Eating off the Hill: McDonald's Chicken Big Mac a bland sloppy mess

While I consider it my mission to chronicle the fast food chicken sandwich wars, I knew going in that the limited-time stunt sammy from McDonald's, the Chicken Big Mac, would not be a worthy entry. But in the interests of science, I brought one back to the office the other day. And it managed to fail to meet my zero expectations.

I should confess, I've never been a Big Mac fan. I've always been all about the quarter pounder with cheese -- which, in France, they call a royale with cheese. Why they don't call it a royale avec fromage I don't know. Move on already. And I've never had a burger and thought, you know what this needs? More bun! Like really.

But anyway, try the Chicken Big Mac I did -- I did hold the pickles and, thankfully, the special order did not upset them. Besides, there was plenty of pickle taste in the Big Mac sauce.

In short, it was a bland and sloppy mess that after a few bites was a real challenge to eat. Between the heavy sauce and the half a head of lettuce shred, the patties were quickly slip-sliding around. I like to eat an orderly sandwich, without my patty to bun ratio getting out of whack.

And the patties. They seemed to be created for this sandwich, which is an usual fast food move. Taco Bell has perfected the supply chain-friendly practice of using the same dozen ingredients in one hundred different ways. But not McDonald's, it seems.

The McChicken or the fancier fillets would probably too big to replicate the Big Mac esthetic, but the junior chicken patties could have worked. And being a bit peppery would have had more taste than the bland new patties they developed.

I will not be having this sandwich again. Back to the royale with cheese for me.

For the record, God tier chicken sammy is still the spicy chicken sandwich from Popeye's. I've had it several times since that review fresh in store and it is amazing.

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Eating on the road: Penny's Hot Chicken in Toronto

 As chronicled previously, Nashville Hot Chicken is all the rage these days. Very on trend. And when delivered in chicken sandwich form it ticks several boxes for me. So finding myself in Toronto over the lunching hour recently, some googling brought me to Penny's Hot Chicken near Yonge Dundas Square.

It's actually a few blocks North of Dundas, on Yonge, in kind of a mini food court with several other restaurants with minimal seating; an interesting concept to save on downtown rent and seems designed to cater more to the take-out office worker and Uber Eats crowd than dine-in customers.

Still, a friend and I found a table at the back and went to the counter to make our orders. They have tenders, platters and lots of different fry options, but I was in sammy-mode and ordered the Hot Mac sandwich, described as a medium-spiced thigh with lettuce, green onions, pickles (which I held), nacho cheese and comeback sauce on sliced bread. 

Sandwiches come with one side and one dipping sauce. Not being a fry guy, I opted to try the mac & cheese wedges and nacho cheese sauce. Other side options include fries, fried pickles, potato salad and coleslaw. But I figured with the lettuce and green onions I had veggies covered.

Everything was cooked (deep fried) fresh, and was ready in about 10 minutes. The sandwich was piping hot, which was great. A few variations from the menu description: it came on a brioche bun instead of two slices of bread -- I am more than fine with that. The described lettuce was also missing, leaving me short of my required serving of veggies or the day.

I would not order this side again -- the mac and cheese wedges were generic and bland. And I would go with a dipping sauce with some heat.

The sammy, though, was fantastic. The chicken thigh (the best chicken to use for sammies) was juicy and delicious, pounded down and generously breaded to be just huge. A big battered chicken tongue sticking out of the bun seems to be a signature for them. It was fun to tackle and offered a natural starting place to begin eating the sammy. Next time I'll up the heat, as a medium really did nothing. But it was delicious and filling and offers excellent lunch value at $13.90 before tax.

Either time your visit carefully though or be ready to carry out, as seating is very limited.

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Eating off the Hill: New McDonalds chicken sandwich, the McCrispy

I'm always on the look-out for chicken sammy updates, and so when I heard McDonald's had a new chicken sandwich I knew I had to try it out for lunch my next in office day. 

McDonald's has has two main chicken sandwiches on its menu, the cheaper McChicken with processed meat and a regular chicken sandwich with breast meat that was a bit more expensive whose name I forget. Various variations are possible to those two bases, such as adding bacon for a deluxe version, or lately a rotating array of spicy mayos. There's also, of course, the Junior Chicken, a smaller patty, and that patty is also used for the English Muffin Chicken sandwich offered at breakfast.

I usually go for the classic McChicken, but this new McCrispy replaces the old fancy option. It's available in two base varieties: the McCrispy with shredded lettuce and mayo, or the McCrispy Deluxe which adds a slice of tomato and bacon. All on a potato bun.

I opted for the regular McCrispy, although I did try to swap out the regular mayo for a spicy one. Sadly, the app would now allow such frivolity. So I had to settle for the sandwich as the creator intended. From what I hear, in the U.S. the app and kiosk allow for all kinds of whacky combos. Sadly, in Canada we're on lockdown.

