Free Fries at McDonald's TOMORROW ONLY!

To celebrate National Potato Month, McDonald's restaurants in Connecticut and Western Massachusetts are offering FREE FRIES! On Friday September 12th, from 11:00 AM to 2:00 PM, just walk politely into a local Mickey D's and receive a free order of small fries.

Burger King Onion Rings Revisited

I last wrote about Burger King onion rings almost exactly a year ago. They sucked. But because I never seem to learn my goddamn lesson, there I was in Burger King last night ordering onion rings again. I couldn't help it. I really love onion rings, and the BK I was in was pushing them hard, and I thought to myself, "Self," (which is what I call myself) "Self," I said, "It's been awhile since we gave those onion rings a try. What say we give 'em one last chance?" So, even though I know full well it's not going to be the last chance really, I ordered the rings. And a tub of Zesty Sauce to go with them.

Well, guess what? Just like last time, the onion rings were okay when they were first handed over to me and then quickly deteriorated into slippery, greasy, artificial-tasting nastiness. The only thing that saved them was the Zesty dipping sauce, which I had never tried before but decided to get this time, figuring that if the rings were as bad as ever at least I'd have something to mask the shittiness.

Commercially-produced sauces labeled "Zesty" are usually not very zesty at all, but I was pleasantly surprised. Strong horseradish and hot pepper notes are prevalent - it's quite obviously a clone of the stuff that less-casual restaurants serve with "blooming onion" appetizers.

The Zesty Sauce was also pretty good for dipping BK's popcorn chicken, which is good to know because BK's Kung Pao sauce is crappy soy sauce-flavored corn syrup. Thanks to my new friend Zesty, the onion rings were a little more tolerable.  But they do still suck.

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Review: Taco Bell's Cantina Menu

Taco Bell has been making a big deal of their new "Cantina Bell" menu, which they're touting as some sort of "gourmet" version of Taco Bell.  Lynnafred and I tried it out.

The Cantina Bowl is citrus-herb marinated chicken, black beans, guacamole, roasted corn-and-pepper salsa, creamy cilantro dressing, and freshly prepared pico de gallo, served on a bed of cilantro rice. Lynnafred enjoyed it - the chicken was flavorful and tender, the salsa was well-seasoned, and the cilantro rice was relatively easy on the cilantro (a good thing for those of us who experience cilantro as overwhelmingly "soap-flavored.")

She also said they are nearly identical to the "Burrito Bowls" sold by the more upscale Chipotle Mexican Grill, at about half the price.

On the other hand, I was totally unimpressed with my Cantina Burrito, which sports the same ingredients as the bowl, except that the whole pile of shit was rolled up in a flour tortilla. It was enormous - I took a pic of it next to a standard full-sized fork to give you an idea of scale - and weighed in at about a pound of food. 

Again, the chicken is moist and flavorful, the salsa is good, the rice is mild on the soapweed aka cilantro, and even the guacamole wasn't bad, but take the whole damn mess and roll it into what amounts to a flour diaper and it's just a jumbled mass of garbage, the appeal of which is totally goddamn lost on me.

Cantina sides are decent, if a little bland. I've already mentioned the roasted corn and pepper salsa, which both Lynnafred and I enjoyed. The Pico de Gallo (pictured) was freshly prepared, but far underseasoned and dead bland. The store-made tortilla chips almost saved the day, though, with their light crispiness and fresh flavor.

For all the crowing Taco Bell is doing about having OMG Famous Latina Chef Lorena Garcia in the kitchen developing recipes, you'd think this Cantina Bell stuff would be so awesome it would knock your sombrero off. While it might be a step in a new direction for Taco Bell and their traditional faux-Mexican menu, I get the distinct impression that Chef Garcia has been putting in some pretty short days.

Review: KFC Original Recipe Bites

Seems like fast food chicken merchants just can't make enough little bite-sized things to eat.  Maybe it started with McDonald's and their Chicken McNuggets, which seems to have gone through several recipes in their long life. I don't know - but I do know that virtually everyone who sells chicken sells at least one littlebit version.

And thus we have Kentucky Fried Chicken and their Original Recipe Bites. They're pretty simple: smallish chunks of white meat coated in KFC's Original Recipe breading. Nothing fancy, and they're pretty good: moist, tender, tasty especially if you like Original Recipe, and pop-in-the-mouthable.

Because I figured everyone would want to try them, I picked up a large order of them at the local KFC, which was supposed to be a "ten-piece." I think they may fill the orders by weight or handful or something other than an actual count, though, because when I got them home there were way more than ten of them in the package. That was pretty fortunate, since everyone really liked them and they were gone in no time.

Review: Burger King's Memphis BBQ Pulled Pork Sandwich

Burger King has taken a little break from slavishly copying McDonald's McCafe beverages to introduce several new BBQ specialties, one of which is the Memphis BBQ Pulled Pork Sandwich.  I stopped in to the local BK yesterday to give it a try.

Here's what it looks like in the advertising:

Photo by Burger King

And here's what it looks like in real life:

Now, I've acknowledged before that comparing real fast food to advertising-agency-styled fast food is a cheap shot, but trust me - this sandwich is so completely disgusting that the way it looks is only the beginning of how shitty it is.

