A local restaurant has just about one of my favorite chicken sandwiches ever. Grilled chicken breast topped with bacon, swiss cheese, BBQ sauce, and a pineapple ring, on a toasted bun.
Dang, now I’m hungry…
This.
Plus this.
Honestly, I think if you have to add toppings to your chicken sandwich to elevate it to the “next level” you’re doing it wrong. It’s all about the quality of the chicken and the bun. Boneless chicken thigh (not the flavorless white meat, like the quote above says). Double dipped in buttermilk and flour the traditional Southern way, and fried to perfection. Add cayenne pepper if you like it hot Nashville style, but that’s not required. Serve it on a fresh bun with a couple of pickles, and you have the perfect chicken sandwich.
Spam, spam, spam, spam, baked beans, spam, spam and spam.
“I want you to hold it between your knees.”
With club sauce?
I actually think the bigger reason this didn’t get much play is because there’s been kind of a slow but significant realization Morgan Spurlock is more or less a hack. This isn’t new, when greater scrutiny was applied even to the original Supersize Me, it was found his “documentary style” relies heavily on misleading presentation. In the original Supersize Me even the basic calorie and fat numbers he presents are not true, as was proven not long after it made it mainstream (but the headline grabbing stories about someone eating nothing but McDonald’s for 30 days drowned out any early skepticism), he never did publish his full 30 day food log presumably because the numbers and conclusions he drew would not have been substantiated.
There was all kinds of nonsense and lies in his Chicken Documentary, including his basically defrauding the local community in which he ran his “pop up” chicken restaurant.
For me if we’re talking a fried chicken sandwich, at core it’s got to be about the fried chicken and the bread. I don’t want many toppings, 2-3 at maximum. Unlike a lot of sandwich proteins, fried chicken is regularly and happily consumed all by itself–because there is an expectation the frying process and the seasoning on the chicken should provide strong flavor by itself. So that’s what really elevates a good chicken sandwich past normal fast food faire for me, is someone who knows how to fry it right so that the chicken itself tastes good and gets the seasoning mix right. Maybe a bit of some sort of sauce and some lettuce on top is all that should really be needed. Bread quality is big too, I am not married to any specific variety, but if it’s high quality bread, lightly toasted, it will set it apart.
I’m convinced the ‘sandwich wars’ started because of the sauce, somewhere between ketchup and Mayo with a hint of something else (paprika?). Fast food places have always had a chicken sandwich option, it’s the sauce that turned it into a competitive market.
Popeye’s and Raising Cane’s are on equal footing. Around here Milwaukee Brewing Company is also pretty good. All have equivalent sauces.
This thread inspired me to have a sandwich for lunch.
Two nights ago I made a barbecue dry rub with paprika, chili powder, ground chipotles, salt, black pepper, lemon pepper, turmeric, sriracha powder, cumin, dried Italian peppers and a teaspoon of sugar. Coated the inside and outside of a full chicken and let it cool for a day. Then spatchcocked it, airfried it for 10 minutes on high heat then oven cooked it at low heat for another thirty. It came out great and made a nice dinner with leftovers.
I like a big meat to bread ratio so prefer my chicken sandwiches piled high on Texas toast. Added feta, bacon, onion, sweet pickles, sliced peppers, sliced cucumber, butter, some pesto and - instead of mayo - Green Goddess (like tarragon mayo) dressing. Not saying it was the best - Harvey’s Buffalo is hard to beat - but it went down real easy.
Interesting, I’ll have to read up on it. I realize that a film being popular doesn’t always mean it’s accurate science, but…
The film received overall positive reviews from critics and audiences. It holds a 92% “Certified Fresh” rating on the film review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes based on 171 reviews, with an average rating of 7.73/10. The consensus calls the film an “entertaining doc about the adverse effects of eating fast food.”[19] Metacritic assigned the film a weighted average score of 73 out of 100, based on 37 critics, indicating “generally favorable reviews”.[20]
Think imna make THIS tomorrow.
From the Houston Chronicle (link
The significantly questionable aspects of the Supersize Me presentation is the claim that Spurlock was eating 5,000 calories every day for 30 days, which is actually a very high caloric intake for anyone who isn’t super active. It’s also non-trivial to eat that much food, let alone every day for 30 days. He certainly was never filmed eating anywhere close to that much food, since we know the actual nutrition facts of his on-camera meals, hence the reason the people who spent time investigating his claims wanted him to publish a detailed food log (which he never did.)
He also mentions he suffered liver damage from the 30 day binge, but didn’t admit until years later that he is a serious problem drinker who at the time he made Supersize Me “had not been sober for a single week in the last 30 years.”
There’s also a decent little summary on Cracked.com (which I normally wouldn’t cite, but they reference two good sources–link)
From that article:
As [Tom Naughton points out] in his documentary, Fat Head , there’s simply no way Spurlock could have been eating that much food if he was sticking to his own rules. A large Big Mac meal clocks in at “just” 1,450 calories, and it’s by far one of the fattiest items on the menu. This means that even Supersizing lunch and dinner every day and adding dessert falls well short of the 5,000 calories a day Spurlock’s nutritionist claims he was consuming.
