Welcome to The Human Guinea Pig, my newest brainchild in a series of side projects from my usual music fare. Remember Standards and Practices? Me neither…
In this column, my main goal is to put my body on the line and act as a human guinea pig so that you, the reader won’t have to. If I’m successful, you’ll never have to eat or drink another shitty concoction, because I can let you know ahead of time how much it sucks (or how great it is). You will gain knowledge of exactly what kinds of things the capitalist machine is trying to get you to shove down your gullet, and if you should give in or not.
That said, the focus in this edition will be the current special items that some of the most popular fast food restaurants are offering. Have you wanted to try that Fresh Toasted Chicken Parmesan Sandwich, but are a little iffy about whether or not it’s worth the 4 bucks? How about those Steak Nachos BellGrande at Taco Bell… Are they any better than the slightly cheaper ground beef permutation? These are questions that I will answer.
The views expressed in this column are solely those of the author and are not to be attributed to InsidePulse.com, Alexander Lucard, Widro, or Warren Woo. Also, most of these items were only attained from one particular location each, and may slightly differ depending on the restaurant or the motivation of the employees working therein.
Honey Chipotle Chicken Breast Sandwich (White Castle)
A touch of sweet… A touch of heat…
Price: $1.49
Calories: ~220
Fat: 8g
A large majority of people find themselves at White Castle at the end of a successful night of drinking, mostly because it’s (a) always open, and (b) Slyders, although widely known for causing gastrointestinal distress, are great drunk food. However, White Castle has been doing some interesting things with their menu lately to appeal to the choosier, more sober consumer, offering premium items such as the new and improved fish sandwich, the all-white meat chicken breast sandwich, the French Onion Cheeseburger, and Fish Nibblers, to name a few.
In keeping with that trend, the chain recently unveiled the Honey Chipotle Chicken Breast Sandwich, an all-white meat breaded chicken breast on a dusted honey wheat bun, with a slice of Monterey jack cheese, and topped off with a special honey-chipotle barbecue sauce. The sauce, as promised, has a sweet-tangy thing that really works well with the sweet honey wheat bun to make the juicy chicken breast part of an amazing composition of culinary goodness. My only qualm is that the bun isn’t toasted, as that would really hold this thing together even more divinely, since the sandwich tends to get smashed in the foil wrapper if you’re carrying out.
The Final Word:
This sandwich is quite possibly the best thing on the menu right now, and I enjoy pretty much everything at White Castle. Since they’re miniature-sized like the rest of the Castle sandwiches, you’ll probably need between 2-4 for a full meal, so if you’re a nutrition fiend, make sure to multiply the above stats accordingly. Then again, if you’re eating anything at White Castle, you’re probably not the most nutritionally savvy consumer out there.
Rating: 9
Bacon Mushroom Melt (Wendy’s)
It’s the mother of all cravings!
Price: $2.99
Calories: 560
Fat: 29g
Wendy’s, due to the fact that it is considerably less popular that McDonald’s and Burger King, has been driven to create some really intriguing sandwich ideas over the years on order to attract consumers. They are well known for using less conventional ingredients like ranch and peppercorn dressings, a vast array of cheeses, and applewood-smoked bacon to give the gluttoniest-ass glutton goose bumps.
Most of these special sandwiches come and go, being resurrected every 8-12 months, in between the occasional new creation. One such sandwich that makes a regular annual return is the Bacon Mushroom Melt. Served on a Kaiser roll, it’s a classic single patty topped with three slices of bacon and a generous dollop each of mushrooms and warm cheddar cheese sauce. According to Wendy’s, the sauce is actually cheese and mushrooms together, but you get such a mushroom explosion that I’m thinking they’re put on separately. The cheese, while reminiscent of the stuff you get for your nachos at the movie theatre, is still pretty awesome, and works really well with the other ingredients—especially the mushrooms, which, although seem to be the canned ones, are pretty tasty. It may also help that you get a shitload of them, so touting this as a Bacon “Mushroom” Melt is an appropriate assertion.