There was no meaty pile of pulled pork on a crusty split-top bun. It was a small - significantly smaller than the diameter of the bread - knot of crappy, low-quality meat on a squishy oversized burger bun.  Even though I actually looked at the contents of the sandwich when I took this picture, I still mustered up the courage to take a bite.

The pork was drenched in cheap, sticky BBQ sauce that tasted mostly of corn syrup and artificial smoke and it was the texture of shredded flannel. And worst of all, the entire interior was completely smothered in mayonnaise. So not only did the sandwich look like someone took a dump on a hamburger bun, it tasted like an overly-sweetened old washcloth sopped in slime.

For the first time in the history of Dave's Cupboard, I was unable to stomach so much as a single bite of a review subject. This heinous wet lump of filth was so horrendous that my first and only bite was instantly interrupted by my gag reflex and I spit the gnarly bolus back at the cardboard clamshell in which it was served.

On the other hand, the sweet potato shoestring fries that I got as a side were pretty good. So the visit wasn't a total loss.

Dale Earnhardt Jr Vending Machine Sandwiches

So, having neglected to bring lunch to work last week, I was forced to venture out to the lunchroom and survey the offerings in the vending machine. I found a few cans of Chef Boy R Dee (seriously) and some Kellogg's cereal cups, and multiple instances of microwaveable sandwiches bearing the "Dale Jr." trademark so familiar to NASCAR fans.

You just know that with Dale Jr.'s name and likeness on the wrapper, millions of them are going to sell regardless of the quality. And, to tell the truth, they didn't look all that appetizing sitting in the dark little pockets of the machine.  Some testing and reviewing was obviously in order here.

There were three varieties of DaleChow available for purchase, so I bought one of each and resigned myself to vending machine food for the next few days.

I found all of the sandwiches I bought to at least meet minimum standards of flavor and edibility. To be honest, I didn't have very high expectations for any of the three, so it was easy for them not to disappoint. I was, however, surprised that they actually tasted fairly decent considering what they were. 

We'll start with the appropriately-named "Double-Dog Dare," twin hot dogs in buns, topped with chili and mustard.

Chili dogs are one of my favorite lunches when they are made with high-quality natural casing franks and slow-cooked beef chili sauce. But vending machine food is more about maximizing profits than providing an optimal dining experience.

The hot dogs are really low-grade skinless franks mostly made of mechanically-separated chicken with some beef, and they taste like the cheapest generic bologna - even Vienna sausages have a better taste profile. The dogs are dressed with a line of standard yellow mustard and then covered with a thick layer of chili sauce made from spiced beef and TVP.

They actually look better in the package (above) than they do after heating (right.) The buns get really soft and squishy after they're heated, and unfortunately the hot dogs don't heat up quite enough by the time the buns are almost mushy.

Surprisingly enough, though, the chili sauce has a fairly decent flavor. While spicy, it isn't too hot and on it's own (or on a better quality hot do) it wouldn't be too bad. Luckily, this halfway decent chili sauce masks the nasty bologna flavor of the hot dogs. The mustard is hardly noticeable, although I guess it's applied unevenly, because every now and then a bit of a hot dog provides a blast of mustard flavor, which isn't really compatible with the chili.

I just can't resist showing you this cross-section. That mustard really looks sick, but the part that really concerned me was the hot dog. I never did figure out what all those little white bits were.

Overall, I give the Double-Dog Dare a grade of 5 on a 1-to-10 scale: Not entirely horrible, but not my first choice for lunch.

Next up is the Dale Jr. Cheeseburger.

This is a big and substantial lunch, weighing in at over nine ounces (which is big for a vending machine sandwich.)  It seems to be pretty standard - sesame seed bun, a patty which is advertised to be "made with 100% BEEF," cheese, ketchup, mustard, and pickles.  The ingredient panel, though, reveals that the 100% beef is "seasoned" with hydrolyzed soy protein - a source of filler as well as MSG - and is flavored with beef broth.

Freshly out of the microwave, lifting the lid on the burger reveals just what kind of lunchtime nightmare it really is. The processed cheese turns into a viscous pool which collects in the artificial "grill lines" which have been etched into the surface of the pale grey burger. What I didn't show was that the bottom surface of the sandwich was coated in a thin, sticky film of ketchup and mustard; it must have spilled or been misapplied during manfacture, and it resulted in a messy, hard-to-hold product.  It was icky enough that I decided to cut the burger in half to make it easier to hold and eat.

That proved to be very entertaining. The pickles, which were hidden under the patty between the burger and the bun, were highly resistant to cutting. As I sliced through the sandwich, the blade (which was gliding effortlessly through the meat and bread) "caught" on the pickles and dragged them out against the blade. I popped one into my mouth and found that it seemed to be made of pale green plastic with a tougher, thicker green plastic rim. I could barely chew it

As you might imagine, this sandwich, like the hot dogs, was less than ideal. The cheese was lowest-common-denominator cheap American, and the burger tasted more like salt and cheap beef bouillon than it did like real beef. The complete flavor profile was something like what a food additive corporation would come up with if asked to make "cheeseburger flavor" for addition to other things. This product gets a 4 on a 1-to-ten scale. Edible, but it will never be a first choice.

