REVIEW: Papa John’s Mushroom Swiss Burger Pizza

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Papa John's Mushroom Swiss Burger Pizza

Papa John’s seems hellbent on deconstructing already-existing fast food sandwiches and turning them into pizza. They are the Dr. Frankenstein of dough. And, as with the infamous doctor, things don’t always go well.

For instance, there was the time they tried to turn a Philly cheesesteak sandwich into a pizza, and they also did it to a double cheeseburger. Both of these were, in my opinion, failed attempts. Oh, sure, Papa John could shout “IT’S ALIVE!” But at what cost?

To my taste buds, I mean. The price is on their menu.

I feel like right after the God of Burgers created the cheeseburger and then added bacon to it, his next creation was the mushroom Swiss burger. I’m not sure why it was that combination that came up next, but it seems to be menu item #3 on a lot of burger restaurants’ lists.

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Papa John’s says that “Our New burger pizza comes with beef, crimini mushrooms, onions, cheese made from mozzarella and Swiss cheeses, with creamy garlic sauce.”

I’m not a mushroom expert, but the mushrooms that came on my pizza looked like what I would call “pizza mushrooms”. Are criminis always used for pizzas? I don’t know, but the ones on my pizza tasted like pizza mushrooms. Which is fine, I suppose. There was also a healthy coverage of them.

What there was not a lot of was burger pieces. I feel like if you’re going to make a pizza specifically designed from a burger, you should get at least one burger piece per bite. That was not the case with my pizza. However, the umami from the mushrooms helped balance that out a little.

The onions were, of course, rather floppy, but they added a nice kick of flavor to the pizza. As for the Swiss, I feel like it added an extra dimension to the cheese profile. I also feel like that sentence smelled just a tiiiiny bit like bullshit. My mind could have been tricking me into thinking that the Swiss was there; I honestly can’t say for sure.

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Call it trivial if you like, but I think the biggest victory of this pizza was Papa John’s choice to use garlic sauce. They must have tweaked the recipe since its application on the Philly Cheesesteak Pizza, because this time it did not taste like bile. It had a nice creamy texture and the taste of garlic was present but not overwhelming.

This was a critical decision, because using tomato sauce would have made the pizza impressively boring, and using the weird “zesty burger sauce” they had on their Double Cheeseburger Pizza would have been disgusting because that shit tasted like hot Thousand Island. So again, good call, Papa.

The Mushroom Swiss Burger Pizza is by far not Papa John’s worst limited time pizza, but I wasn’t exactly blown away by it. There were lots of mushrooms, but they were the same kind of mushrooms you’d get on a usual pizza as far as I could tell, and the burger – kind of an important part – was sparse. I’m not entirely sure I could taste the Swiss, but if I did, it was okay? The real saving grace here was the creamy garlic sauce, which really brought the pizza together and gave it that little something special that it otherwise definitely would have lacked.

(Nutrition Facts – 1/6 of a small pizza – 240 calories, 110 calories from fat, 12 grams of fat, 4.5 grams of saturated fat, 0 grams of trans fat, 25 milligrams of cholesterol, 500 milligrams of sodium, 25 grams of carbohydrates, 1 gram of fiber, 3 grams of sugar, 9 grams of protein..)

Purchased Price: $12.00
Size: Small
Purchased at: Papa John’s
Rating: 6 out of 10
Pros: Creamy garlic sauce brings it all together. The God of Burgers. Plenty of mushrooms. Garlic sauce doesn’t taste like bile this time.
Cons: Sparse burger pieces. Being the Dr. Frankenstein of pizza. My stupid brain could have tricked me into tasting Swiss. Just a bit boring.

REVIEW: Keebler Limited Batch Birthday Cake Fudge Stripes Cookies

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Keebler Limited Batch Birthday Cake Fudge Stripes Cookies

During the 45 years or so of the Cold War, the United States and Soviet Union built up massive quantities of nuclear weapons in an effort to counter each other and become the world’s leading super power.

Each had their own spheres of influence, but since separate hemispheres weren’t enough, both nations just kept building more and bigger missiles until one couldn’t keep up any longer.

A quarter century after the Berlin Wall fell, another arms race is occurring. The good news is that the entire existence of the human race is no longer at stake. The bad news is that we are all going to get massively obese.

It’s a trade I am totally cool with.

