The KFC Double Down is a sandwich, but it's not supposed to be eaten.
The Double Down is an entity born for the social media age, designed to be spread across the internet through snarky blog posts and Instagram photos with bad lighting. It's made to be viral, more digestible as a news commodity than is in the stomach of a mother of three who has acid reflux.
That's what makes the concept so brilliant. The Double Down is such a cumbersome, flamboyant food pile that it hardly counts as part of the menu. In reality, the offerings at KFC currently break down into two groups: Things People Actually Order and The Double Down.
KFC's advertising campaign even has a certain level of self-awareness. They know that the idea of the usual Generic Young Hip Millennials grabbing some Double Downs on their Hip Millennial Tech Startup lunch breaks is laughable.
Instead, they pitch the idea that a bunch of dudes in a crummy apartment or dorm decided to grab some because, hey, they had nothing better to do today than raise their cholesterol. But even this is a stretch. A person eats a Double Down the same way a Mexican cliff diver jumps into the ocean: alone, brazenly and with roughly the same amount of salt hitting them in the face.
The Double Down is a dumb idea. You know it. I know it. KFC knows it. But that's not the point. The point is that, even if the people talking about it aren't eating it, they're still spreading the word, the promotion, the legend.
The sandwich certainly exists, but it doesn't necessarily have to. Pictures and people going on about how "This is Why America has A Fat Butt" on Facebook is enough to keep the sandwich -- and the KFC brand -- relevant.
The first run for the Double Down was a bit of a social phenomenon, epitomizing everything that the Ridiculous Fast Food Item market has come to symbolize. It's the Godfather of over-the-top sandwiches. It doesn't need to take on all challengers in order to maintain its legacy. It just has to trot down the ramp every couple years, wave to the crowd and soak in the applause as the rest of the fast food world concedes defeat.
As with all legends, the Double Down is best when never actually seen in person. Like Bigfoot and Area 51 before it, the great myths of the world are better when sensationalized and infinitely more interesting than the actual truth. But then again, with a few nuts on the internet claiming to have "really seen it out there," legend doesn't hold the same weight. So here goes:
The KFC Double Down
The KFC Double Down is an unwieldy fried Meat Oreo that replaces the cookie's wave of oily sweetness with a largely uniform wall of saltiness and a horrifying temperature disparity between the chicken-bread and the sandwich contents.
Upon receiving the sandwich, it was immediately clear that the two pieces of chicken were cooked fully and then slapped together with the cheese, bacon and sauce in between just before it was handed to me. By the time I had sat down to take a look at the thing, the cheese had hardly started to melt and hung over the edge of the chicken.
The expectation, I suppose, is that the heat from the chicken is supposed to get a nice melt going. It's a noble idea, but falls short in practice. However, that's certainly not a result of the chicken not being hot.
The first bite of the Double Down defies expectations in a really annoying way. I was surprised by how little grease and sloppiness I encountered when first picking it up. It may be that, with the second go around, KFC has decided to go with a more rigid cut of chicken for the bun.
I missed the Double Down the first time around. But if previous images are any indication, KFC has adapted the sandwich to a more reasonable form. The "bun" on my Double Down looked less like a normal piece of KFC chicken and more like a cutlet that's been pounded thin like in a chicken parm. The end result is a much more uniform and functional sandwich than what you would think considering the Double Down's haphazard premise. Unfortunately, that breading also acts as a good insulator for the chicken, meaning that if your Double Down is a scalding mass of sizzling chicken flesh on the inside, you won't know until you take a bite.
This is perhaps the biggest shortcoming of the Double Down. Without the bread, you expose your mouth to all be direct perils of the chicken. With a bun, there's less concern about taking a bite since there's bread to act as a mouth buffer for the heat -- and for the texture as well.
Since you don't have a fork and knife to break it down into manageable pieces, your only option is to come at the Double Down at awkward angles, which is unfortunate for your mouth. The rough outside texture of the chicken provides a good crunchy texture, but does leave parts of your mouth exposed to getting a little scraped similar to the way a well-toasted club sandwich does.
In a surprising twist, it's actually your mouth you should be worrying about when eating the double down as opposed to your stomach. So, that's something.
So what does it taste like?
The Double Down is a simple sandwich: Two pieces of friend chicken with cheese, a couple slices of bacon and a dollop of something called "Colonel's Special Sauce," which, like most mystery sauces, is a mayonnaise-y/Thousand Island dressing offshoot.
When you bite into it, there's little question that the chicken is the star while the stuff in the middle is more of a three-part meat-cheese condiment. It doesn't quite feel like a sandwich in a classic sense. It similar to how, when you bite into an ice cream sandwich, the contents kind of squish to the side while you bite through the two cookies, but to a bigger extreme and with less mess.
The sauce is key, if bland. It adds a welcome amount of creaminess to the sandwich and is the one ingredient doing anything to cool down the chicken heat bombs. The cheese is standard fare and really gets lost in the amalgamation in the middle of the sandwich.
Honestly, for a while, I straight up forgot there was bacon on this sandwich. It's a nice addition, but really gets out-muscled buy the roughly 15:1 chicken-to-bacon ratio.
As for the main aspect of the Double Down: I like the chicken. If you like KFC chicken, then this will probably work for you. The chicken's flavorful and the breading's seasoned well and gives a nice crunchy texture.
If you don't feel comfortable shoving two pieces of chicken down your gullet simultaneously, then obviously you don't know how to party. You are not invited to the Double Down Hoedown.
The final word
Like most legends, the truth of the Double Down is not as impressive as the stories say. In the end, it's just a man. And by man, I mean two pieces of chicken with some cheesy stuff in the middle pretending to be a sandwich.
The Double Down is discussed in such grim tones as this diabetes-inducing death sandwich. It's certainly not good for you, of course. But the reality is that the Double Down is usually marked at 540 calories. Meanwhile a McDonalds Premium Crispy Chicken Club Sandwich (not that bad, right?) is 670 calories.
What should you take away from this? Pretty much all fast food is simply terrible for you -- that's the main thing. Besides that, is the idea that the consumption of a Double Down isn't the metaphorical slaying of a fast food dragon that it's made it to be. It's a couple pieces of fried chicken with some cheese, bacon and a squirt of special sauce.
Just don't tell anyone that. It'll ruin the mystique.
"I ate it so you don't have to" is a (somewhat) regular series by Nick O'Malley of MassLive.com.