Getting it back to my desk, the sandwich was hot but the fries were not. The fries got a reheat, but let's focus on the sandwich.

The potato bun was pretty, and toasted on the insides. The chicken was breast meat, and the breading was indeed crispy. I got a slight hint of pepper, which I liked. Those were the positives. 

On the flip side, I could have used more breading. And more chicken. And a spicy mayo option. It was an OK fast food chicken sandwich. But no where near the size or the crispiness of the reigning champion from Popeye's. 

It's definitely a second-tier chicken sandwich. It's the chicken sandwich you get when you don't feel like beef but your friends insisted on going to McDonald's. It's a chicken sandwich, but not a Chicken Sandwich. 

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Eating on the Hill: A&W's not so hot Nashville Hot Chicken Sandwich

The newest chicken craze is Nashville Hot Chicken, and A&W is out of the gates early with the first fast food version, available now for a limited time: the A&W Nashville Hot Chicken Sandwich.

 I've already written at length about the chicken sandwich wars; Popeye's is the undisputed winner and I stand by that. Especially if you can get it freshly made; then it's transcendent. But in the next tier down of your basic fast good chicken sammies, A&W's Chubby Chicken stands out from the pack for being a juicy, decently sized, well-seasoned breast of chicken.

I've been coming back into the office lately now that I'm fully vaxed and local case numbers are down, and an A&W opened up just off the Hill during the pandemic (O'Connor and Sparks, between Winners and the LRT). So I'm locally lunching again, and had to try their Nashville Hot Chicken Sandwich.

I ordered on the app so I could just walk in and pick it up, and the app makes it easier to customize too. It comes standard with the hot sauce and pickles. I dropped the pickets and added lettuce and tomato, so I still had my veg. A&W does a good job of the veg for a fast food place.

Dine-in is still closed and it was a sunny day, so I took my bag and retired to an outdoor table on Sparks Street to enjoy the weather and dine al-fresco. 

I haven't had a lot of Nashville Hot Chicken but I'm familiar with the concept. The legend is that a woman, in Nashville of course, tired of her husband's philandering and desirous of revenge, made him fried chicken and smothered it with the spiciest sauce she could concoct, hoping to repay the pain she caused him. Instead, he loved it. In the commercial application pain isn't the goad, but chicken coated in a spicy sauce is still the basic idea.

This...was not that. It was a standard chicken breast, with some sauce on the top bun and some sauce on the top bun. Not coated in it at all. And the sauce wasn't particularly hot and wasn't particularly good. It had a weird taste, maybe a bit tangy, but I wasn't really getting spicy from it. They call it a hot Nashville aioli. So, I guess mayo and some sort of hot sauce. A brioche bun, because that's on trend but doesn't really mean anything in wide practice.

So I walked back to the office full but not impressed. If you want Nashville Hot Chicken, go somewhere else doing it right. If you're going to A&W anyway though and you want a chicken sandwich, give it a try.

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Eating in lockdown: The saga of the Popeye's Sandwich

 I've long liked that chicken from Popeye's. So much better than KFC. A spicy option, quality fries, biscuits, mac and cheese, corn on the cob -- so good. 

There really weren't any convenient locations for me for awhile though. Living in Toronto, I would hike to the one downtown on Yonge from time to time. When the 2015 campaign was underway there was one just down the street from the campaign office, and as this one offered Halal chicken it became a frequent fixture on the campaign office buffet. When I moved to Ottawa, the nearest one was a two-trip bus away in Alta Vista, so it remained a rare treat.

Then one opened in the Glebe, inside the former KFC turned Rogers Wireless store. There was the expected murmur of discontent from the Glebians, though tempered by past fights lost over Boston Pizza and McDonald's -- though they seem fine with Whole Foods and Starbucks.

Anyways, it was good to have a Popeye's close to home and they did busy business, and I made a few off hours visits due to their limited seating to get my chicken fix. But since pandemic times we've had to turn to Uber Eats, and it has not been a good experience. They do a lot of food delivery business at Popeye's, and they don't do it well.

Nearly every time I've ordered, they've gotten something wrong. They forget an item. They run out of something, so they just make a substitution with no consultation. So many times I'm given the wrong order entirely. If you're there in person, you can make sure you get the right thing, so they're less likely to screw you over. Less so with delivery. Still, many times I've had to complain to Uber Eats for refunds and they're usually good with it, but still, I wanted what I ordered.

Which brings me to the long-awaited flagship Popeye's Chicken Sandwich. I had long since given up on Popeye's via Uber Eats -- fool me four times, shame on you, fool me five times, you can't get fooled again -- but I wasn't going to go down there with dining closed and photograph a chicken sandwich in the parking lot.