Gone are the days when Oreo was content with being the world’s leading chocolate sandwich cookie; likewise, Keebler’s elves aspire to an empire greater than just fudge covered shortbreads. The two companies have fought for cookie supremacy in recent limited time offerings of red velvet and pumpkin spice, but the latest flashpoint in the great cookie conflict is one flavor that I never get tired of celebrating: Birthday Cake.

While I give the elves credit for creating a cookie that has all three traditional elements of birthday cake (sprinkles, frosting, and uh, “cake”) I do need to point out that the box artwork features a cupcake. At first I thought this was just a celebration of portion control, but since the package also happens to be non-resalable — thus increasing my chances of inhaling all the cookies in one sitting — I realize the elves probably just suck at making distinctions.

I, however, do not. And to be sure, the distinction of Birthday Cake vs. Cupcake is one I take seriously. If you show me a cupcake, I expect the frosting to steal the show. That’s not the case with these cookies, though.

Keebler Limited Batch Birthday Cake Fudge Stripes Cookies 2

Oh, I mean the shortbread element is fine. It’s buttery with a delectably fine crumb and the non-overpowering element of sweetness I admire about the original Fudge Stripe.

But whereas the original Fudge Stripe can get away with a faux-chocolate glaze that works to balance the shortbread, the frosting glaze on the latest batch of shortbread just tastes like that generic palm oil glaze we’ve all had a million times. It’s not buttercream frosting; it’s not cream cheese frosting; it’s not even a damn Swiss meringue. It’s just way too sweet, and lacks that luscious mouthfeel of an actual frosting element. Likewise, it’s cut off from the sprinkles, which themselves lack the crunchy contrast I want buried in frosting.

Keebler Limited Batch Birthday Cake Fudge Stripes Cookies 3

Fortunately, since my pantry is always willing to celebrate an actual birthday, I had some rainbow chip frosting handy. Now, while I realize this stuff would be good on anything from pancakes to Ritz crackers, I did find it especially wonderful when stuffed between the Fudge Stripe Birthday Cake cookies.

Biting through the crunchy shortbread into actual, sprinkled-filled frosting — even in an artificial, shelf-stable form — reminded me of Oreo’s birthday cake attempt and how providing just a level of textural contrast can go a long way to really making a birthday cake-flavored product worth the purchase.

Does the fact that Oreo makes a better birthday cake cookie than Keebler mean that the Elves are destined to toil in a downtrodden economy until an ex-KGB spy who likes to take his shirt off attempts to assert them as the world’s leading cookie makers? Probably not. But in the arms race of cookie flavors, Keebler’s latest gambit just can’t keep pace.

(Nutrition Facts – 2 cookies – 130 calories, 6 grams of fat, 4 grams of saturated fat, 0 grams of trans fat, 0 milligrams of cholesterol, 70 milligrams of sodium, 18 grams of carbohydrates, 10 grams of sugar, and less than 1 gram of protein.)

Purchased Price: $2.99
Size: $2.99
Purchased at: Weis Markets
Rating: 5 out of 10
Pros: Delectable shortbread crumb. Crunchy sprinkle pieces. Wonderful vehicle birthday cake frosting.
Cons: Waxy, mostly tasteless frosting element. Too much shortbread taste for a birthday cake product. Non-resalable packaging. Cookie company flavor arms races.

REVIEW: Wendy’s Bacon Mozzarella Burger

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Wendy’s Bacon Mozzarella Burger

Listen close, boys and girls: today’s secret word is “twang.”

Yep, “twang:” everyone’s favorite flavor descriptor that’s fun to overuse and hard to explain, but easily recognizable when you taste it. And every time I use it in my review of Wendy’s new Bacon Mozzarella Burger, I want you to scream as loud as you can like it’s Pee-Wee’s Playhouse.

My apologies to any librarians reading this.

There’s a lot going on in this sandwich, and as the kind of easily overwhelmed person who can’t even decide which grocery aisle to go down first, it helps for me to quickly break it down into parts. So after fixing my hair in the bun’s reflective gloss and becoming That Guy Publically Pointing A Camera At His Hamburger™, I started dissecting.

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Let’s start with that Brioche bun: it has a hyper garlicky and buttery glaze on top of a fragile and well-browned shell that hides fluffy, doughy innards. It’s addictively lick-able, but make sure you don’t touch your camera lens after handling it, unless you like having your review photos look like something out of a hazy movie desert scene.

The festive leafy greens on my Bacon Mozzarella Burger ranged from “fresh, and crisp” to “dark and damp clumps that belong in an amateur production of Little Shop of Horrors.” However, every leaf does a good job of absorbing the addictive twanginess (AHHH!) of the Parmesan Garlic sauce.

