Author: Kelley

REVIEW: Stouffer’s Corner Bistro Stuffed Melt and Soup Steak & Swiss Stuffed Melt with Broccoli Cheddar Soup

Kelley 16 Comments

I feel like I’ve been stuck in a rut lately. I’ve dubbed it the “4 out of 10” rut. It seems like everything I review is either spectacularly underwhelming or just plain blech. Which is why I was so glad to see Stouffer’s new Stuffed Melt and Soup. It’s an ingenious idea with three available combinations that all sound like they could be really tasty. I chose the Steak & Swiss Stuffed Melt with Broccoli Cheddar Soup over the Three Cheese & Ham Stuffed Melt with Creamy Tomato Bisque because I can’t seem to find a tomato soup I like, so I wanted to give Stouffer’s the best chance possible to succeed in making my taste buds give them a round of applause.

Apparently there’s also a Chicken Bacon Ranch Stuffed Melt with Baked Potato Soup available, but they didn’t have it at my store. If it had been there, I would have had some tough decisions to make. Actually, I probably would have just bought them both, after standing in front of the frozen food section for 15 minutes, paralyzed by my inability to make a quick trip to the grocery store last less than half an hour. I really shouldn’t be left unsupervised.

As a brief side note, food manufacturers really need to start cutting down on their product names. Seriously, “Stouffer’s Corner Bistro Stuffed Melt and Soup Steak & Swiss Stuffed Melt with Broccoli Cheddar Soup?” Is the Stouffer’s marketing team working on the Dickensian pay scale? Can’t we trim it down a little? Also, who uses the term “stuffed melt?” It’s a fucking sandwich. Treat it as such. Or at least be less fucking redundant.

The entire description of the SCBSMSSSSMBCS on the front of the box is as follows: “Herb-topped focaccia bread filled with beef steak, onions and mushrooms in a swiss cheese sauce paired with creamy broccoli and cheddar cheese soup.”

Whew! Thank God they specified beef steaks. I thought I was in for some crazy fish steak and swiss cheese adventure.

There are no conventional oven cooking instructions, only microwave. That’s how fucking serious Stouffer’s is about giving you a bakery fresh taste in minutes. You are strictly not allowed to take your time. The top of the box tears away, leaving you with a handy little tray to hold your soup and sandwi…stuffed melt. You pop the soup in by itself for a minute thirty, then you add the melt with its convenient crisping sleeve for another three and a quarter minutes. Voila!

And yes, I spilled some of the soup into the tray by accident. Don’t worry, I scraped most of it off the cardboard with my spoon and ate it. No stone left unturned for you TIB readers! And also, no dignity for me.

I’m really sad to say that the finished product fell well short of my expectations. Let’s start with the soup. The broccoli bits were small but actually had a nice, crunchy texture, whereas you might expect them to be soggy, so that was nice. There wasn’t a whole lot of them, but then again, the soup was pretty small to begin with, so I guess ratio-wise they were on target. The cheese part of the soup was really disappointing.

The flavor was pretty much on par with Campbell’s broccoli and cheese soup, which I actually enjoy, but it was just so watery. It was like cheese water, which is a phrase that actually makes me a little nauseous. The little orange things as pictured on the box were also present. I guess they were supposed to be carrots? They were minuscule and tasted like nothing, but their shape did make me wish I was eating some sort of awesome Tetris soup, except all the pieces were the long, straight pieces that never dropped when I had that giant, gaping, straight chasm that was just begging for that piece. Now I’m mad at Stouffer’s AND Tetris. And I’m still thinking about cheese water, which is just…ugh.

I knew going into this that the “stuffed melt” portion of the meal was probably going to be nothing more than a glorified Hot Pocket, especially after I saw the crisping sleeve. And I was generally right, except Hot Pockets have about 50 percent more filling than this stuffed melt had. It was woefully under-stuffed.

