contains "modified corn starch, guar gum, sodium citrate, carageenan, locust bean gum."

Apologists may argue that guar gum, carageenan, and locust bean gum are all "natural" products (guar gum is an extract of the guar bean, carageenan has it's origin in seaweed, and locust bean gum comes from, well, locust beans) but no matter how you try to spin it, sodium citrate and modified corn starch are both heavily processed manufactured products.  I am not saying any of this stuff is harmful - only that it seems to me that a dairy product which is made by so many other producers out of nothing but milk, cream, and culturing enzymes should not carry an "all natural" label when it is so full of unnecessary shit that serves only as low-cost filler.

An identically-sized container of generic no-name sour cream at the same store, stocked right next to the Cabot sour cream, had no gums or dubious thickeners in it at all and was selling for less than half the price of Cabot.

It's Not Cheese, It's SHREDS.

 

Water, Food Starch, Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil, Whey, Salt, Casein and/or Caseinate, Sodium Phosphate, Sorbic Acid (as a preservative), Carrageen, Natural Flavor, Lactic Acid, Artificial Color, Powdered Cellulose to prevent caking.

I really shouldn't need to write anything more than that about these horrifying bits of shredded filth, but I will:  When listing the features of this product, they specifically say "No Melt."   

Canned Silkworm Pupa

I've eaten toasted mealworms (they had cheese powder on them and tasted like Cheetos, only made of mealworms.)  And I've eaten a cricket, inside a Cricket Lick-It lollypop (it tasted kind of like a peanut.)  Both of those examples were crunchy and not very nauseating.

However, just the thought of biting into a squishy, insect-guts-filled silkworm pupa makes me want to hurl. So I left these cans of (presumably) delicious pupa on the shelf of the Korean market.

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