Since I seem to be arranging these things in decending order of goodness, I suppose it's fitting that I finish off by describing the Dale Jr. BBQ Pork Sandwich.

It's basically a NASCAR-themed version of McDonald's McRib sandwich: a pork patty formed into a crude representation of a tiny rack of spare ribs, dressed with BBQ sauce and served on a club roll.

The sauce is thick and sweet and wet and makes the sandwich a little harder to handle than it might be, but it had a fairly good flavor which is similar to many inexpensive bottled barbecue sauces.

The patty is very mild with any pork flavor very efficiently subsumed by the sauce. I could handle that. It was harder to handle the texture - chewy, gristly, kind of lumpy, with a lot of what I earnestly hoped was cartilage. This pork patty was so inferior to anything I'd ever had under any other brand that I was surprised that any actual person would put their real name on the packaging. Dale, dude, talk to these guys. That's your [highly stylized and probably trademarked] signature on the cellophane - have you no pride?

If you're hungry - really hungry - the BBQ Pork Sandwich will probably score a 4 on a 1-to10 scale. But since I have some standards (and a stash of Cup-A-Soup in my desk drawer for emergency lunchtime hunger) I can't give it more than a 3.

McDonald's New Bakery Items

McDonald's is stepping up the fast food wars with a shot aimed squarely at chain coffee shops: they've introduced new bakery items. In the past, stopping at McDonald's for a coffee has been pretty much coffee only, since Mickey D's didn't offer anything other than their pies that would really go with a good cup of joe. That's changed now that there are five new baked goods on the menu. All of them are very good and I can see them appealing to people who want a little something with their coffee - and maybe even tempting people away from the local Starbucks or Dunkie's.

I recently stopped by the local McDonald's and bought one of each of the new bakery items to give them a try. I was impressed.

Multi-Grain Berry Muffins - Moist and delicious, these are topped with mixed whole grains and studded with blueberries and cranberries (whole, not chopped.) There are berries in every bite, which is pretty awesome. I found the muffin tops to be a bit tough, but that's probably due to all those whole grains up there.

Blueberry Muffins are similarly delicious. They're a bit dryer than the Multi-Grain version, but still moist and mouthwatering. They're topped with a brown sugar crumble, and once again there are berries in every bite. I really can't say anything bad about them.

The Cheese Danish is outstanding, with  flaky, buttery croissant-like crust wrapped around a sweetened cheese filling. It might be my favorite of the bunch.

Vanilla Bean Mini-Scones - I have mixed feelings about these. I liked the scones themselves; they were like a slightly moister shortbread, with a fantastic vanilla flavor and a tender crumb that practically melts in your mouth.

On the other hand, each of them is covered with an icing glaze, which I really didn't care for (I thought it was over-the-top for such a delicious and simple pastry.)  Lynnafred, however, tells me that every American scone she's ever eaten has had icing and that people are going to expect icing on their scones. Fair enough, but still, WTF America? Icing on your scones?

Banana Bread - Moist and scrumptious, with just the right blend of spices to compliment the banana. This was as good as any banana bread I've ever had (except for my stepdaughter Jamie's, which is so good that other sweet quickbreads bow to it and call it Master.)

There is something to keep in mind when you're ordering these treats to go along with your coffee: You are not going to find massive portions here.  You know how some bakery and supermarket muffins are so damn big you can feed a family of six with them? That's not going to happen at McDonald's. The muffins are normal sized - that is, about the same size as the muffins you will get from your very own cupcake tins in your kitchen. The mini-scones are about the diameter of a silver dollar (which is why you get three of them.) The banana bread comes to you in a thick slice of about the dimensions of a standard loaf tin. In other words, you get portion sizes that I consider to be just right. It's kind of refreshing, actually, to see a big company like McDonald's making such an obvious effort to be normal.  I hope that this portioning is accepted by a public which has been conditioned to think a 20-ounce soft drink is a normal size, that a muffin should be able to fill a shopping bag, and that bagels should be eight inches in diameter. 

Anyway, enough ranting. McDonald's bakery items are delicious, and worth a try.

Review: Arby's Fish Sandwich

I don't like Arby's. I haven't liked them since they stopped using whole beef roasts for their sandwiches (they use some kind of strange oval-shaped roast-like thing that they make by gluing various chunks of beef together. Eww.)

Anyway, I would never even give them a thought at lunch time if it weren't for the big signs in the front windows of the local Arby's advertising two fish sandwiches for five dollars, which is a decent deal.  The signs caught Maryanne's eye as we drove by yesterday, and it was lunch time, and Maryanne said, "Let's get that fish sandwich deal from Arby's for lunch."

Arby's has been advertising that they have "the best fish sandwich in the business." I am astonished to find myself agreeing with them. Their fish sandwich is pretty awesome. It's a fairly large patty, rather oddly shaped into an irregular pentagon. There is shredded iceberg lettuce - not too much, and obligatory tartar sauce - not too much. The fish had a very pleasant crunchy coating and the whole thing was served on a soft sesame roll. And I'm certainly not going to complain about the price, since the two of us each got a sandwich for that five-dollar bill.

