Burger King Bonanza (Winter 2016 Edition!)

Dr. Pepper milkshakes, jalapeno chicken fries, greasy garlicky burgers and two varieties of grilled hot dog ... is it fast food heaven, or fast food hell?

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@Jimbo__X

Say what you will about Burger King - and whatever it is, it's probably going to be something negative - you at least have to give the other long-running fast food burger joint some credit. When it comes to weird-ass, gimmicky limited-time-only menu offerings, they usually bring the goods in spades. I mean, this is the same chain that gave us spooky steak sauce burgers that turned our turds chartreuse last Halloween, after all. 

Not merely content with tossing out one or two limited time only, novelty foodstuffs, Burger King rolled out a good half dozen specialty items over the 2016 Q1 season, running the gamut from esoteric, co-branded milkshakes to a double dose of grilled wieners to seasoned chicken tenders with packaging that's yay close to being racist. So in short, yeah, they had one HELL of a quarter, I believe it is safe to say. 

So, what all did you miss out on January and February 2016? Here's a quick rundown of a couple of BK gimmicks that - odds are - you are likely to NEVER wrap your lips, tongue and bicuspids around ever again. Hey, you should have waddled your ass on over to the King when you had your chance, amigo...

A DR. PEPPER-FLAVORED MILKSHAKE! 

What on the surface sounds like an utterly disgusting item is actually one of the more surprisingly enjoyable LTO products to come down the BK pipes in quite some time. Granted, the concept of the beverage is hardly anything new - forgive me if I am mistaken, but I am pretty sure people used to call ice cream with soda poured on top of it "floats" - but I really didn't expect America's favorite non-Coke/non-Pepsi carbonated cola to taste as good as it is in congealed dairy form. 

OK, ok, so it does look like a big old swirling puddle of mud (or the surface of Jupiter, depending on how high you are at the time of ingesting it), but flavor-wise, it is actually quite yummy. You get a full, chunky and saccharine (but not too saccharine) kick from the vanilla ice cream and the fizzy, tingly Dr. Pepper addendum gels astonishingly well with it. It's not quite the best way to describe its taste, but imagine a really thick, rich dark cherry ice cream, and that's essentially what you are getting here in liquefied form. Suffice to say, Dr. Pepper clearly works better as a slushy ice cream than it does as a bubble gum flavor. 

JALAPENO CHICKEN FRIES!

Chicken Fries - a longtime seasonal BK product that became a full-time menu offering last summer - have gone through a few variations over the years. The latest is a super spicy mixture, but really, the most important thing here is the packaging ... which, frankly, is about as culturally sensitive as greeting the prime minister of Singapore while stretching your eyelids vertically and making "ching chong ding dong" sounds under your breath. 

Beyond the gloriously stereotypical depiction of a Mexican chicken (complete with a sombrero and maracas), the package is just littered with terrible ethnic puns. Oh, the "I'd Mariachi this flavor" joke above is bad, but I assure you the ones on the other four sides of the packaging are just as groan-inducing, if not worse. How bad are we talking here? "These jalapeño chicken fries are la bomba" - that's how fuckin' bad. 

Alas, while the marketing of the products are, well, dubious, to say the least, you really can't argue with the gustatory quality of the fries themselves (which, to those who aren't in the know, aren't actually fries ... they are really teeny, tiny slivers of breaded chicken, i.e., nuggets shaped like a lower case "l.") They are comparatively spicy, but seeing as how even faux Mexican fast food juggernauts like Taco Bell and Del Taco can't produce a hot sauce worth a darn, it really shouldn't come as a surprise that these items are probably a four, maybe a five on the adjusted, American consumer heat index. And if you are using the actual Scoville scale? Eh, it might break into the third tier from the bottom. If you are feeling particularly generous that evening. 

AN EXTRA LONG BUTTERY CHEESEBURGER!

Burger King has been all about the burger\sub hybrid sandwiches for a while now, and the "extra long buttery cheeseburger" takes the gimmick to its next logical step - that being, a sammich that is pretty much the exact same thing as a normal Whopper, only with the patties decked out side by side inside an Italian roll - but with a shit ton of garlic sauce on top of everything!

Yeah, it is not the most inventive menu addendum they've ever trot out, but on the whole, it is pretty good. As a huge garlicky burger fan, though, I can safely say I have had far better burgers of the like at other establishments - Steak 'n Shake's Garlic Double Steakburger immediately springs to mind - and the melted cheddar cheese tasted a little too plastic. Then again, I did order it from a franchisee that once took 15 minutes to get my two Whopper order correct before, so maybe that's something we can blame on that particular establishment as opposed to the national brand itself. But hey - as long-time IIIA readers can attest to, at least they didn't forget to put a goddamn patty in the bun, as some other BK franchisees are oft prone. 