And speaking of Parmesan Garlic sauce: Parmesan Garlic sauce! It’s easily the best part of this sandwich, as it combines a buttery base with a biting garlic twang and nostril-tickling notes of nutty cheese that’s been carefully aged in the remote hills of Italy by a wise hermit.

The combo of cheesy and creamy really did remind me of Italian restaurant Alfredo sauce. When doused in this sauce, the burger’s raw red onions deliver a welcome two-pronged bite effect. That’s right: this twang’s got fangs.

The beef burger itself is impressive, too. It tastes freshly browned and salted without being dry, while its core is juicy without being messy. I just wish the bacon and cheese had as much flavor. The Applewood Smoked Bacon tasted of neither apples nor fresh cedar planks, and it had little charcoal-smoked twang.

The mozzarella, meanwhile, was smooth but practically tasteless—it’s a boring cheese choice that really puts the sleepy “zz” in mozzarella.

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It doesn’t matter too much, though. Just like in nature and in many other multi-ingredient burgers, when eaten as a whole, the Bacon Mozzarella Burger’s strongly flavored ingredients swallow many of the weaker ones. In this case, the bun, burger, and Parmesan Garlic sauce dominate with a tasty trio of buttered garlic beef.

It’s like an Olive Garden meal (with breadsticks) in squeezable sandwich form and on a drive-thru budget. Though my single burger rang up at $5.99, the suggested price is $4.69. At that dollar figure, I’d highly recommend this “Taste of Fast Food Italy Burger.”

Even though some ingredients underwhelmed, the rest were impressive enough that you’d think Wendy brought them back from a study abroad trip in Italy that she won’t shut up about for the next five years.

Now I think I need to stop licking butter off my camera and get out of this restaurant before the secret Wendy’s police hauls me off kicking, screaming, and babbling about twangy Italian cheese hermits.

(Nutrition Facts – Single burger – 620 calories, 330 calories from fat, 37 grams of fat, 15 grams of saturated fat, 1.5 grams of trans fat, 120 milligrams of cholesterol, 1430 milligrams of sodium, 34 grams of carbohydrates, 2 grams of dietary fiber, 6 grams of sugar, and 37 grams of protein.)

Purchased Price: $5.99
Size: Single
Purchased at: Wendy’s
Rating: 8 out of 10
Pros: Italian-American fusion you can eat at 70mph. Buttery Brioche worth ruining technology over. Parmesan cave gurus. Everybody have fun tonight. Everybody Twang Chung tonight.
Cons: MozzZzzZZarella. Having to go to Home Depot for properly woody bacon. Burger price variability. Limp spinach swamp monsters. Eternally being “That Guy.”

REVIEW: Limited Edition Blueberry Pie Oreo Cookies

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Limited Edition Blueberry Pie Oreo Cookies

I imagine there are some of you out there who are absolutely sick of all these limited edition Oreo flavors. You’ve probably left a comment on someone’s Facebook post about a new Oreo variety that was somewhere along the lines of “Enough with the Oreo flavors” or “Oreo needs to stop” or “OreOh no, not moreo Oreos.”

But think of the food scientists who develop these flavors. Oreo is the canvas on which they can use natural and artificial flavors to unleash their creativity. Would you take away a paintbrush from Van Gogh? Would you cut the strings in Beethoven’s piano? Would you smash Hemingway’s typewriter with a sledgehammer? Would you take Chicago away from Dick Wolf?

Without the Oreo cookie, some food scientists might have less fun jobs to do, like coming up with new ways for Nature Valley to use granola or trying to shoehorn Kashi’s seven whole grains into something edible.

The latest flavor that’ll make Oreo haters roll their eyes is Limited Edition Blueberry Pie.

The cookie combines the graham-flavored wafer that comes with S’mores, Strawberry Shortcake, and Key Lime Pie Oreo cookies with a Violet Beauregard-colored blueberry creme.

These aren’t the first blueberry Oreo cookies to enter my mouth. I’ve had blueberry ice cream flavored Oreo cookies from Asia that used chocolate wafers. While they were good, they didn’t make me instantly call Nabisco’s Customer Service line and demand the company bring blueberry Oreo cookies to the U.S. But these Blueberry Pie Oreo Cookies make me want to call the Nabisco Customer Service line and demand they never leave shelves or send me a signed letter from the current Mondelez CEO promising they’ll be back next year.

