 Image via Popeyes
Popeyes looks to add some heat to its sides menu with the launch of new Jalapeño Poppers at select locations. The Fast Food Post first spotted the new side item on the menu at a Popeyes restaurant in the New York area. Jalapeño Poppers consist of spicy jalapeño peppers filled with cream cheese, then hand-battered in a southern breading and deep-fried until crispy and golden. They’re available in 3- and 5-piece orders and are served with your choice of sauce for dipping. While prices may vary by location, you can expect to pay around $2.49 for a 3-piece order and $3.49 for a 5-piece order. Pro Tip: Order the Popeyes Chicken Sandwich alongside a 3-piece order of Jalapeño Poppers and put two of those bad boys beneath the top bun to create a Jalapeño Popper Chicken Sandwich. It’s fire! Have you spotted the new Jalapeño Poppers at a Popeyes location in your area? Let us know down in the comments. Welcome to #NotAnAd, where we post enthusiastically and without reservation about things we’re obsessed with from the world of food. A few years ago, two buddies and I strolled into OnStage Drinks & Grinds, a sports bar at the corner of Kapahulu Avenue in Honolulu. A woman named Lulu ran her own mini Mexican restaurant out of the bar’s kitchen, serving giant wet burritos and pulled pork nachos that were out of this world. We heard the stuffed jalapeños were equally amazing, and we wanted to see for ourselves. Luckily, we arrived at happy hour, when Lulu was offering her famous poppers (normally $3) for just a buck each. Hell yes, my friends and I said, and we ordered 18 to share. We were surprised when the jalapeños arrived and they were grilled and bright green, and packed with mozzarella cheese, guacamole, pico de gallo, and a squirt of sour cream. They were delicious, but eye-wateringly spicy (Lulu, that rascal, had savagely left all the capsican-loaded seeds and membrane inside each jalapeño) and the three of us choked them down while guzzling many beers. We ate, and we cried. Were Lulu’s poppers authentic and delicious? Definitely. But they were also a real disappointment because they were not oily; filled with a mix of cream cheese, Monterey Jack, and Cheddar; and deep-fried, like Jack in the Box’s Stuffed jalapeños, which are the greatest stuffed jalapeño poppers ever created. For over two decades, they’ve graced the menu at Jack in the Box as part of a round-up of greasy treats from different cultures, like a model UN for fried foods: Chinese-inspired egg rolls, German-style loaded potato wedges, the Italian-ish (?) cheesy macaroni bites. Mexico scored two culinary offerings in this Hall-of-Fame showcase: the (in)famous “wet envelope of cat food” tacos, of which Jack in the Box somehow sells 554 million each year; and the jalapeño poppers, which sells a respectable 13 million orders annually. “Poppers are not quite as popular as our [two] tacos or Jumbo Jacks, but sell more than onion rings or cheesy potato wedges,” says Kathleen Kennedy, director of culinary innovation at Jack in the Box. According to Kennedy, the idea to add something fried with “a touch of heat and a creamy inside” to the menu was a novel idea for a burger restaurant back then. It still is. Health-wise, the stuffed jalapeños are a mess of nutrients and nitrates. A single popper has 73 calories (nearly half coming from fat), four grams of fat, 242 milligrams of sodium, and nearly six grams of cholesterol. But potassium-lovers rejoice, because they also each have over 30 milligrams of potassium. And two grams of protein, for fitness buffs looking to refuel post-workout—which apparently includes bigheaded “CEO” mascot Jack Box, who claims to enjoy them as his favorite cheat-day snack.
“When he’s not spending his time getting fit, Jack absolutely loves the flavorful stuffed jalapeños,” says Kennedy. “Don’t tell his trainer.” Your secret’s safe with me, buddy. I remember the first time I saw a Jack in the Box popper. I was a kid, going through the drive-thru with my family, when I spotted a guy sitting inside the dining room eating (what looked to me like) misshapen chicken nuggets. He dunked each one in a milky sauce that I speculated to be Alfredo. It would take the next few visits of ordering various blob-shaped menu items in trial-and-error (they weren’t nuggets; they weren’t egg rolls) before I discovered these glorious flavor bombs. Taking a bite of the Jack in the Box jalapeño popper—or, for the eager, popping the whole thing into one’s mouth—is an experience of textures, temperatures, and tastes that could rival even the most fanciful and outlandish molecular gastronomy creations from the top Michelin-rated restaurants. Dipped first into cool, creamy buttermilk ranch sauce, a hot Jack in the Box popper is crunchy on the outside, gooey on the inside, and spicy throughout. It’s a little too much to order a side of poppers on top of a full burger-and-fries combo but luckily, a three-piece baggie or seven-piece box can be swapped in instead of fries for a nominal charge. To be honest, Jack in the Box’s jalapeño poppers got me through some tough times. There was a point in my life when I was going to college and working part-time on the sales floor at CompUSA (back when they were in business, over a decade ago), making something like eight bucks an hour. After taxes, my take-home pay added up to around a hundred bucks a week, and after every pay cycle, one of the only indulgences I allowed myself was a bi-monthly visit to the neighborhood Jack in the Box. I’d order a seven-piece box of poppers, sit alone at a corner table, and eat each one with great ceremony, like Don Draper with a Hershey’s bar. When all else fails you—whether it’s the economy or even other restaurants’ jalapeño poppers—thank the fast food gods (are you there, Ronald?) that the Jack in the Box stuffed jalapeños haven’t changed, and hopefully never will. Menu