A CLASSIC GRILLED DOG!

Not since Taco Bell announced its breakfast menu has their been a fast food gamble as big as Burger King's grilled hot dogs. While some elitist dickwad at the New York Post deemed the item "a disgusting disgrace" (although judging from the critic's erroneous description of the dog's toppings, it seems quite likely said dickwad never actually tried the item), the little doggies have proven themselves to be BK's fastest selling menu newcomer in years. How successful, you may be wondering? According to some reports, the aggregate Burger King restaurant is selling between 80 to 120 of the newfangled hot dogs per day.

To be fair, the "classic" hot dog ain't exactly a beauty. Alas, alike many a Bruce Springsteen sexual conquest, "that's all right," though, because as unsightly as the product may be, it doesn't really taste all that bad. You get ketchup, you get mustard, you get onions and you get relish, and yes, the wieners themselves are indeed grilled (or, in this case, a bit on the scorched side.) Yeah, it doesn't come close to the hot dogs offered by Sonic and Checkers/Rally's, but it is certainly better than most gas station hot dogs. And yes, I know that's a really backhanded compliment, but coming from a guy who actually kind of likes gas station food, that's nowhere near as big a slight as it sounds. 

A CHILI CHEESE GRILLED DOG!

Next to Sonic the Hedgehog, there probably isn't a bigger fan of chili dogs than me. This is apparent by all of the re-pins my recipe for veggie chili dogs has gotten on Pinterest - which, presumably, means the masses really like my taste when it comes to good old fashioned, artery-clogging white trash cuisine. Which, naturally, makes Burger King's take on the time-tested county carnival/trailer park favorite all the more disappointing. 

First off, it isn't a terrible item. It is certainly edible, and if you are half-starved, it will certainly fix you right up. That said, nothing about the dog really felt authentic; the cheese tasted like it was imitation-brand and the chili was like, ALDI-quality and shit. If you are looking for a chili cheese dog fix, there are certainly far better fast food options at your disposal - like, any of them. 

To summarize? The Dr. Pepper milkshake was surprisingly good, the jalapeño fries were fairly decent despite offending everyone of Hispanic origin, the extra long buttery cheeseburger was just sort of meh, the classic hot dog is certainly serviceable and the chili cheese dog is a huge letdown. So, yeah, in terms of gustatory quality, it is a real mixed bag, but you know what? Sometimes, you just get a hankering for slightly above mediocre different over well above average normal. Can you get far better food at other restaurants? Without question. But as far as lower-class, unhealthy, edible ephemerality goes, it is hard to beat the uncultured, saturated fat-soaked fast food fugaciousness the fine folks at the King have given us over the last three months. 

And for that dedication to novelty consumer experience, I gently tip my paper crown to them. 

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Hubba Bubba Dr. Pepper Bubblegum!

Have you ever been sipping on a Dr. Pepper and thought to yourself, "man, sometimes I just want to chew this stuff instead of drink it?" Well, it looks like Wrigley's has finally answered your prayers...

Let's talk about the art of criticism for a moment. Social commentary is pretty easy, since everybody has an opinion on culture and politics. Literature, film and music are also pretty easy to critique, as are video games, food and drink. Other things however, are a bit more challenging to review -- like, say, pens or hotel rooms. I mean, yeah, you can probably iron out a couple of paragraphs if you really apply yourself, but in general, we have so few experiences with such things (compared to watching movies or eating out at restaurants, anyway) that comparatively ranking those experiences is difficult.

Which brings me to one of my tallest orders to date as a subversive anti-consumerist satirist fan of mass manufactured culture. How do you, precisely, review bubblegum?

Over the years, I've probably chewed tens of thousands of pieces of gum. Hell, I may even be up to the sextuple-digits by now, actually. As much experience as I have had with the semi-foodstuffs, however, I have yet to really develop anything even remotely resembling a qualitative personal gauge for what makes gum superior or inferior to others. Surely, you cannot just rely upon simple flavor here -- you also have to figure in things like the duration of the flavor, how long it takes before the gum becomes too soggy to thoroughly chew and of course, its overall mouthfeel (if it has a gel center a'la Freshen Up, that's obviously automatic bonus points.) And that's not even accounting for variations in texture -- can you really objectively compare the flavor of  your basic stick of Juicy Fruit to that of a Hobgoblin-themed gumball, anyway? With all of those factors taken into consideration, maybe it actually isn't surprising why I haven't come up with a ranking system yet.

