After my inspiring encounter with the Burger King Mac N Cheetos I was slightly optimistic for the Cheetos Chicken Fries review. Only slightly. The rest of me was filled with foreboding.
Chicken fries are a strange concept in and of themselves. Chicken patties are already a thing. Chicken strips are already a thing. Chicken nuggets are already a thing. I’ll bet it took 50 top-level executives 3 years to come up with this new revolution in chicken consumption, bu they really achieved something remarkable. They made the chicken strips skinnier!
I’ll concede that chicken fries offer a couple advantages to other breaded chicken options. Their size and shape lends them to easy and portable dipping. It’s probably also easier to produce these little strips of chicken rather than larger chunks. They’ll also cook faster. Those are the only advantages.
To give a fair comparison I ordered a small order of the regular chicken fries and a small order of the Cheetos chicken fries. The packaging is admittedly very well done.
Don’t think about the boxes too hard, though. It doesn’t take long to realize that you’re eating a chicken product out of what appears to be a paper facsimile of a chicken head. That’s pretty messed up.
Since I’m a classy dude I brought my own ceramic dish to eat my chicken fries out of. It didn’t make them look a whole lot more appetizing, but it was better than the chicken brain imagery.
You’ll notice right away that the Cheetos chicken fries (on the left) have quite a bit more color than the regular chicken fries (on the right). The regular chicken fries tasted about as boring as they looked. The ratio of breading to chicken is heavily skewed towards breading, and I doubt that there was any seasoning whatsoever added once they were removed from the fryer. End result, they were kind of dry, fairly greasy, and extremely bland.
The Cheetos chicken fries weren’t much better.The Cheetos coating added a little bit of flavor, but it was marginal. They didn’t taste anything like Cheetos, but at least they had a bit of flavor, albeit a generic MSG sort of flavor.
The texture was a little more appealing than the regular chicken fries. I believe that whatever is used for the Cheetos breading (I’m not going to assume that it’s Cheetos) creates a slightly crispier crust. Dipping them in the Chicken Fries Sauce (mayonnaise based something or other) made them edible, but not something I would choose over most other options. The Cheetos Chicken Fries earned a 4.5 on my scale, while the regular chicken fries clock in at an even 4.
Could the Cheetos Chicken Fries be redeemed by some change in the Burger King corporate kitchen? Probably not. They could toss them in a Cheetos seasoning mixture after they come out of the fryer. Could help. That doesn’t change the fact that they’re always going to be a bit dry, a bit greasy, and an overall poor life choice. I do not recommend.
Catalog:
Sampled on 9/22/2016 in Edmonds, Washington
The Sodafry 