One major shortcoming of this sandwich is that it tends to fall apart, due to the fact that virtually all of the ingredients are rather soft (save for the bacon), so around halfway into the thing, it sort of implodes on itself, tending to cause a bit of a mess, not unlike Courtney Love. This problem might be alleviated by toasting the bun, which would more than likely hold it together a lot better.
The Final Word:
Unlike the proceeding item, while the Bacon Mushroom Melt can be a mess to eat, it tastes great, so that makes up for it (see also, Philly cheese steak sandwich, gyros sandwich). In fact, a relatively effective fix for that problem is to hold it in the wrapper as you eat it, so it has something to keep it together. This sandwich melts in your mouth like a Krispy Kreme doughnut, and disappears just as quickly.
Rating: 7.5
Toasted Chicken Parmesan Sub (Subway)
An Italian taste adventure!
Price: $5.69 (12-inch)
Calories: 1020
Fat: 38g
I don’t eat at Subway very often. Jared Fogel annoys the hell out of me. I don’t give a shit anymore that you lost two Jeff Fernandezs worth of weight by eating Subway and running 35 miles a day, and I don’t think anyone else does either. However, when I do go to Subway I usually get either a roast beef or a Subway Club. Last week, I was compelled to try this new chicken parmesan sandwich, as my co-workers had only good things to say about it.
Legerdemain!
The sandwich, which I got on a 12-inch loaf of Italian Herbs & Cheese bread (as I figured to be most apropos), consists of four chicken strips topped with provolone and parmesan cheeses, and covered in a special marinara sauce that is allegedly owner Fred DeLuca’s mother’s own recipe. Poor Carmela… I can only assume that nobody’s ever told you that your sauce is insufferably bland because you have one of those fiery Italian tempers and probably wouldn’t take it very well. Luckily, I have this computer to hide behind, so your sauce is insufferably bland. Maybe that’s a bit harsh… let’s say “overtly mild”. Oh yeah, and it’s watery, too. In fact, the bread was toasted, and the damned thing was still falling apart.
As far as the chicken goes, the strips are more than likely delivered to the Subway outlet frozen and are cooked in the toaster oven. The chicken on the sandwich that I had was pretty soggy by the time I got it back to work, which, however, was only about 3 minutes away. As a result, I’m not sure if they were like that originally or if they just absorbed the relatively watery sauce in that short amount of time, causing them to soften up like Mathan Erhardt’s opinion of DualDiscs. Much like the sauce, the chicken was relatively insipid, and was comparable to the chicken nuggets you got in the cafeteria in grammar school. The texture was similar, too, as they had that lumpy, microwave thing going on.
The Final Word:
I got about 75% into the sandwich when I just decided that it was too messy and not tasty enough to bother with the rest of it (since the wrapper was a mess of marinara juice, I couldn’t really wrap the sandwich in it), and I threw it away and ate a bag of chips. I should have tried the Arby’s French Dip instead.
Rating: 2
Steak Nachos BellGrande (Taco Bell)
Also available in chicken!
Price: $2.99
Calories: 740
Fat: 37g
Taco Bell, much like White Castle, tends to capitalize on the drunken folk, staying open until 4am at some locations and offering hearty, heavy food items. Once in a while, they come up with a brand new item (i.e., beef-and-potato burrito, spicy chicken taco/burrito), and other times they trick you into thinking that they’ve come up with something completely new by adding a squirt of new sauce or capitalizing on something that you could always get but was never listed verbatim on the menu. While I personally enjoy the Meximelt with steak, Taco Bell recently decided to highlight their Nachos BellGrande (the larger of the two nacho platters offered by the chain) with carne asada-style steak or grilled chicken in lieu of the standard ground beef. Since I prefer steak to chicken, that’s the one I’m going with for this review.
The foundation of the Steak Nachos BellGrande is a bed of white corn chips, first topped with refried pinto beans, then with slices of steak, nacho cheese, diced tomato, sliced scallions, and sour cream. It sounds like a real mess, and that’s exactly what it is. Much like the aforementioned Bacon Mushroom Melt, though, this nacho platter is delicious, so one can overlook the messiness, with a sufficient stockpile of napkins in toll. Taco Bell nacho cheese has a bit more kick than your run-of-the-mill movie theatre stuff, so that’s a plus, and the vegetables are always fresh.