Props also to Arby's for their curly fries and their mozzarella sticks, two more menu items which were very good and very fairly priced.

I would probably go to Arby's for their fish sandwich again, even if it were the regular price. But it won't be at the Arby's in my hometown.

You see, the Arby's in Enfield (right off I-91's Exit 48) is usually deserted. The half-mile stretch of Elm Street in town is home to a bunch of fast-food and casual-dining restaurants: Arby's, McDonalds, Burger King, Wendy's, Denny's, Friendly's, and Dunkin Donuts are all within eyeball range of each other. McDonald's, Arby's, and Burger King are right in a row, and Arby's regularly gets its ass kicked in terms of sales. Even at the busiest lunch and dinner hours when parking lots are full and long lines of cars wind around through the drive-thrus, Arby's drive-thru is empty and its parking lot barren. I finally found out why on Friday when we stopped for the fish:  The staff doesn't seem to know what's going on.

I don't understand how I can be at a fast food place with only two other customers and still have to wait over twenty minutes for two fish sandwiches, one medium curly fries, and one small order of mozzarella sticks. The manager and his employees seemed competent and intelligent enough, and the young man taking our order at the register was efficient and enthusiastic. And yet, there we were, waiting. And waiting. With our feet sticking to the floor (kind of disgusting, and another real anomaly, since the rest of the place seemed exceptionally clean.)

So, thumbs-up for Arby's fish sandwich, and thumbs-down for Arby's the restaurant (at least the one in Enfield.)

McDonald's Sausage McMuffin with Egg AND BACON

I noticed a smallish sign dangling from the menu display at my local McDonald's last week:  Add Bacon To Any Sandwich: 99 Cents. That has some serious potential for dietary abuse. Imagine, if you will, a Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese and Bacon.

Though I rarely eat anything other than breakfast at McDonald's, that sign was still highly relevant to my interests.  So this morning, when I stopped to pick up the best breakfast sandwich on the planet, a Sausage McMuffin With Egg, I decided to BACONIZE IT.  

"Sausage McMuffin with Egg, please.  And add bacon to it."

The woman behind the counter looked a little surprised.  "You want to add bacon to that? Really?"

"Yes," I replied. "I'm crazy. Please do it or I will stand here and bark like a dog."

She laughed and keyed the order in.

I did not think it possible to improve upon a Sausage McMuffin with Egg.  I was wrong. This sandwich was BORN TO BEAR BACON. The smoky umami of the bacon pairs perfectly with the egg, of course, but also highlights and enriches the already-outstanding flavor of the sausage.  If you already like Sausage McMuffins with Egg, you should add bacon to it at least once to experience this awesomeness for yourself.

And McDonald's, I say to you: Offer a Sausage McMuffin With Bacon And Egg as a regular menu item. It's amazing (and I don't ever use that word lightly because it's trite and overplayed.) Just remember it was my idea and I'll expect at least a sweetly-loaded Arch Card for my troubles.

McDonald's Brings Back The McRib

Pining for the pseudoporky deliciousness that is the McDonald's McRib sandwich? You can now satisfy that longing: McDonald's has announced that the McRib is coming back for another limited engagement. It will be available from now until December 31, which is pretty cool because that means McRIBS FOR THANKSGIVING DINNER.

Props to Leeanne Griffin at ctnow.com's A LaCarte page for the initial heads-up.


Correction:  My original information was incorrect - McRibs will only be around until mid-November.  Sadly, that means you'll be stuck making turkey again for Thanksgiving.  Sorry for getting your hopes up.

Burger King Onion Rings

Burger King's onion rings are on their "value menu" for a buck. They'd be too expensive at half of that.

Right out of the fryer, they're tolerable I guess, but the second they start cooling down the quality starts dropping sharply. They have a slippery mouthfeel, they have an artificial salt/onion powder flavor, and the grease coats the inside of the mouth.  

I can't figure out why they're so damn bad.  They're made from real sliced onions as far as I can tell, and they've got a fairly standard crumb coating. And yet, they're far and away the worst thing on the menu.

What's worse, I already knew all of that when I ordered them, so I have no one but myself to blame for giving them a second chance.

Subway's Pulled Pork Sandwich

Photo by Subway

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Subway BBQ Pulled Pork Edition.

The Good:

Close examination of the pulled pork reveals that it is actual slow-cooked pulled pork, fairly juicy. Even when not dressed with the barbecue sauce (I got it on the side) it had a bit of smokiness (not that I believe for a minute that Subway's little tubs of commissary-pulled pork are done in a pit.)

Subway's bread is decent. Pulled pork should be served on good soft rolls and Subway delivers.

The Bad:

That barbecue sauce is totally generic. Cloyingly sweet (thank you, high-fructose corn syrup) with bottled smoke and a limited amount of spices lending flavor. It tastes like every other cheap fast-food barbecue sauce you've ever had.  McDonalds McRib? Gotcha. Burger King "barbecue" dipping sauce? Yeah. Wendy's whatever-the-hell-completely-forgettable-BBQ-crap-they've-done? Tastes just like it.