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While I’ve never had a blueberry pie with a graham cracker crust, I’ve mostly had the lattice top ones depicted on the front of the packaging, this Oreo makes me pie-curious. Now I must try a blueberry pie with a graham cracker crust, because I think these are the best fruit-flavored Oreo cookies so far.

The slightly tart blueberry flavor reminds me of what I’d get from a blueberry pie, muffin, scone, or (insert baked good here). Good job, food scientists! The graham-flavored wafers do a great job of complementing the creme. They go together like Cagney & Lacey, Norm & Cliff, and Ren & Stimpy. The wafers don’t heavily dampen the creme’s flavor and there’s the same level of graham flavor as there would be a crust flavor in an actual blueberry pie. It’s a great combination and one that’s surprising because of my previous blueberry Oreo experience.

But there are two minor issues. Even though, these are wonderful cookies, the image of the lattice top pie on the packaging doesn’t represent what the cookies taste like. Also, these are currently available only at Target for a limited time. But again, minor issues.

Overall, I think these Limited Edition Blueberry Pie Oreo Cookies are good enough to make new Oreo flavor haters still hate new Oreo flavors. Yes, haters are going to still hate no matter what. But if you’re a fan of blueberry baked goods, I think you’ll love these.

(Nutrition Facts – 2 cookies – 140 calories, 60 calories from fat, 7 grams of fat, 2 grams of saturated fat, 0 grams of trans fat, 0 milligrams of cholesterol, 65 milligrams of sodium, 15 milligrams of potassium, 21 grams of carbohydrates, 0 grams of fiber, 12 grams of sugar, and less than 1 gram of protein.)

Purchased Price: $2.99
Size: 10.7 oz.
Purchased at: Target
Rating: 9 out of 10
Pros: Blueberry flavor reminds me of baked goods. My favorite fruit-flavored Oreo cookie. Letting food scientists be creative. Creme and wafers are a great combination. Wafer doesn’t mute the creme’s flavor much.
Cons: Limited edition Oreo haters are gonna to hate these. Blueberry haters are gonna hate these. Limited edition. Available only at Target.

QUICK REVIEW: Cheesy Quesadilla Pringles

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Cheesy Quesadilla Pringles

I imagine putting together a Taco Bell Crunchwrap Supreme is like brain surgery when compared with the effort it takes to make a cheesy quesadilla. Making one is easier than typing qasadia quasadila quesadila quesadea quesadilla for a first time speller of the word. It involves these simple steps: warm up a soft tortilla in a skillet, sprinkle on a lot of cheese, wait for cheese to melt, fold tortilla in half, and eat.

But Pringles, the Master of Potato Flake Compression, has given us a much simpler way to experience the simple dish — Cheesy Quesadilla Pringles.

It’s not a new flavor, it originally came out years ago, but it hasn’t been on shelves for a while and is currently exclusive to Walgreens. So you can pick up a can while you’re picking up your prescription for something that only you and your doctor know about. Oh, and don’t forget to take your Walgreens Balance Rewards Card. This paragraph was not brought to you by Walgreens at the corner happy & healthy.

The flavor of these crisps is not what I would consider bold or cheese quesadilla-like. There’s a light cheesiness with an equally light pepperiness. I know what these are supposed to taste like, but it doesn’t fire my neurons in a way that makes me think cheesy quesadilla. Instead, all I can think about is watered down chile con queso.

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Maybe the flavors are mild because Pringles wanted to recreate the flavor dampening abilities of soft tortillas. Or maybe the seasoning robot in the Pringles factory was set to level 4 by accident.

Overall, Cheesy Quesadilla Pringles are adequate. I don’t think it’s one of those “accidentally eat more than half a can in one sitting” flavors, like sour cream and onion or original. I guess what I’m trying to say is if you see it while picking up your medication at Walgreens, it’s probably not worth a try.

Disclosure: I received a free sample from Pringles in return for an honest review. Receiving the sample did not influence my review.

Purchased Price: FREE
Size: 5.96 oz can
Purchased at: Available at Walgreens
Rating: 5 out of 10
Nutrition Facts: (1 ounce) 150 calories, 80 calories from fat, 9 grams of fat, 2.5 grams of saturated fat, 0 grams of trans fat, 0 milligrams of cholesterol, 170 milligrams of sodium, 16 grams of carbohydrates, less than 1 gram of fiber, less than 1 gram of sugar, and 1 gram of protein.

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