The molten lava cheese, when you could actually find some, was pretty tasty, but the “steak” consisted of largely flavorless tiny pieces, and while I could taste a hint of onion, good luck finding any mushrooms. Who knows, I could have been eating mushrooms that I thought were steak the whole time. I wouldn’t be surprised. Also, they can call the shell herb-topped foccacia bread until they’re blue in the face, but seriously, once again…Hot Pockets. The bread was nicely chewy and texturally acceptable, but it was no artisanal masterpiece.

It’s pretty sad when what seems to be a really great concept fails so badly at execution. It’s also pretty sad when I can tell Stouffer’s that Campbell’s makes a concentrated broccoli and cheese soup that costs 99 cents per can and tastes better than their soup, and that a Hot Pocket has more plentiful and flavorful filling than their stuffed melt. Furthermore, I have a pretty dainty appetite, and after finishing off the Stouffer’s Corner Bistro Stuffed Melt and Soup Steak & Swiss Stuffed Melt with Broccoli Cheddar Soup, I was actually still a little hungry. This could have been a great five-minute, stomach-warming lunch to take to work on a rainy day, but instead it just makes you wish you’d rushed to the bakery down the street and ordered their half-sandwich and soup lunch special.

Looking back on this review, I’m making it sound like Stouffer’s killed my whole family, when what they really did was just offer up a mediocre frozen meal. I guess I just really wanted them to win with such a great concept, which made my disappointment all the more tangible. In all fairness, it’s edible, it’s convenient and probably tastes better than whatever horror show sits in your break area’s vending machine. It just wasn’t the comfort-food-in-a-box that I was hoping it would be.

(Nutrition Facts – 1 stuffed melt and soup (283 grams) — 400 calories, 90 calories from fat, 10 grams of total fat, 10 grams of saturated fat, 0 grams of trans fat, 45 milligrams of cholesterol, 880 milligrams of sodium, , 41 grams of total carbohydrates, 2 grams of dietary fiber, 7 grams of sugars, 17 grams of protein, 15% vitamin A, 40% calcium, 15% vitamin C and 10% iron.)

Item: Stouffer’s Corner Bistro Stuffed Melt and Soup Steak & Swiss Stuffed Melt with Broccoli Cheddar Soup

Price: $2.99 (on sale; original $3.89)

Size: 1 stuffed melt and soup (283 grams)

Purchased at: Safeway

Rating: 5 out of 10

Pros: Broccoli bits were crisp and tasty. No fish steaks involved. Easy to prepare. Fun carrying tray. Swiss cheese was tasty. Stouffer’s did not kill my whole family.

Cons: Under-stuffed stuffed melt. Cheese water. Good concept, bad execution. Incredibly long food product names. Steak bits too small. Made me want Tetris soup, which does not exist.

REVIEW: Kellogg’s Eggo Real Fruit Pizza Mixed Berry Granola

Kelley 14 Comments

Eggo Real Fruit Pizza Mixed Berry Granola

The Kellogg’s Eggo Real Fruit Pizza Mixed Berry Granola was inevitable, which is unfortunate. If you break it down, you’ve got two food innovations (I use the term semi-sarcastically) that came together in a perfect storm of potential horror.

On the one hand, you’ve got the gourmet pizza movement, which cropped up a few decades ago. Based entirely on shit someone told me with no empirical evidence, Wolfgang Puck made the first gourmet pizza, so you can blame him for shit like cream cheese smoked salmon pizza and foie gras pizza and god knows what else. I also blame, again, with very little evidence, California Pizza Kitchen for bringing gourmet pizza to the masses, with creations like cheeseburger pizza and Pear & Gorgonzola pizza. Don’t get me wrong, I love me some gourmet pizza and non-traditional toppings. One of the little local pizza joints in my town has a $10 large unlimited topping offer that I abuse on a regular basis to create my own monstrosities. White pizza with a butter parmesan crust with double green olives, feta, onion, tomatoes and artichoke hearts, anyone? I wouldn’t be surprised if they take that deal off the table because I’m single-handedly putting them out of business.

The other part of this equation is the recent explosion of breakfast frozen food products. I don’t know when this started – maybe it’s been around for quite a while and I just never noticed – but I seem to remember a time when, if you wanted a breakfast frozen food, you grabbed yourself a box of Eggo waffles and shut the fuck up about it. Now you’ve got crazy options, from sausage Mcmuffins to bowls with all your shit thrown together to…whatever in God’s name this is.