Anyway, long store short, on the second order attempt I actually received the chicken sandwich I ordered for a work lunch, standing on Wellington Street to retrieve it and taking in inside passed the undoubtedly jealous Parliamentary security. Opening the bag and my desk and breathing a sigh of relief to find the long-awaited spicy chicken sammy inside.

I plated, photographed, dug in and it was ... OK. After all that, it was OK. It was good. It was a perfectly serviceable chicken sandwich. Probably the best of the fast food chicken sandwiches I've had. But the years of hype, the lines and fights over this sandwich in the US, the chicken sandwich showdowns, the long wait for it to come to Canada, with all that build-up it just underwhelmed.

I think we live in an era where we have been conditioned to lower our expectations. A decade or two ago, this sandwich would have been what you would reliably expect from a fast food chicken sammy. As I think I wrote about before, I still remember the big, juicy KFC Big Crunch of my junior high years. This Popeye's sammy reminded me of that. And it only shines because of the decline in quality over the years we have experienced in fast food.

 Anyway, some 600 words later. The brioche bun was good, the breading was well-seasoned, the patty of good size and the chicken juicy, and the spicy mayo did its job.

I haven’t had it since. When we can dine in safely again, I’ll be back. It’s as quality a fast food chicken Sammy as you’ll find. But it’s not worth the hype, or the Uber Eats Roulette with Popeye’s Glebe.

Other chicken sammies

• KFC is cannon fodder in the chicken sandwich wars
• Spicy Big Mary Sandwich at Mary Brown's

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Eating in lockdown: Fried vs baked chicken thigh sammies

 I've written about chicken sammies a bit lately, and I did finally get around to trying Popeye's new fancy chicken sandwich after some customer service foul-ups -- more on that soon. But after behaving myself this week, for the weekend I wanted to try making at home versions but with a twist -- I would deep fry some and bake the rest and compare the results.

Spoiler alert: deep fried was better. I mean, of course it was. We all knew that already. It's also horrible for me. And we knew that too. Still, we'll press ahead. Because science is testing your hypothesis, no matter how obvious.

The finished products. Guess which one is which?

I had defrosted a package of Ontario chicken thighs from my TruLocal meat subscription -- thighs being on trend right now for being jucier and more flavourful -- and proceeded to make a buttermilk dredge. Not having buttermilk, I made it by adding vinegar to milk. And not having white vinegar, I used balsamic. Probably not ideal, but seemed a better choice than wine vinegar. I added Frank's Red Hot, paprika and cayenne, and poured it into a zip lock bag to marinade in the fridge overnight.

Marinaded chicken thighs ready to dredge

Retrieving it the next day when ready to cook, I made a dredge of flour, paprika, cayenne, garlic powder, salt and pepper. Moving the marinade into another contained. I proceeded to do a double dredge -- dry, wet, dry, moving half to a plate and the other half to my funky new baking tray with rack.

My oven pre-heated to 450 degrees, in the chicken went for 12 minutes. Meanwhile, I heated vegetable oil in my deep dryer to 350 degrees to deep fry the other half of the chicken.

Ready for the oven.

After 12 minutes, I opened the oven and took out the chicken to turn it over and put it back in to bake for another 15 minutes. Meanwhile, all the smoke inevitable set off my smoke alarm, making me race to open my balcony door to the eight degree Ottawa afternoon and begin waving my jacket in the direction of the smoke detector, which is on the ceiling far to high to hit the button on. I retrieved standing Costco fan and turned it on 15 minutes later with the door open when it was time to open the oven again -- this time, stress-inducing alarm averted.

With both batches of chicken done, I surveyed the results.

Not hard to tell which is which, though the pan does give it away.

Meanwhile, I had two brioche buns from TruLoaf, my local bakery, then I had buttered and toasted in my cast iron pan. I also mixed mayo with hot sauce, garlic power, paprika and cayenne that I smeared on the top and bottom buns. And it's not traditional, but some aged sharp cheddar on the bottom buns.

Baked and fried chicken sammies.

So, as we sat at the outset, the fried chicken was obviously better. The meat was jucier, the batter adhered better and was crispier and crunchier. The baked still had a smidge of flour in spots, lost some of the coating, and the chicken wasn't as juicy. 

In fairness, I baked a kind of dredge that was designed to be fried. If I had done a spiced flour, egg wash, bread crumb dredge, the results would likely have been more conducive to baking. But I wanted to keep the prep the same as a control -- you know, science. 

Anyway, a tasty lunch either way. And I don't deep fry very often, not to worry. I don't even care for french fries. Smash burgers tomorrow, and then back to healthy for the work week. Stay healthy and stay safe.

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Eating off the Hill: KFC is cannon fodder in the chicken sandwich wars

 It seems like all the cool stuff comes to Canada late. That's certainly the case with the fast food chicken sandwich wars, which have already been fought and won in the United States. I thought the new NAFTA or whatever its called meant we would have chicken sandwich free trade?