And then, along comes something like Hubba Bubba's Dr. Pepper-flavored bubblegum, which makes you reevaluate your entire philosophical outlook on things. What an amazing corporate syncretism going on here, no? It's Wrigley's meets Cadburry Schweppes (by way of corporate spinoff) -- it's not quite the Mountain Dew-flavored Oreos I have always dreamed of, but as far as cross-promotional Frankenfoods go, I'd say this one is definitely one of the finest I have seen in a while.

Of course, this isn't the first time somebody tried to convert Dr. Pepper into gum.Way back in the 1980s, the popular beverage was transformed into a fancy bubblegum with a fancy, quasi-liquid core. Ostensibly, that meant you could feasibly chew and drink the product simultaneously, although from what I recollect, the molten gunk in the middle didn't taste all that much like any kind of soda ... unless there is a cola out there somewhere that tastes like melted confectioner sugar.

This newfangled gum, I am afraid, is sans that semi-liquid gimmick. Admittedly, that's a pretty big letdown, seeing as how synthetic soda flavoring technology has had to have certainly made leaps and bounds since the Reagan years. Alas, as its own individual product, I reckon this here Hubba Bubba/Dr. Pepper chimera (henceforth referred to as BubbaPepper) isn't too bad.

As soon as you open the wrapper, the first thing you are going to notice is the smell. Give the engineers at Wrigley's credit, because the scent of this stuff is almost indistinguishable from that of the actual cola. Go ahead, crack open one of these bad boys in a crowded room, and I guarantee you someone will soon be asking if someone spilled a Dr. Pepper on the floor.

Probably the biggest problem with the gum, however, is its appearance. I guess the brown hue is a nice ode to the color of the beverage, but I am definitely not a fan of the ridged, obese Tootsie Roll aesthetic. I know it sounds like me trying to be funny, but it actually DOES start smelling like a Tootsie Roll after awhile. Yeah, at first, you may be smelling nothing but soda, but once the Tootsie Roll thought enters your head, there's no way you will be able to smell anything other than gooey chocolate. It's just like that dress meme that took the Internet by storm earlier this year -- as soon as you see black and blue (Tootsie Roll smell), you'll never be able to go back to seeing white and gold (Dr. Pepper smell.)

As far as the product's taste is concerned, it's all right. To me, it didn't really have that much of a Dr. Pepper vibe; I mean, a slight hint was palpable, but it was fairly faint, and after about five minutes of chewing, the flavoring seems to dissipate altogether. Maybe it's just the power of suggestion, but I started getting a Tootsie Roll taste as well after a few gnashes -- can anybody else out there who has tried this stuff go to bat for me, or am I just flat out going bonkers here?

It really seems to be a golden era for novelty gum right now. In addition to the Dr. Pepper blend, Hubba Bubba has also released a Hawaiian Punch-flavored tie-in, while other manufacturers have releases gums that (allegedly) taste like, among other things, Sour Patch Kids and assorted Starburst candies.

At the end of the day, though, I guess I just can't give you folks a solid interpretation of this stuff. Sure, I can give you kind of an overview of what the the product looks, smells and tastes like, but I really can't describe to you how the gum feels swirling around in your mouth, or the rubbery friction that results from pounding the gum between your back row bicuspids. Ultimately, this is just the kind of stuff you are going to have to try and dictate for yourself -- and seriously, if you dictate anything other than "Tootise Roll," you better shoot me a damned e-mail.

Lastly, I just wanted to comment on how much of a joy it was to see the "mouth-wrapper-trash-can" sequential pictograph above. It does the heart good to know that, more than a decade after I graduated high school, today's youths are still bearing witness to the same text-less, anti-littering hieroglyphics that my generation grew up with. Dr. Pepper flavored things may be scrumptious, but even that doesn't hold a candle to the sweet taste of continuity...

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Celeste's Limited Edition White Pizza!

Plus, some stuff about Dr. Pepper's new vanilla-flavored drink, too!

Mama Celeste -- now known simply as Celeste, but not to be confused with a different brand called Celeste that sells questionable beverages at Kangaroo gas stations throughout the U.S. -- has never really been one to cash in on modern trends. You can ascertain as much by looking at the company's website, which feels like it hasn't been updated since 2003.

