You can still order the Double Down at Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC), three years after the fast-food chain reveled its infamous breadless "sandwich" in a 2010 April Fool's Day press release and then decided to leave it on the menu. But the Double Down's continued existence does not justify anyone 's ordering it.
The idea behind the Double Down is simple, yet terrifying. The folks at KFC, in what I admit is a creative maneuver, replaced the bread of a sandwich with two breaded chicken patties. Sandwiched within the chicken are bacon, slices of processed white American cheese and a viscous cheese sauce that tastes like it is mixed with ranch dressing or mayo.
Back in 2010, the Double Down became an April Fool's Day phenomenon. It was so silly that it became an example of marketing genius. The press could not resist the story of this greasy, heavy food as a symbol for our nationwide gluttony. The Double Down was irresistible and perfect for sharing through social media. It was a joke, a prank on both sandwich die-hards and the public at-large. But the Double Down was also an ingenious way to call attention to the KFC brand, a difficult task given the challenge of continually repackaging and reselling the few options that the chicken chain sells.
The so-called "sandwich" was so popular that KFC keeps it as a menu option to this day, though it is not heavily advertised. I've been afraid to sample it for years, but I tried the Double Down this week at a franchise somewhere off a major highway in Delaware on my drive back to Tufts from a spring break trip in Georgia.
My conclusion was that it was not a sandwich by any means, though the breaded-chicken-as-bread idea, as idiotic as it seems on its surface, has the potential to be tasty in the hands of a restaurant with better ingredients than KFC's.
I try to be as lenient with my existential sandwich concerns as possible, but my first problem with the Double Down was that it lacked the first ingredients in any good sandwich: sturdy yet not-overpowering pieces of bread. Instead, the two pieces of "breaded" chicken serving as the meal's bookends were soggy and overpowered the bacon and cheese within. My hands did not end up as greasy as I had feared, but the chicken nonetheless did not stack up, its saltiness silencing the rest of the "sandwich."
My other problems with the Double Down were with the ingredients lodged inside those chicken patties. The bacon was not crispy and was dominated by the chicken; the white American cheese was not melted and without flavor and the orange, liquid cheese sauce - which has sort of the consistency of a non-chunky salsa con queso - tasted nothing like cheese.
I doubt that every Double Down is as bad as the one I tasted, however. I rolled up to the Delaware drive-thru near closing time, when the chicken had clearly been sitting around for a while. Freshly fried, crunchy, moist chicken is the key to any fried chicken sandwich, even for one that bears no bread.
And hey, I'm not entirely against the idea of using breaded chicken patties as the base for a sandwich. If the chicken had been crunchy, less salty and somehow not as greasy, the Double Down could have passed for a decent food item. But either bread or a chewy biscuit remains without a doubt the best vehicle for a fried chicken sandwich.
I think KFC knows this, which is why the chain meant for the Double Down to be a temporary way to build buzz. Three years later, it's about time to put the Double Down down.
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Ben Kochman is a senior majoring in English. He can be reached at benjamin.kochman@tufts.edu or on Twitter @benkochman. Want to see what Ben ate this week? Check out his video column on Jumbo Slice at blogs.tuftsdaily.com.