The Ugly:

If you like a dab of pulled pork with a metric ton of lettuce and onions to make the sandwich look big, this is the lunch for you. Subway's photo ads are the biggest liars in fast food marketing. And really, every time I've been to a good BBQ joint, my pulled pork sandwich has had nothing on it but decent sauce and some sweet bread-and-butter pickles on top. Lettuce and dill pickles? WTF, Subway?

For an emergency BBQ fix, Subway's got you covered. Tell them to leave off the lettuce and dill pickles and you can almost make believe that you're at a real BBQ place, if real BBQ places used the cheapest sauce they could scrounge.

Burger King Minis

Hey, look! Burger King has little tiny burgers again! These are, essentially, the very same small pull-apart burgers that the chain has been selling on and off since the mid-1980's when they were called "Burger Bundles" and sold in sets of two for 89 cents.  They've also been sold as "Burger Buddies" in the early 1990's, and most recently as "Burger Shots" in the late aughts.

Back when I reviewed "Burger Shots" three years ago, I said I couldn't understand why BK can't seem to make a success of them. They're just miniature versions of their standard flame-broiled cheeseburger. Everything I said about them then is still true today - delicious, would be great for a few kids to share a box, and a pile of them at a party would be pretty cool. I think the biggest problem Burger King has with them is people incessantly compare them to White Castle sliders.  Minis are not sliders. They don't pretend to be. They don't taste anything like sliders; they taste like what they are: little replicas of Burger King cheeseburgers.

New to the lineup this time we find Chicken Minis, small breaded white-meat chicken patties dropped on the buns with mayo and pickles.  I'm not sure I like these as well as the burgers. The breading outweighs the chicken, for one thing, and even though the seasoning is decent, plopping a big-ass slice of pickle on top just overpowers it. The taste isn't bad once the pickle is gone, but they're just too bready for me.

Are Minis going to be around for awhile? Who knows - given BK's track record with miniaturization, I wouldn't bet on a longer run than about six months or so. If I were the Burger King's Prime Minister or Grand Vizier or BFF or whatever, I would tell him to just ditch the little bastards once and for all. They've never been successful enough to earn a place on the permanent menu, and eventually the marketing department is going to run out of descriptive names for small sandwiches containing 1-ounce meat patties.

Or maybe not.

Back of House at McDonald's

Longtime readers here at Dave's Cupboard know that I'm a fan of McDonald's breakfast offerings. I don't think any fast-food company even comes close to Mickey D's when it comes to breakfast sandwiches. If I were King of the World, I'd give a knighthood to the dude who invented the Sausage McMuffin with Egg.

So, when I was invited to a "behind-the-scenes" blog event to tour a local McDonald's restaurant at breakfast time to see for myself what's involved with getting an Egg McMuffin from the griddle to the customer, I jumped at the chance.  

Before I start though, there's a few things you should know.  We were invited to the tour by Charlene Durham, an account supervisor with Cronin & Company LLC, the PR firm for the Connecticut and Western Massachusetts McDonald's Owner/Operator Association.  And at the end of the tour and presentation, Lynnafred and I were each given a tote bag containing McSwag like promotional t-shirts, a notepad and pen, coupons for Mickey D's oatmeal, and a $10 Arch Card. (The tote bags in particular are very cool - the "fabrics" they're made of are former McDonald's advertising banners, a great way to recycle that tough and durable material.)

Okay.  Now that the disclaimer is out of the way, on with the tour, which we attended with fellow bloggers Julie Kieras who writes A Year With Mom And Dad, and Cheryl Budge, whose eponymous blog can be found at cherylbudge.com.

There were two purposes to the tour: One was to highlight the nutritional features of breakfast at McDonald's, and the other was to show via a "backstage tour" how a typical McDonald's operates.  To make this post a little more manageable, I'll break it up into two sections as well. We'll start with breakfast part and move on later to the tour.

As I've said before, a McDonald's breakfast sandwich seems to me to be a perfectly reasonable way to start the day.  When I eat breakfast at home (usually on the weekend) it's normally two eggs, toast or an English muffin, and a few slices of bacon or a couple of sausages. That's basically the same thing that you'd find in an Egg McMuffin or a Sausage McMuffin with Egg.

What I didn't know was that a standard Egg McMuffin only has 300 calories and 12g of fat. And if you leave off the cheese like I do (because I'm not all that crazy about the taste of eggs and cheese together) you can trim that down to 250 calories and 8.5g of fat. Seriously, that's a pretty light breakfast.

My beloved Sausage McMuffin Wtih Egg comes out a little less trim, though, with 450 calories and 27g of fat in it's full, cheesy form (400 calories and 24 g fat with the cheese omitted.) Still, that compares favorably with the homemade breakfast I outlined.

As part of our tour, nutritionist Nancy Dell pointed out other McDonald's breakfast offerings that are light and reasonably healthy, like the Fruit 'n' Yogurt Parfait at 160 calories, and the Fruit & Maple Oatmeal with 290 calories.