My point, quite obviously by now, is that Eggo took these two concepts, herded them into a small pen, watched them do the nasty, and what came out a couple minutes later (food gestates quickly) was the Eggo Real Fruit Pizza. They wiped off the amniotic maple syrup and disgusting globs of strawberry jam and said, “I think we’ve got something here.” Kind of like how my friends think their newborn babies are cute, and I think they look like horrible aliens.

I hadn’t noticed this before, but there’s a strange purple sauce-like substance underneath the toppings. Ugh, is that supposed to be yogurt? I am not looking forward to having hot yogurt in my mouth. I’m also not comfortable with that sentence.

The instructions are simple: unwrap the pizza, flip the box over that it was resting in, set it on the silver circle on the back of the container, and throw it in the microwave for a minute to 1 1/2 minutes. I split the difference, and stuck it in there for 1 1/4 minutes. It was still a little cold in the middle, so I stuck it in for the extra 15, but my microwave is also a piece of shit, so bare that in mind. Waiting a minute and a half for a quick breakfast when you’re on the go is a little impressive. It takes me longer to smear cream cheese on a bagel. I have some pretty strict rules about cream cheese.

Eggo Real Fruit Pizza Mixed Berry Granola

It actually smells pretty good coming out of the microwave. It smells like a bowl of oatmeal that has berries and granola in it – warm and inviting, something you’d want to eat on a cold, snowy day. Unfortunately it’s 106 and humid right now where I live, but I’ll close my eyes and use my imagination.

There’s obviously blueberries going on, scattered about the top of the pizza, shriveled up as they tend to do when cooked. They’re distributed nicely, but I would have liked to have seen a few more of them.

I don’t see any other recognizable berries, but there’s some red glop haphazardly strewn over the top. I took some off and tasted it by itself, and it tastes like they took some raspberries and turned them into a puree. It’s definitely real raspberries; it’s got that delicious tartness of the berry and I even got some seeds stuck in my teeth, which is the one thing that annoys me about raspberries. But I welcome them here, since they offer proof of real berry, unless Eggo spent millions of dollars attempting to create a facsimile of raspberry seeds to fool consumers. Probably a lot easier just to throw some berries in a blender and hold true to their claims of “real fruit.”

The dreaded yogurt sauce was nothing to fear after all. It’s very thin, and when I tasted it on its own, it had the faint flavor of mixed berry yogurt, but it was very mild and inoffensive. The granola is spread generously on one side of the pizza, but tapers out until there’s barely any on the other side.

I was truly surprised to see that the crust wasn’t actually a waffle. If I’d look more closely at the box, I might have figured it out, but my mind associates “Eggo” with “waffles” so decisively that I just assumed that would be the case. Instead, the dough of this “pizza” seems to be made out of wheat. It looks like a thin crust pizza crust, except darker. Unfortunately, it’s tasteless, soggy and way too chewy. I’m not even really sure what to call it. Wheat…pizza crust…thing. Except it tastes more like a bland PowerBar than a pizza crust.

There seem to be two fundamental problems with the Eggo Real Fruit Pizza Mixed Berry Granola: sogginess and poor topping distribution. The crust and the granola were both way too soggy. Perhaps it would have turned out better if I’d cooked it in the oven, but if you’re eating fruit pizza for breakfast, you either don’t have time to wait for the oven to preheat, you’re a college student who doesn’t even own an oven or you’re young enough that you’re not allowed to use the oven.

As far as the toppings go, the mysterious purple sauce was thin to the point where in some places, you could see bare patches of crust. The raspberry puree, which I think is the best part of this item, is strewn halfheartedly across the pizza, globbed up in some places and simply nonexistent in others. The granola is piled high on one half the pizza, but peters out into scattered flakes.