The battle has primarily been waged between Popeye's and Chick-fil-A. It's been a viral sensation with long lines, fights over limited supplies, and lots of Instagramming. While there were entries from other traditional players like Wendy's and McDonald's, these two were the primary competitors. Each upped their game, and it's generally agreed Popeye's came out on top with a buttery toasted brioche bun, larger breaded chicken breast, pickles and the option of regular or spicy mayo.

In Canada, Mary Brown's has a contender, which I reviewed when last in Scarborough.

We only have two Chick-fil-As in Canada (both in Toronto) and while we do have Popeye's, they've made us wait for the hero sammy. It's been testing in the select Alberta markets since the spring, and will go nation-wide on Sept. 14th -- looking forward to it.

KFC has tried to jump on to Popeye's hype though by beating it to the Canadian market with its own hero chicken sammy -- the "famous chicken sandwich." According to KFC, its "buttermilk marinated and hand breaded in KFC's famous Extra Crispy seasoning, and is then topped with sweet chunky pickles, creamy mayonnaise and sandwiched between a lightly toasted potato bun." You can also get it with "double spicy mayo." So, being a chicken sammy fan, I picked a spicy one up yesterday and brought it home to eat safely. 

Short review: meh. And definitely not worth the $6.99 before tax.

I liked the bun, the spicy mayo was noteable but not overpowering, and the breading had the usual KFC seasoning. But there wasn't near rnough chicken for a sandwich at this pricepoint, and it was a bit dry. It was an OK chicken sandwich, but definitely not a worthy contender in the chicken sandwich wars and not worth the price charged. A little more spicy mayo would have been nice too.

Maybe my childhood memories are hazy, but I'm of the impression that KFC has had a major decline in quality over the past couple of decades. I remember going to KFC on my lunch break during junior high, using my paper route money to buy a big crunch sandwich. And while it's still on the menu, the big crunch used to be big. Maybe 40% bigger than this new famous sandwich.Much meatier. And I still remember fondly working accross the street from the Rideau Centre in the early aughts, going over to the food court on Twonie Tuesdays for an original chicken sammy and small fries for $2.00.

Anyways, nowadays KFC just seems to be going through the motions. One opened accross the street from my condo a few years ago, and it was good for about two weeks and then they just stopped trying hard.

Other warning signs at my local KFC: masks worn around the neck instead of the face in the kitchen (the manager not wearing one at all), and the manager loudly talking about ordering a pizza for the team. If they're not going to eat their own food, I'm not likely to be back any time soon either.

Anyway, glad I tried it but I wouldn't cross the road for this sammy again. Waiting for Popeye's!

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Eating off the Hill: Spicy Big Mary Sandwich at Mary Brown's

I like me a spicy chicken sammy. I remember back in the day, when KFC didn't suck (or maybe my standards were just lower) I was all about the spicy Big Crunch. Unfortunately, I've mostly missed out on the fast food spicy chicken sandwich wars that raged South of our border -- Popeye's didn't bring their's to Canada, and Chick-fil-A is on the no-go list.

A late entrant into the game though was a regional Canadian player with a spicy version of their hero chicken sammy, the Spicy Big Mary.

Mary Brown's is a Newfoundland (& Labrador?) fried chicken chain beloved for their potato taters. People get excited by them. I don't. I get upset. If I'm going to have fries I want them thin and crispy with as little potato as possible, so taters are a slap in the face to me and all I hold dear.

Anyway, MB's have been sprouting up everywhere recently -- apparently there are a few in suburban Ottawa. I first noticed them in Scarborough during the campaign last fall, and stopped in one day for lunch. Wasn't impressed, didn't blog it. Had a two piece fried chicken and found it nothing special. Passed on the taters; see above.

Still, I heard they were doing a spicy sammy and I hadn't tried their sandwich yet so on my last trip back to the borough just before everything changed, I stopped by on my way to the hotel and got one to go -- hold the pickle. I don't like pickles.

It was a solid spicy chicken sammy. The bun was your standard fast food seasame; didn't really bring much to the party but didn't detract either. Good spicy mayo, nice kick though not Scarborough spicy, and in a class move they give you the sauce on top and on the bottom -- don't see that often in the spicy sammy game. The chicken breast as meaty, juicy and cooked fresh to order. I couldn't tell for sure if the patty itself was spicy -- that would be next level -- but it was likely just their regular Big Mary chicken sammy patty. Their marketing materials imply it is, but I couldn't detect it.

Anyway, as I said, solid spicy chicken sammy. Probably doesn't hold up to Popeye's or Voldemort's, but would eat again. They need to up their bun game though to compete in the majors.

And that's it for food I took pictures of when we could still go outside and eat. I shall now order delivery to bring you the food contant you crave. Up first, local donuts...

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