May 10, 2013 Food & Drink
(Requested by James.k.polk, if I remember correctly) I’ve handled battling chicken nuggets before, but this is the first time I’m really delving into all-out, four-way fast food war. And there’s no better item for this Texas Tornado-style oblong-off than what is pretty much my favorite cheap, deep-fried thing in the whole world – the jalapeno popper. Or depending where you get it, the Ched’r Pepper. Because there are a lot of fast food items I can buy frozen at the store which do a decent job: White Castle cheeseburgers, pizza, chicken nuggets, pizza bites – on a side note, Jack in the Box’s new pizza bites are the worst item they’ve ever had. Mine were as tangy as blue cheese, but they were meant to be cheddar; I think it had gone way past sale date and I may or may not have had hallucinations as a side-effect. Back to my main point, though – I’ve never found a satisfactory store-bought popper. They need to be hot and NOW. Yet with the big names – McDonald’s, Burger King and Hardee’s/Carl’s not having them on the menu at this point in time, it can be hard to know where I’m gonna pick my hot pop-its. The contenders: AMC Theatres, Jack in the Box, Sonic and Wienerschnitzel. STYLE: Only two of these follow essentially the same formula – both Jack in the Box and Sonic have whole peppers stuffed with cheddar. Where they differ is that JitB’s is clearly a solid cheese melted down, and it will solidify again if you don’t eat it quickly. This, however, means that 90% of the time, you gotta eat it at skin-melting heat, and I cannot count the times this has left a blister on the roof of my mouth (okay, I can – I think it’s three) or burned my hand with molten cheese that kept burning till I licked it off. Sonic uses a more processed, plasticky cheese-food-product (and I actually mean that as a compliment) with a lower melting point but still, be careful. AMC goes with the cream cheese version but fails at one of the basics – while Ranch dressing is the preferred dipping sauce for cheddar, the cream cheese versions are traditionally paired with sweeter, fruitier sauces…that AMC does not deliver on. Honey mustard doesn’t count, and do NOT go for the marinara. While we’re on the subject of Ranch – I don’t like it that much, but JitB calls it’s Ranch-type thing “Buttermilk House,” which gives me plausible deniability and I go for it. Seriously, tastes different/better, and I admit that could all be in the marketing. Wienerschnitzel’s are cheddar – a plasticky version very similar to Sonic – but rather than stuff a whole pepper, they chop up the pepper into small bits and mix it all up with the cheese. This is to prevent that thing that often happens with the others, where you bite down but your teeth don’t go quite all the way through the pepper skin, and you end up dragging the whole pepper part of the breading with your teeth, often spilling burning fromage everywhere. I won’t pick a winner in this category – style is what you make it. SIZE: AMC’s are huge and you get eight, but then none of your (by which I mean my) lame friends ever wants to share and you’re (I’m) stuck with all of them. Wienerschnitzel’s are the smallest, and come in 3 or 6 packs. JitB comes 3 or 7, and I think Sonic only does 4. Six is about the perfect number. TASTE: I’m more of a cheddar guy, and AMC blows it on the sauce, so they certainly don’t win. Sonic and Wienerschnitzel are close enough as to be the exact same flavor. I think JitB may have the slight edge in taste for the more authentic cheese and plausible-deniability dressing. PAIN: Wienerschnitzel’s are the only ones not likely to burn or blister you in any way, and I’m talking about temperature, not taste burn. Easy win. THE WINNER: Wienerschnitzel may be a bizarre sad-sack of a fast-food chain, but when it comes to peppers mixed with cheese, they put the heat on the competition. They also put the poppers on their burgers, which is a good idea, assuming your interpretation of “good idea” has already been sufficiently compromised to eat at a Wienerschnitzel. If we open up “fast food” to include chain restaurants, though, as I have in the past (the very first item I ever wrote about was the Philly Cheesesteak Eggrolls at Dave & Busters), Joe’s Crab Shack schools all these amateurs with the Great Balls of Fire – something akin to the diced-style Wienerschnitzel popper, but with the addition of crabmeat. Possibly the greatest menu item in the history of mass-produced seafood chains. Luke Y. Thompson has been writing professionally about movies and pop-culture since 1999, and has also been an actor in some extremely cheap culty and horror movies you will probably never hear much about (he is nonetheless mostly proud of them, as he met his wife on one). As editor of The Robot's Voice since 2012, he can take the blame for the majority of the site's content, all of which he creates because he loves you very, very much. (Although he loves nachos more. Sorry.) Prior to TRV, Luke wrote for publications that include the New Times LA, Los Angeles CityBeat, E! Online, OC Weekly, Geekweek, GeekChicDaily, The L.A. Times, The Village Voice, LA Weekly, and Nerdist |
Best fast food jalapeño poppers
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