There was also a Swedish University that simply took Spurlock at his word about how many calories he was consuming, and attempted to replicate his findings with a group of university students–none of them showed any of the deleterious health effects that Spurlock supposedly found from his “before” and “after” medical testing, link
If all Morgan Spurlock had ever said was “hey, fast food isn’t that healthy, and if you eat it all the time for many years it’s very likely to cause negative health consequences” no one would take serious issue with…repeating more or less consensus nutrition advice from experts. What he specifically has claimed is that McDonald’s is so damaging to the body that if you eat it for 30 days, you will have measured, serious health consequences that can be measured by a physician’s examination.
That particular claim has only ever been demonstrated by one person–Morgan Spurlock, who has not made the specific foods he consumed available or publicly vetted his tests or anything else. Anyone who has tried to replicate it with some facsimile of what he did, has found none of the same results.
One of his least trustworthy claims is that he was able to gain 24 pounds off of a month of McDonald’s. Basic fundamentals of weight gain and metabolism suggest this is not actually possible.
What’s interesting is if you start with his claim of gaining 24 pounds (which is highly unlikely), the 5,000 calories a day number makes shocking sense, but also leads me to believe he lied about the 5,000 calories a day because he knew he would have to make that lie for his lie about 24 pounds making any sense at all. An average adult male burns around 2200-2800 calories/day if they are sedentary, Spurlock was actually not sedentary prior to Supersize Me, but was active, so he most likely was burning over 3,000 calories per day. But anyway, let’s say your goal is to lie about gaining a bunch of weight for a documentary, the smaller the lie the easier, right, so Spurlock probably started with the lowest end baseline–2200 calories a day. He then multiplied that by 30, to get 66,000 calories needed just to maintain weight. So he knew he would need to claim he consumed at least 84,000 calories more than that over 30 days, to support his claim of gaining 24 pounds. Not too surprisingly, 5,000 calories a day = 150,000 calories/30 days which provides the exact mathematical deficit Spurlock needed to support his claim of gaining 24 pounds. Of course the very fact the rules he sets out in the beginning for what he will eat at McDonald’s makes it all but impossible he consumed 5,000 calories on even one day, let alone 30. Additionally someone who is physically active as Spurlock was prior to starting his 30 day experiment, his body would be highly unlikely to crash down to a basal metabolic rate down at 2200 calories/day just from a few weeks of inactivity. That low end of the daily estimate for males is typically associated with someone who is sedentary and has lived a sedentary lifestyle for some period of time. Even if we assume his metabolic rate did actually crash down that low by the end of the experiment, it’s highly unlikely it was that low the first two weeks, so his math actually is likely suspect in that regard, as he likely was burning 3000-3200 calories/day or even more as a baseline rate.
Thanks for the info…I’ll have to watch it again because I don’t remember a lot of the specific claims.
And now we return to your regularly scheduled program…
BK’s Italian chicken sandwich (which they would run as a limited-time offering once or twice a year, for many years) used the same chicken patty and bun as their “original” chicken sandwich, then topped it with tomato sauce and slices of mozzarella cheese.
Dangit, now I really want one… 
Wendy’s spicy chicken sandwich is my favorite fast food chicken sandwich, but I’ve never had Popeye’s. Burger King is the only one I can get easily.
I like a slice (or two) of tomato on my sandwich. A tasteless slice of tomato, or too much mayo, really brings down the sandwich.
Has to be on a potato bun. Brioche is also acceptable, but potato is where it’s at.
Might have to try these:
I heard the secret ingredient in the breading is MSG.
My ideal is:
-
Thigh meat
-
Crispy, well-seasoned coating, preferably with a lot of black and white pepper. When I make my own, it’s black pepper, white pepper, cayenne (or similar) pepper, salt, MSG. I prefer a generous single dredge of flour to a double dredge of flour-egg wash-flour or flour-egg wash-bread crums.
-
A bun that is neither too light nor too heavy, but if you’re going to err, err on the side of light. I enjoy the squishier varieties of brioche and potato rolls. Lightly buttered or mayo’d.
-
A couple of pickle slices, whether dill or a spicy version of a bread-and-butter pickle.
And, really, that’s it. The “next level” to me is in getting all those individual components right. It’s not about condiments. If I want it spicy, I’ll dip the thigh in a cayenne-and-lard mix for that Nashiville style goodness. But the crispy chicken thigh should taste perfect on its own and be the star of the show.
Well, they’ve been pretty open about using MSG, so if it’s a secret ingredient, it’s not a well-kept one. Their chicken coating is, according to their website: “enriched bleached wheat flor, sugar, salt, monosodium glutimate, nonfat milk,” etc. You can look it up here:
or here’s a chart that breaks it down:
Don’t know why they want to pile so much stuff on top of the chicken in a chicken sandwich, in addition to using the least flavorful part of a chicken. It sounds to me like a lot of people just don’t like chicken but want to pretend they are eating some.
That’s one of the things I don’t like about the chicken sandwich wars is that almost everyone is still going white meat. (I can’t think of an exception, but maybe there is one.) I would have thought someone would at least try or at least give a choice.
I’ve tried most of the major contenders in the wars, and right now, Popeye’s when made correctly is clearly the best for me. But the other day I was at KFC, tried out their hot and fresh one, and everything about it looked perfect. The requisite crunch was there, the meat was juicy, the bun was on an appropriate brichoe roll. I wanted to like everything about it, but it just tasted like nothing. It somehow didn’t even have that over-salted MSG flavor of their regular chicken. It was lacking seasoning-wise in the coating, and the chicken itself, despite all appearances of being real and perfectly cooked chicken, was just tasteless. Make that with thigh, and it’d be a grand slam, in my book.