I have to say, I expected this whole “fruit pizza” thing to be a horror show. Instead, it just left me disappointed. If done correctly, it would have been quite tasty. A less chewy, less soggy, more flavorful crust, coated thickly with the delicious raspberry puree, a generous layer of crispy granola, and piled high with blueberries, would have actually been something that I’d consider spending 1 1/2 minutes nuking in the morning for a quick breakfast. Unfortunately, that’s not what the Eggo Real Fruit Pizza Mixed Berry Granola really is, so I think I’ll just stick with real pizza for breakfast. That box of double green olives, feta, and everything else pizza that’s been sitting out on the counter all night looks pretty good right now.

(Nutrition Facts – 1 individual-size pizza (5.3 ounces) — 390 calories, 110 calories from fat, 13 grams of total fat, 6 grams of saturated fat, 0 grams of trans fat, 3 grams of polyunsaturated fat, 2.5 grams of monounsaturated fat, 15 milligrams of cholesterol, 390 milligrams of sodium, , 62 grams of total carbohydrates, 4 grams of dietary fiber, 17 grams of sugars, 10 grams of protein, 0% vitamin A, 6% calcium, 0% vitamin C and 8% iron.)

Item: Kellogg’s Eggo Real Fruit Pizza Mixed Berry Granola
Price: $1.67 (on sale; normally $3.29)
Size: 1 individual-size pizza (5.3 ounces)
Purchased at: Albertson’s
Rating: 4 out of 10
Pros: Raspberry puree was delicious. Taking advantage of unlimited topping deals. Quick and easy to make. Purple sauce was not scary.
Cons: Soggy, tasteless crust and soggy granola. “Hot yogurt in my mouth” making me uneasy. Uneven and sloppily applied toppings. Just the idea of fruit pizza making me shudder. 46 percent of total fat was saturated fat on what appears on the surface to be a healthy food item.

REVIEW: Arby’s Steakhouse Sub

Kelley 15 Comments

Arby's Steakhouse Sub

Arby’s is like the middle child of the fast food industry. You’ve got the oldest child, represented by places like McDonald’s, Burger King and Taco Bell. They’ve been around, they’re reliable and you know you can trust them to be there when you need them. Then there’s the baby of the family, that local place that you dote upon – that one little burger joint on Center Street or the musty taqueria that is probably violating at least a half dozen health codes. You tell your friends about them, even show them some pictures, not realizing that they honestly don’t care.

Then there’s Arby’s.

Sure, it’s always hanging around, but its cries for attention go largely ignored. It shuffles its feet, wondering when someone will notice the uniqueness, the ingenuity of its shaved beef sandwiches. It’s even tried other tactics to gain your attention, like its line of Market Fresh sandwiches, which got put on the fridge but was promptly covered up by Wendy’s B+ on her calculus test.

Badly-constructed analogies and sweeping generalizations about a whole nation’s opinion on Arby’s aside, their latest arm-waving “look at me!” creation goes even further, with the limited-edition Steakhouse Sub.

The commercial itself is a sad thing to see: a man is parked literally a few feet away from an actual steakhouse, and then decides to go to Arby’s instead. He is already at a steakhouse that serves real steak. I believe he describes Arby’s new sandwich as a “steakhouse dream,” but by then my brain had already exited my skull, carrying a bindle and sticking its thumb out in a desperate attempt to get as far away from my television as possible, so don’t quote me on that.

What exactly makes this sandwich such a “dream?” According to Arby’s, “When you’re craving that big Steakhouse taste, this sub delivers. We piled our classic, thinly sliced roast beef with melted Swiss cheese and crispy onions on a toasted ciabatta roll and topped it all off with our zesty cracked peppercorn sauce.”

If you’ve never had an Arby’s roast beef sandwich before, imagine the roast beef being a notch or two above the packet of Carl Buddig “Beef” that your mom used to pack in your lunch for school. Or was that just my mom?

Great, yet another childhood trauma I’ll have to bring up with my therapist at our next appointment. Anyway, Arby’s roast beef is thinly sliced, quite salty, and if you try really hard, you can even detect a vague taste of beef. But that’s about all you’re going to get out of it.