The steak atop the nachos is awesome; it’s tender, juicy, and loaded with flavor. However, I’d like to get more than just a dozen slices of it. After all, that is the focal point of the marketing of this product. Another thing that’s always bothered me about Taco Bell’s nachos is their beans. Having grown up in a Mexican family, I’m used to beans cooked with lard, which causes them to be creamier (sort of like cottage cheese) and not as hard as Taco Bell’s (which has more of the consistency of peanut butter). Hell, my grandmother uses lard in everything in which most others would use butter, even ham sandwiches. Creamier beans would make the nachos easier to eat, as you wouldn’t be left at the end of the plate with that one big nacho that’s actually seven of them bound together by a caulk-like pile of beans. Then again, one must consider two things in this argument in that (a) creamier beans would more than likely cause the chips to get soggier quicker, and (b) Taco Bell is not real Mexican food, so they can make their beans with castor oil if they want. I don’t think any Mexicans are going to lose any sleep over it.
The Final Word:
The Steak Nachos BellGrande is delicious, but it does tend to get messy due to the plethora of ingredients involved. If not for the lack of meat and the consistency of the beans (which I won’t hold against them too much for reasons aforementioned), it would be fantastic. One more thing about this item: very often, the ingredients are not distributed very evenly, and there have been numerous times when I’ve had one side of the plate covered in just cheese while the other side is weighed down by everything else. Not a huge deal, but a factor nonetheless.
Rating: 7.5
Angus ‘Shroom & Swiss Steak Burger (Burger King)
Loaded with fire-grilled taste!
Price: $3.69
Calories: ~660
Fat: ~270g
There have been several installations in the Angus Steak Burger series since Burger King launched it a little over a year ago, and the most recent addition to the ranks of the Bacon Cheddar Ranch and the Western is the Angus ‘Shroom & Swiss Steak Burger. I’m going to review this assuming that you’ve never had one of the Angus Steak Burgers, so that I can start from scratch on my description of the meat itself.
The chain touts the Angus Steak Burger patties as being of a higher quality beef (à la a fine chopped steak that one might find at a 24-hour Hellenic-owned restaurant), and containing a super-secret special signature steak sauce of alliteration goodness, which seems more like a marinade than a sauce. The burger will more than likely be dripping with it as you unwrap it—as I have experienced virtually every time I’ve ordered one—mixing with the mayonnaise to create a watery/filmy substance that’s not the most appetizing thing. The burger doesn’t really have the distinctive taste of said sauce, instead coming off as somewhat bland, with black pepper being the most noticeable of ingredients (see also, McDonalds’ Arch Deluxe, 1996).
The burger is served on a cornmeal-dusted, split-top bun (which may actually be the best part of the sandwich), and is festooned with shredded lettuce, tomato, mayonnaise, two slices of Swiss cheese, and a rather meager offering of mushrooms. I was expecting a sandwich called the ‘Shroom & Swiss Burger to be an absolute mushroom explosion (supra Bacon Mushroom Melt), as it had a decent amount of cheese, however, it was more of a small firecracker than a full-blown explosion of fungal goodness. I can only assume that it is called the ‘Shroom burger because it only contains about half the amount of mushrooms you’d expect, so they only used half the word. Also, Burger King describes the mushrooms as “savory” and “sautéed”, but they were neither, as they tasted more like the Pennsylvania Dutch ones that I use to put on my frozen pizza.
The Final Word:
This burger was not bad, as I ate the whole thing. However, I am a glutton and frequently eat things that aren’t necessarily worthy of a cordon bleu. It works if you’re hungry, but I probably wouldn’t get it again.
Rating: 5
That does it for this debut edition of The Human Guinea Pig. Next time I’m going to put my body through more of torturous exercise, and compare and contrast several of the energy drinks that are trying to compete with Red Bull in that rapidly growing market… all in one sitting. I’m Jeff Fernandez, and my love is like bad medicine.
Cheers
-JF2k5!
