Who needs bread when the world has fried chicken?
Fast food chains get a bad rap for contributing to the nation’s obesity woes. Thus Burger King offers apple fries and McDonald’s dutifully peddles salads, so that when your lard-ass drives up to the order window you can theoretically buy something with nutritional value. But one fast food chain, instead of wasting time with fruits and vegetables, is hard at work inventing new products worthy of a company called Yum! Brands. Instead of folding in the face of nutritional pressure, KFC has decided to Double Down on deliciousness.
The new Double Down sandwich’s fillings include bacon, pepper jack cheese, swiss cheese and the Colonel’s sauce. “But Ez,” you say, “How could they make this bacon and two-kinds-of-cheese sandwich even more irresistible?” After years of trying to create chicken-flavored bread, the Colonel hit on the solution: Replace the bread with actual slabs of fried chicken. In terms of milestones in human progress, you now have the wheel, the cotton gin, and the KFC Double Down sandwich. Yum, indeed.
The DD, being a controversial product, is sold in a lawless land to the south, a place where seemingly upstanding citizens have been known to slip across the border in pursuit of sex, drugs and unthinkable debauchery. I’m talking, of course, about Rhode Island.
I get in the car and head for Providence, because the only other state where you can score a Double Down is Nebraska, and frankly Nebraska’s already had its sandwich-innovation moment, what with the invention of the reuben. You know, once upon a time, people thought that corned beef and Russian dressing on rye sounded gross, too.
Even though I called ahead to confirm Double Down availability, I’m still mildly shocked when I pull up to the KFC drive-through and see it there on the menu. So this is really happening. I’m really about to order a sandwich that uses chicken for buns.
When I get my sandwich, I open the box and discover KFC’s solution to the most obvious technical challenge of the breadless sandwich. The quandary, the stumbling block that’s halted all prior chicken-instead-of-bread research, is that bread traditionally serves as a means of grasping messy fillings. So what do you do when the exterior of the sandwich is itself greasy fried chicken? You wrap it in wax paper, is what you do. Because you wouldn’t want to touch with your fingers what you’re ingesting into your body. Is “genius” too strong a word?
I use the paper to grip the sandwich, which nonetheless slides around in my hands like a feisty trout. But given a bit of determination, I subdue the 10.3 ounces of chicken, bacon and cheese long enough to take a bite. The result is a flavor explosion, a nuclear assault on my palate, a weeklong Woodstock where 100,000 taste buds are tripping on pure umami. Anything is possible. Compared to this, an Angry Whopper is a bowl of Kashi. KFC has rung a bell that cannot be unrung.
People laughed at the idea of using chicken for bread. They said it couldn’t be done. But we’re a nation of dreamers, inventors and scientists—gluttonous dreamers, tubby inventors and morbidly obese scientists. With a little know-how and some good old-fashioned bravado, we’ve entered an era when the sandwich is no longer constrained by bread, tradition or shame. John Lennon wrote a little song called “Imagine” that seems so relevant to this wondrous time we’re living in. Especially the verse that goes, “Imagine all the people, crapping themselves as they have heart attacks.”
If I were the bread industry, I’d be running scared. In a stroke, KFC has rendered bread obsolete. What would you rather have for breakfast, toast or fried chicken? And I think we can all agree that the bread bowl was always better in theory than in practice. Imagine clam chowder in a savory fried-chicken bowl. No sogginess there, friends. Even the expression, “The best thing since sliced bread” is now an anachronism, supplanted by “the best thing since fried chicken instead of sliced bread”.
There’s already a lot of hand-wringing on Beacon Hill as legislators argue over the future of the Double Down in Massachusetts. Personally, I think we should legalize it so that we can collect tax revenue, because habitual users are going to get their hands on it anyway. If the Double Down is criminal, then only criminals will have Double Downs, right? Besides, the recipe is already all over the Internet, and any two-bit chicken-slinger can rig a basement kitchen to cook up counterfeits that might be cut with spare ribs, sausage patties or worse.
As for the critics who suggest that this is exactly the sort of mass-produced high-calorie trash that contributes to America’s grotesque obesity and general unhealthiness, I’ll have you know that the Double Down is actually a great source of fiber. As long as you also eat the box.