The onions added zero flavor or texture to the sandwich. Arby’s claims they are “crispy onions.” Mine were anything but. I ate some of the stragglers on my plate that had escaped from the Steakhouse Sub, and they were soggy, tough and chewy. It’s like they took a can of French’s French Fried Onions and let them sit in a deep frier for half an hour.

The sauce was actually quite nice on its own; I would even venture to agree with Arby’s claims of it being “zesty.” Much like the onions, it seemed to get swallowed up by the rest of the sandwich and I couldn’t really taste it unless my tongue was in direct contact with the sauced bun. I went to check out the ingredient list and there must have been 50 of them in the sauce alone, but I think the inclusion of steak sauce was probably what gave it a little zing. Or it could have been the disodium inosinate. Who can tell?

Part of the reason I couldn’t feel the chewy texture of the onions was that the ciabatta roll itself was overly chewy. Taking a bite of the Steakhouse Sub felt a bit like I was a puppy wrestling with a rope toy; to tear through the bread, I had to whip my head back and forth with my teeth firmly dug into the bun. I may have even growled once or twice, I’m not entirely sure.

Okay, so it wasn’t that bad, but I do think that the bread-to-fillings ratio was tipped too heavily in the former’s favor, especially when it came to the sauce and the onions. I got a few bites where I could taste a little zip from the sauce, but the onions added nothing, and most bites were just a mouthful of bread and some mildly beefy-tasting slices of meat.

If Arby’s thinks their Steakhouse Sub is something that’s going to lure someone already at a steakhouse to their nearest Arby’s drive-thru, they need to head out to a Black Angus Steakhouse and do a little R&D. The fact that I’m using Black Angus as my example of a steakhouse taste they should emulate should speak volumes in and of itself.

(Nutrition Facts – 1 sandwich (268 grams) – 750 calories, 360 calories from fat, 40 grams of total fat, 10 grams of saturated fat, 1 gram of trans fat, 70 milligrams of cholesterol, 1,970 milligrams of sodium, 67 grams of carbohydrates, 3 grams of dietary fiber, 3 grams of sugars, 30 grams of protein, 4% vitamin A, 4% vitamin C, 15% calcium and 20% iron.)

Item: Arby’s Steakhouse Sub

Price: $2.99

Size: 1 sandwich

Purchased at: Arby’s

Rating: 3 out of 10

Pros: Cracked peppercorn sauce was zesty, if you licked the bun. Actual steakhouses. Fair-sized sandwich for the price. Hobo bindles. Making sweeping generalizations about other people’s opinions.

Cons: Too much chewy ciabatta drowning out other flavors. Tough, un-crisp onions. Being the middle child. Arby’s roast beef in general. Playing tug-of-war with my lunch. Carl Buddig.

REVIEW: BK Fire-Grilled Ribs

Kelley 17 Comments

Burger King has ribs now! Is that the appropriate level of excitement? I can’t tell, because The King has given me no direction on how to feel about his new ribs. I look to fast food restaurants’ media and marketing departments to tell me how I should feel about their food, and there is absolutely no information about the ribs on their website. Usually, companies assault you with their new products on the front page of their sites, making sure you know damn well that there’s a new product and you’re going to love it. I couldn’t even find the nutritional information on the ribs. I had to find that through other, nefarious means. Is Burger King trying to hide them? Should I be worried?

I’m glad I called my local BK earlier to make sure they were carrying the ribs, because, again, there was no indication of their existence at the restaurant. No big pictures on the drive-thru menu, no posters in the window…nothing. There is no way in the world for you to know these ribs exist, unless you stumbled upon a news story about them on the Internet. (Or the editor of the website you review for told you about them.) I felt like I was in on some sort of secret, like In-N-Out’s not-so-secret secret menu.

I don’t even actually know what these things are officially called. The box says, “Straight from the grill”, but there’s no name on it. The side of the box at least has little pictures of ribs on it, so at least I know I’ve got the right product.

Edit: The Internet just told me they’re called BK Fire-Grilled Ribs. Mystery solved.