All of my reviews of McDonald's stuff have focused on how they taste and not their nutritional profile.  I don't really see that changing significantly in the future, but it was interesting to find out that the only fast food breakfasts I really like aren't as horrible for you as the shrill looneys like to claim.

So on to the tour.

Lynnafred and I had never been behind the scenes at a McDonald's restaurant before, so we were both looking forward to this. We were there as much for the curiosity factor as anything else, but as it turned out the tour was both interesting and fun - interesting because we found out a lot about what makes a typical McDonald's franchise tick, and fun because we were encouraged to go hands-on with some of the equipment.

We started off by meeting Keith Santacroce, the owner/operator of the McDonald's restaurant in New Britain where we met - one of several franchises he owns and which he operates with the help of his family.  He takes a great deal of pride in both his own restaurants and the McDonald's organization in general and his enthusiasm is pretty infectious.

One of the goals of the tour was to show off new products like their Strawberry-Banana and Wild Berry Smoothies, and the smoothie machine was the first stop on our tour.  I'd actually reviewed them back in September 2010, but it was very cool to see the process up close and personal. The equipment itself is pretty bad-assed. The top part houses the control panel, a niche for the blender, and a water spout upon which the used blender cup is inverted; the spout then jets hot water into the cup to clean it and ready it for the next smoothie.  The bottom part, which you can see in the picture to the left, has compartment holding various ingredients - one slot for the yogurt, for example, and others for the fruit ingredients like the berry mixture, banana puree, and strawberries. It's all quite efficient - the machine automatically measures the portions and dispenses them.  All the operator has to do is push a few buttons to select the product and the size.  The machine drops the ingredients and the ice into the blender container and whips everything into frozen deliciousness, and the machine operator just pours it into a cup and hands it over to the customer.  It takes just seconds to whip up a perfect smoothie, and the results are absolutely consistent every time.

It's so easy even a middle-aged
food blogger can do it!

Each of us on the tour had the opportunity to make a smoothie or a frozen strawberry lemonade for ourselves, and there was a lot of laughter as we fumbled with the simple controls of the machine.  The smoothies are every bit as delicious as they were when I first tasted them, but they're still a bit on the sweet side for me, though they're primarily fruit, yogurt and ice with a little sugar added.  (No high-fructose corn syrup here - thanks, McDonald's.)

Naturally, since we were at McDonald's at breakfast time, we were also shown what was involved in making Egg McMuffins.  One of the things that makes Mickey D's stand out above other fast food places at breakfast is their use of freshly cooked whole eggs - there aren't any pre-sliced, pre-cooked slices of "egg product" like you find at Dunkin' Donuts. 

Fresh whole eggs  are cooked eight at a time in specially-made egg rings.  After the eggs are cracked into the rings, they're covered with a rectangular lid and a small amount of water is added. Steam cooks the tops of the eggs while the griddle fries the bottom, so they fully cook without having to be turned.

I asked Keith how his crew knows how much food to prepare at any given time, since the cooked eggs are held warm in anticipation of an order for a very limited time before being discarded. He explained that they reduce waste by using a continual analysis of food sales. Every day, a chart is printed for each cooking station showing a cooking schedule - in this case, what time of the morning any number of eggs should get started on the griddle. The appropriate charts (one of which is barely visible in the picture here at the top center) are posted at each cooking station.  "It's not a flawless solution," Keith told me, "There will always be some waste.  But this system holds it down to a minimum."

The cooked eggs are held in a warming cabinet for just 12 minutes before being tossed (you can see the importance of "just-in-time" production here) along with the sliced Canadian bacon and lightly toasted English muffins. Everything is ready to assemble at the time a customer places an order.  The standard deadline for preparing an Egg McMuffin, from the time the order is posted to the time it's sent to the front to the customer, is 35 seconds. Lynnafred volunteered to put together a couple of McMuffins for us.

Uniform tomato slices

We also had a tour of the restaurant's walk-in refrigerator/freezer unit. The extraordinary part about a McDonald's walk-in is its ordinariness.  I was astounded by the volume of fresh ingredients on hand - the turnover must be incredible - but when it comes right down to it, the Mickey D's walk-in is like just about every other restaurant's walk-in.  Fresh stuff is brought in semi-prepared - the salads, for example, are pre-cut and pre-mixed and packed in food-service sized bags and tomato slices for the burgers are all a uniform size because they are shipped pre-sliced in long trays of similar-gauge slices - and this is no different from the way many other restaurants buy vegetables.  The boxes in which the bags are shipped are also clearly and prominently marked with sell-by dates to be sure that the stock is always fresh.

In the freezer section, we found boxes of french fries, hash browns, and meat patties. McDonald's ships all of their patties frozen, saying that they are better able to maintain quality that way.  But like the eggs in the Egg McMuffins, burgers are cooked in the restaurant and held for a few minutes warm so sandwiches can be assembled to order.  Back when I was a kid, the local McDonald's would have big piles of burgers waiting under heat lamps, pre-cooked in anticipation of a lunchtime rush, but those days are gone forever.