Celeste, "the pizza for one," knows its nothing better than a niche product for really poor people, and nobly, it has refused to hop aboard all of those highfalutin, "limited-time only" gimmicks that competitors like Totino's are always trotting out.

Which is why, on my lost stroll through the frozen pizza aisle, I was somewhat taken aback by this sight:

What the...a NEW Mama Celeste offering, in this, the year of our Lord 2014? Shit, they even stamped "LIMITED EDITION" on their box in a font that's nearly larger than the pizza's official title. Looks like one of the last stalwarts of the Old Guard has finally joined modernity; expect RC Cola to roll out a new "EXTREME PINEAPPLE" soda any day now.

Well, it's a white pizza, which means three things: it has mozzarella on it, the sauce is Alfredo, and there's a shit ton of garlic salt sprinkled all over it. And since it's a Celeste product, it also comes with a handy dandy silver baking tray, which is quite easily the most ghetto thing in the history of Planet Earth.

As a congealed product, the item didn't really have a smell when I unwrapped it. Then again, it's a frozen chunk of mass manufactured dough, with artificial dairy slathered all over it. Most corpses wouldn't smell like anything if they underwent the same kind of processing that these pizzas do.

The appeal of Celeste pizzas, of course, is that you can microwave them. Per the back of the box (pictured above, just in case Stevie Wonder is an IIIA fan), you're supposed to nuke this sumbitch for four minutes, and you're all set.

Well, four minutes in, this is what my limited edition Celeste white pizza resembled. The perimeter of the pizza was nice and semi-baked, but a good 75 percent of the synthetic cheese atop my pie was still very much unthawed. Cue another four minutes of watching this thing spin around and around inside a radioactive contraption; a good ten years from now, when its revealed that I cannot conceive, please point me back to this article.

After EIGHT combined minutes of microwaving, this is what the white pizza resembled. The outer shell was burned to a crisp and somehow, most of the cheese appeared to crawl towards the center of the pie, where radioactive technologies STILL couldn't completely de-ice the faux cheese hanging out at the nucleus of the pizza.

Needless to say, this stuff was not the best pizza I had ever eaten before. For what it was, though it really wasn't that horrible. You could actually pick up the Alfredo sauce, and shockingly, the garlic seasoning wasn't overpowering. I still had to church it up with some additional spices, but it was...against all odds...edible.

You really have to be in a certain mood to eat this stuff, though. Like, when its three in the morning , and you want to chow down on something, but you really don't feel like doing anything that requires any extra effort, like turning on an oven or having to boil something. Celeste pizza is the kind of food you eat, in  the middle of the night, while standing in the kitchen in your boxers. You don't eat it because you're hungry, and you sure as heck don't eat it because it tastes good. You just eat it, because there's a void somewhere in your soul that -- temporarily -- you can quash with make-believe cheese and irradiated crust.

Mama Celeste's limited edition white pizza is a post-post-modern food, for a world filled with post-post-modern people. You won't like it, but you'll eat it anyway. All hail the new flesh...while supplies last, of course.

SUPER BONUS MEGA DUPER ALL RIGHT GOOD TIME EXTRA!

So, Dr. Pepper has a new permutation out. They don't really seem to wheel out the product variations with the same regularity as Coke and Pepsi, so this here "Vanilla Float" permutation really caught my eye.

For whatever reason, Dr. Pepper just doesn't have much luck with the revamps. Remember Dr. Pepper Red Fusion and Dr. Pepper Berries and Cream? Yeah, not exactly the most memorable beverages in the world, no?

The good thing about Dr. Pepper Vanilla Float -- a product no doubt destined to go the way of Pepsi Paradise Mango by the time September gets here -- is that it does indeed taste like a pretty good vanilla soda.

The big drawback there, of course, is that it tastes like a pretty good vanilla soda. There are about fifteen billion vanilla-sodas that taste just like this one, and to be honest, the Dr. Pepper flavor here is a bit too overpowering. I mean, yeah, you can pick up the vanilla flavoring, but its nowhere near as strong as it is in Vanilla Coke. Of course, you don't get the infamous "Vanilla Coke aftertaste," with this one, but its a small consolation for being a very, very by-the-numbers product.

It's drinkable, of course, and I reckon it's good for a parched throat. But I'm still at a loss for why this product -- of all the possible permutations that could've been selected -- was the one ultimately chosen by Dr. Pepper.

Apparently, my thumb must be WAY off the pulse of mainstream America, I take it.

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