According to the box, you can get either six or eight pieces, but my secret nutritional information source says that you can also get a three-piece box. Who knows? Burger King certainly isn’t going to tell me. And that creepy King never talks, so he’s of no help. Yeah, you just keep standing over there with your arms crossed, The King. Looking all creepy and smug, knowing that nobody knows a damn thing about your ribs.

I dunno about these guys. They look kind of weird. And…burned. There is a pleasant smell of grilled meat faintly wafting from the box, but it does smell a little like what happened when I tried to use a grill once. Considering I once managed to ruin a package of ramen, I think you see where I’m going with this.

These certainly don’t look like any ribs I’ve ever seen before. I guess they’re supposed to be short ribs? Hey, wait, is that…is that a bone I see? Oh, these are actual ribs! Up to this point, I thought they were just going to be strange and boneless, like that mutant piece of meat on the McRib. Burger King copies all of McDonald’s other ideas, so I just figured this would be more of the same. Good thing I noticed the bones before I bit into them. That could have gone poorly.

They look mostly like seriously failed chicken wings. Or perhaps the severed limbs of infant burn victims? Okay, that’s just tasteless. C’mon now. Seriously though, it looks like a Chihuahua caught on fire in the Burger King parking lot and they decided to call it a “happy accident.” I mean, I’m not a rib expert, but these just don’t look right.

They don’t taste right, either. The first one I tried was dry and terribly burned. The second one was moist, and by that I mean greasy, and burned. And that’s pretty much the story for the rest of the box. The few moist bites I got showed that the meat closest to the bone had some good flavor and texture, but there wasn’t much of that on those little ribs. One person on the Internet noted that they got barbecue sauce with theirs, so I made sure to ask for some at the window. The King’s serf assured me that it was in the bag. It was not in the bag.

The ribs seemed like they didn’t have any seasoning on them, unless you count “burned” as a seasoning. If I’ve learned anything from Bobby Flay, besides the fact that you can cook anything on a grill (I think I saw him make a bowl of Frosted Flakes on there once), it’s that your ribs need to be properly seasoned, whether that’s with a dry rub or a wet one. If I’ve learned anything from the various barbecue shows I’ve seen on the Travel Channel, the nation is polarized between wet and dry rubs, but I’m pretty sure they’d all agree that a naked rib is a no-no.

Honestly though, any seasoning they might have applied to it would have been overpowered by the taste of charred flesh. The flavor stayed in my mouth long after I’d finished the ribs, leaving me feeling like I’d just eaten a box full of the remains of someone’s tragic house fire. No amount of barbecue sauce is going to cover that up. Speaking of covering up, I see now why Burger King is keeping these ribs under wraps. These ribs just ain’t right.

(Nutrition Facts – 6 ribs – 450 calories, 33 grams of total fat, 12 grams of saturated fat, 0 grams of trans fat, 140 milligrams of cholesterol, 1,290 milligrams of sodium, 4 grams of carbohydrates, 0 grams of dietary fiber, 0 grams of sugars and 35 grams of protein.)

Item: BK Fire-Grilled Ribs
Price: $5.69
Size: 6 ribs
Purchased at: Burger King
Rating: 3 out of 10
Pros: Some meat was moist. Feeling like part of a secret club. Actual meat on a bone and not fake, formed ribs. Getting to call a Burger King employee a serf.
Cons: Charred as all get-out. The King, being smug and creepy. Lots of dry meat. Making infant burn victim jokes. Charcoals-in-my-mouth taste will not leave.

REVIEW: Wendy’s Spicy Chipotle Boneless Wings

Kelley 8 Comments

Wendy’s has recently added a new flavor to their line of boneless chicken wings – Spicy Chipotle. Their website describes them as “made from 100% all-white meat chicken breast, delicately breaded and hand-tossed in a sauce made with real chipotle peppers, dark chili powder, and a touch of amber honey.”