By the end of the tour, Lynnafred and I were fairly impressed by the efficiency of the operation and by the quality of the ingredients. I'm more convinced than ever that the best fast food breakfast is found under the Golden Arches. And while they're still not my top choice for a cheeseburger (sorry, Ronald) I give them credit for living up to their promise of fast, fresh service using top-quality ingredients.

Mooyah Burgers And Fries

Mooyah Burgers and Fries, a relatively new burger franchise that is kind of a weak imitation of Five Guys, just opened in Hartford, in the Food Court at State House Square.  Lynnafred and I checked them out for lunch today.  

We got there a little after noon and the line was about 25 people deep.  It took us about half an hour to move through the line. This was not the fault of the people taking orders - Mooyah had two registers going and the friendly folks ringing up orders were moving customers through as quickly as they could.

If you've ever been to Five Guys, you'll find Mooyah quite familiar.  Mooyah isn't even subtle about aping practically everything about that other red-shirted hamburger joint, so for me to point out every little detail would get tiresome.  Let's skip right to the food.

Left to right: Mooyah Burger, regular fries, "shake", another Mooyah Burger in front of a large Coke Zero.

The first thing Lynnafred and I noticed was that the burgers are actually smaller than other "premium" fast food burgers.  They look huge - like Five Guys or Red Robin huge - but they're not.  Mooyah uses smaller buns than the other guys, so their generously-sized burgers look more massive than they really are.  Clever, eh?  Until you go to pick up that sloppy-ass pile of grease and melted cheese and the whole thing slides around inside the bun as you try to grip and bite it,  and it plops into your lap.

Mooyah's fries are completely unremarkable.  Have you had  unpeeled potatoes cut into strips and fried before? Yeah me too. Most of the time they haven't been as soggy at the ones at Mooyah, though. And even Wendy's has mostly long, intact fries dusted with sea salt.  We got a cup of little fragments that were seasoned with disappointment and broken dreams.

Lynnafred liked her Oreo shake, though it was in fact soft-serve ice cream over a mound of crushed cookies and hit with the stick blender until still not soft enough to drink. She ended up eating it with a spoon since the straws provided were so small in diameter that they proved impossible to use.

If I were a "ratings" kinda guy, I'd give Mooyah about a five out of ten.  But I'm not, so I'll just say that I might eat there again if I got a flat tire right in front of them, at lunch time, and had to wait an hour for the tow truck, and Burger King were more than a fifteen minute walk away.

Taco Bell's new Beefy Melt Burrito

I tried Taco Bell's new Beefy Melt Burrito last night and I have to say this is some seriously underwhelming stuff.

It sounds promising enough - seasoned beef, seasoned rice, three-cheese blend and sour cream rolled up in a flour tortilla - but it's so totally "meh."

Nothing looks as perfect as the publicity shots, so it's no surprise that burrito wasn't food-glamor-gorgeous. Taste is much more important here. Unfortunately, the Beefy Melt Burrito fails to deliver.

The overall taste is okay, in that familiar Taco Bell way, but there's nothing new or different here. No flavors really stand out (actually, the mildly-flavored sour cream got completely swallowed up and lost by the meat seasonings and cheese) and the texture added by the rice is kind of strange but not unpleasant.

So, there you have it.  Taco Bell's new menu addition will adequately postpone your next meal by temporarily quelling your hunger.  Yeah, that's the best I can do. I've had flavored oatmeal that was more exciting.

Oh, there is one more thing: Don't unroll it to check out what's inside unless you enjoy looking at things that appear to have been used for asswipery.

Burger King's New Chicken Tenders

For quite a while now, Burger King's chicken nuggety-things have been vaguely crown shaped, mostly non-descript breaded chicken pulp.  Other than shaping them like crowns,  it never seemed like BK was putting much effort into them. No one really cared, because BK didn't put much marketing into them either as they concentrated on selling burgers and sending the King out to spook people with his creepiness.

And I think people still wouldn't care about Burger King's Chicken Tenders if BK hadn't gone around pointing at them and yelling about how great the New And Improved Chicken Tenders are.  Thing is, they're not all that "new and improved," they're just "different from how they were."

It's clear that BK is trying to mimic McDonald's Chicken McNuggets with their new Tenders. They've given up the sorta-crown in favor of the slightly randomized blobtangle shape Mickey D's has used forever. BK and McDonald's both can call it "white meat" all they want. There are a lot of inferior places on the top end of a bird where you can find "white meat," and because the Tenders are made with chopped and formed chicken, I'd say chances are pretty good that both the King and the Clown are already familiar with some of those places.

Both products share that "kind-of-like-chicken-but-more-like-bouillon" flavor that lots of fast-food chopped/formed chicken has, and there are other similarities to the McNugget as well. The Chicken Tenders are drier and less spongy in texture than their McDonald's counterpart, but the coating is quite similar: The seasoning seems to be (lots of) salt, a little pepper, and that's it.  Burger King really isn't trying all that hard here.

I should probably also mention the sauces that are available, but they're every bit as "meh" as the chicken.  There's generic "Ranch," Burger King's standard "BBQ Sauce" (cheap, smoke-flavored corn syrup), "Sweet and Sour" (not even as good as those little packets the Chinese take-out tosses into your bag by the handful), "Zesty" (a completely WTF flavor that defies definition - also, it's orange), "Buffalo" without the heat, and "Honey Mustard" (like dollar-store honey mustard poured right out of the jar.) It's like Burger King was going out of their way to be unremarkable.

McDonald's Shakes are Looking Fine

Well, here's yet another kinda cool thing that I seem to be "last on the block" to know about:  McDonald's shakes have this cool new look.

In my defense, I really don't order shakes all that much in the winter.  Most of my McD's visits during the Months of Darkness are morning stops for coffee and Sausage McMuffins With Egg, the most awesome breakfast sandwich ever created.

But late the other night, Lynnafred and I and my stepdaughter Jamie were watching cheesy old movies on TV and I had this sudden urge. "You know what I'd really like right now?" I asked.

"Yeah, a milkshake," Lynnafred replied with creepy accuracy.

And so, I was off to the McDonald's (literally) around the corner to pick up some shakes: Shamrock for me, vanilla for Lynnafred, and chocolate for Jamie.

Having grown up with shakes being served in the tall paper cups, I was surprised to find that shakes have been promoted to McCafe items, served in the upscale clear plastic cups, and are now topped with opt-in whipped cream and a cherry.  Well, it was opt-in at the Mickey D's near me, where the friendly Burger Meister asked if I wanted them added before just blindly topping them up.

Tossing the shakes into the McCafe lineup was probably a good idea for McDonald's. The presentation is nice, and seeing the colors of the shake through the cup makes it easy on a big order to get the right shake to the right person. I think next time, though, I'm going to leave off the whipped cream and cherry. As you can see in the picture, it's a lot less impressive-looking after the drive home than it is when it's slid across the counter.  Also, it adds very little in the way of flavor or texture to the drink, so it seems like a kind of pointless little indulgence that just boosts the calorie count of the total. (Yes, I know the 16-ounce McCafe shake has 880 calories. It's a very occasional treat, and when I do splurge on it, I see no problem with asking them to leave off the whipped-cream part of the calories.)

Oh, and BTW, it was totally bitchen to finally get a Shamrock Shake after having craved one for like a month.  They're just as awesome as I remember them as a kid.  I noticed that Uncle O'Grimacy, former Shamrock Shake spokesman and Irish Ambassador to McDonaldland, was nowhere to be found.  Later I discovered he's been moonlighting over at Mucinex.

Don't believe me? See for yourself.

Dunkin Donuts Big n Toasty

Photo by Dunkin' Donuts

Even though Dunkin' Donuts shops are all over the place (there are four of them in my hometown alone, for example) it might be a little hard for you to find their new Big N' Toasty breakfast sandwich. When I walked into the Dunkies around the corner from my house this morning at 7:00 to order one, the pleasant young lady behind the counter said, "You're just in time - we're just about sold out, and our delivery hasn't gotten here yet."  Apparently, Big N' Toasties are hugely popular, with many DD locations running out of them long before the morning rush is over. Looking at DD's promotional photo, it's easy to see why the sandwich is making such a splash - the A La Carte blog at CTnow.com remarked that with it's big golden slices of Texas Toast and stylized arrangement of bacon and cheese, the Big N' Toasty looked more like an offering from the Sonic menu than something available at Dunkies (home of the flavorless and remarkably unsatisfying egg-white flatbread sandwiches.)

That the actual sandwich doesn't quite live up to the gorgeously styled publicity shots isn't a big surprise - the meme of "fast food not looking like the ads" has been done to death and it's not even blogworthy anymore - but for all the petty differences, this is actually a fairly hearty but not at all overwhelming breakfast. Two small eggs over hard, four short strips of decent bacon, a slice of standard-issue Fast Food Orange Cheese and, of course, two thick slices of Texas Toast. If I were to have a quibble at all, it would be about the size of the "four strips" of bacon, which are really more like two strips cut in half.

Seriously, the promos and the media hype around the Big N' Toasty made me anticipate a sandwich so big that I thought I might be better off sharing it with someone. But the actual sandwich isn't anywhere near the massive OMG BREAKFAST FEAST I was led to expect. Rather, it was much more an appropriately-sized brekkie which is approximately the same size as one I'd be likely to eat on a weekend morning (egg, toast, couple strips of bacon.)  The difference here is that the toast is somewhat thicker and the eggs somewhat smaller than what I'd make at home.

No, really, the eggs are small. Look how thin they are, stacked on one another in this cross section.  Even the yolks are thin.  You know what?  With their perfectly-circlular eggs featuring perfectly-centered yolks and perfectly uniform thickness, it would not surprise me one bit if Dunkie's isn't using real cracked-from-the-shell eggs at all, but a factory-extruded egg product, pre-cooked in cylinders and then cut into uniform slices for reheating at point of sale. No shit, that is an actual food service item.  Why has no one else noticed this?? And as long as I'm asking rhetorical questions:  How is Dunkin' Donuts managing to fit 580 calories into this sandwich?

So, bottom line:  Weird eggs notwithstanding, a decent breakfast at a fair price, and it held me over well until lunch. Dunkin' Donuts might be onto something here.