Before even trying these “wings,” I have a bone to pick (queue laugh track) with this product. First of all, fast food establishments are notorious for offering “spicy” menu items that are, well…not spicy. I guess they figure the American public can’t handle anything with more kick than a slice of pepper jack cheese. Second, I am soooo over chipotle. Like pomegranate, it’s one of those tired foodie trends that every chef on the Food Network loves to trot out and explain in detail, like you’ve never heard of a dried jalapeño pepper before and it’s going to BLOW YOUR MIND. Thirdly, there’s no such thing as boneless chicken wings. You know what a boneless chicken wing is? It’s a chicken nugget. You can’t fool me, Wendy’s. I was going to make a tasteless zombie Dave Thomas joke here, but he always seemed like a pretty cool guy, so I guess I’ll just leave it at that.

When I first tasted these chicken nugg- chicken boneless wings, my first thought was, hey, at least the chicken’s not bad. I’d rank it above some of the other fast food chicken nuggets I’ve had. My second thought was, I can barely taste the sauce. Half of my “wings” were glopped up with the sticky stuff, and the other half looked practically naked. And not the good kind of naked, like doing an innocent Google image search for Padma Lakshmi and getting more than you expected. Luckily, there was a bunch of it gathered in what I can only describe as a thick sea of slime at the bottom of the tray, so I could smear my naked nuggets around in that, like two ladies wrestling in a tub of half-melted Jell-O. Maybe Padma Lakshmi and Aida Mollenkamp? Only because I’d like to see Padma beat the pretty out of Aida.

My third thought, after I’d gotten a decent amount of sauce and also guaranteed at least one of my laptop keys would now stick forever (from the sauce, pervs), was that I wasn’t actually sure I’d gotten the right flavor of boneless wings. Wendy’s offers two other flavors – Honey BBQ and Sweet & Spicy Asian – and as I sat here, I honestly couldn’t tell what flavor I’d gotten. I’ve never had the two other products, but all three have a distinct “sweet and spicy/smokey/spicy and smokey” vibe, and that’s pretty much all I could tell about the flavor of this sauce. It was a little sweet. It was…maybe a little smokey? Did I detect what passes for spicy somewhere in there?

I figured I’d check the receipt to see if it at least said I’d gotten the right menu item, not that it means anything. I looked in the bag…no receipt. I was on my own. I dredged my finger along the bottom of the tray, pulling up a big glob of the sauce. It was dark orange, with some little speckles in it…could that be the chili powder? I sucked the sauce off my finger, trying to forget my earlier Jell-O wrestling comments. With no chicken in the way, I definitely detected more spice, a little smokiness, and a sweet honey taste. Okay, I’m pretty sure I got the right stuff. And I don’t mean The Right Stuff.

It’s hard to imagine a sauce with chipotle, chili powder and honey in it, that does indeed have elements of spice, smokiness, and sweetness, could be bland, but Wendy’s Spicy Chipotle sauce manages to accomplish this feat. The chicken itself is actually of quite good quality for a chicken nugget (or boneless wing), but I’d rather be dipping it in something like a spicy mustard than have it covered in gooey, uninteresting chipotle sauce. The flavors just aren’t bold enough to pop, and the texture is a little off-putting. Overall, it’s a disappointing addition to Wendy’s menu.

(Nutrition Facts – 10 boneless wings – 500 calories, 180 calories from fat, 4 grams of saturated fat, 20 grams of total fat, 0 grams of trans fat, 80 milligrams of cholesterol, 1,640 milligrams of sodium, 48 grams of carbohydrates, 3 grams of dietary fiber, 10 grams of sugars, 33 grams of protein, 20% vitamin A, 25% vitamin C, 4% calcium and 8% iron.)

Here are other Wendy’s Spicy Chipotle Boneless Wings reviews:
Mishens Fast Food Reviews
An Immovable Feast

Item: Wendy’s Spicy Chipotle Boneless Wings
Price: $3.99, or so the Internet tells me. I have no receipt to prove that.
Size: 10 boneless wings
Purchased at: Wendy’s
Rating: 4 out of 10
Pros: Chicken was pretty good quality. GISing Padma Lashmi. Quite a few wings for the price. Jell-O wrestling.
Cons: Sauce was too bland. Aida Mollenkamp. Half my chicken was naked. Feeling uncomfortable about sucking goo off my finger. Claims of spiciness that don’t deliver.