#56 Double Down THIS! ... Food-Pundit Persons

One last time--I guess almost literally ad nauseum--for the notorious Double Down aka KFCT = Kentucky Fried Church Triumphant. Because it got new life. A resurrection, if you will. Originally a limited-time promotional item, perhaps on the order of "Hey Madge, I'm sure as hell not gonna eat one--I promise, just the Colonel's new UN-fried grilled stuff for me on account of those love-handles you keep bringing up lovingly, Dear--but let's take the kids out for a bucket or two so's we can see one of them Double Downs in it's natural environment ... roamin' about maybe outside its cage. Should be a sight to behold."

So before its projected six-weeks of fame expired, the DD's run was extended (and presumably still going on) by dint of an outpouring of popular demand, or so we're told by the Colonel's representatives here on Earth. Not surprising. Our selfish CAVE-PEOPLE genes (in the Dawkinsian sense) know what's good for us; we just eat too much of it for our savannah-less lifestyles. Our DNA will eventually mutate and adaptively catch up with (in a few tens of thousands of years, say, at best--sorry, dieters) our light-speed cultural evolution. (See earlier KFC posts MM # 48-50.) For on the molecular level we're still a grab-and-gorge organism ... till the next meal, and our deep-dish, autochthonous programming can never be sure when that will be.

However, speaking of programming, here's another typical party-line food-nanny, like SFGate's Mark Morford in earlier posts (q.v.), telling us a couple of weeks ago just how very bad the KFC sandwich is for us. This time, though, Mr. Tom Sietsema of the Washington Post actually tastes the thing--Morford only imagined, wrongly, how oh-so-awful it would be. But it's in the eating--it's not clear if he spits, wine-taster-wise--wherein lies the proof of this fellow's hypocritical pudding. The video clip "Tom Tries the KFC Double Down" starts out portentously enough, invoking vaguely the authority of Michelle Obama, but then loses all credibility--take a look--when he admits to a "love" for McDonald's french-fries and a "soft spot" for Popeye's chicken and biscuits!

He obviously wants to dissociate himself here from the common run of food-fascists and be more one-of-the-guys, but it doesn't work. A dead give-away is when, before tasting it, he describes the sandwich as made up, first of all, of "two salty slices of chicken breast." Qua?! How does he know that yet? More important question: What kind of salinity does he think he's getting in his favorite McFries or his Popeye drumstick? Both also deep-fried, and the latter pressure-cooked to a turn. Sure enough, when the video gets to the point, the headless voice-over avers that

In the hand it feels like a greasy paperweight. As for the taste [chomp above camera angle] I feel my mouth flooding with salt and fat. This is not a guilty pleasure. More like an endurance test, best served with a gallon of water. I can see how these [hefting two of them for effect] might go over well at a frat party, but, seriously, there's nothing enjoyable about this sandwich. Thumbs down for the Double Down!

O ye Hypocrites! ... the Colonel might be heard intoning somewhere beyond the grave.
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#50 In Praise of the KFC "Double-Down" III

Where and when could you purchase any and all items on the Kentucky Fried Chicken menu at HALF PRICE? Nashville, c. 1969-70. I was there. It was an offer we couldn't refuse, even though Minnie Pearl's Chicken offered an identical product for the most part, and just as good. And better coleslaw. For the year before, when our little family came down to Music City for the start of my doctoral studies at Vanderbilt, the countrified (/fried) comedienne had started up her own hometown-based, franchise-chain of fried chicken stores. She wanted to retire on it. Sadly--though not for her fans--she was back onstage at the Ryman Auditorium within three years. Broke. The Colonel's boys up in Louisville had gone for the jugular, right in her backyard.

I bring this up in connection with the Double-Down for several reasons. First of all, it's very hard NOT to make good southern fried chicken. It's no less than a divine delectation configured by Mother Nature herself. And the various fast-food incarnations testify to that fact. At home, cast-iron and Crisco are all you need. My Grandma Miz Lilla could make the delicacy in her sleep, sometimes literally, on our Georgia family farm--much helped by fresh ingredients, of course. This meant a full-feathered, fresh-"wrung" carcass from the chicken yard (no axe needed, just my Granddaddy's vise-like grip--all quite a sight for a young boy, especially the headless aftermath) ... and lots of McCormick pepper. She made the original Popeye's.

The Colonel's great innovation was to PRESSURE COOK them. Initially, this was to speed-up order-delivery time as business boomed at his original location. But the by-product--sealing in the fowl's natural juices--was what graduated an already magna dish to summa cum laude. Can't really replicate this at home, unless you're ready to risk life and limb with a volatile stove-top pressure-cooker (if even manufactured anymore), and high-G grease approaching the temperature of the sun's surface.

The smart, former debutante and Belmont College graduate in Theater and Dance, Miss Sarah Ophelia Colley (so different from the Minne Pearl persona), and her partners Mahalia Jackson (true!), and the colorful future governor of Tennessee, John Jay Hooker, ripped off the Colonel's idea--quick and safe away-from-home pressure cooking--and almost made it. The chicken was good, and so were the side-dishes. But the cut-throat tactics of the KFC boys, along with chronic mismanagement and some trouble with the SEC over stock-offerings, brought them down. Besides, they were just a bit ahead of their time by a scant few years. The whole Southern-fried phenomenon was in its infancy. That there was room for competition is proven by the ultimate success of such as the aforementioned Popeye's, plus Bojangle's, Church's. etc. (fill in your favorite). Setting aside the "secret recipe of eleven herbs and spices" ("secret"= monosodium glutamate), KFC and its rivals pressure-fry the chickens all in the same way, no matter the batter. This is why their product always tastes better than you can make at home, and why they all taste about the same; that is to say, very good indeed.

So let's go back to that "toxic zoo" of a sandwich, as Mark Morford's SFGate article would have it. He's well-intentioned, but I think the guy's reason is clouded somewhat by the fallacy of sum-of-parts. After all, the Double-Down comprises but chicken, pork, and processed dairy. Thus separately: nothing less "good eats"--as my fave-cook and fellow Georgia-native Alton Brown would say--by any standard. And, together: healthy enough, if you don't eat the thing every day of the week. (The Food-Police always assume we do.)

Again, I do believe there's a refreshing soupcon of whimsy, a little self-irony, along with (I'm sure) the requisite bean-counting market-research menu behind the debut of the Double-Down sandwich. Morford seems to agree when he says, "It's sort of hilarious. It's sort of perfect." However, in the next sentence: "And then it'll probably make you vomit." Puh-leeze. Scroll down and take another look. We know pretty much the taste-experience we're in for. Far from vomit-inducing. Moreover, Morford surely must know that Southern-style cooking has been identified by prominent Foodies as America's only truly indigenous contribution to the world's great cuisines, standing proudly alongside the Chinese, Italian, French, and your choice of only one or two others. Southern-fried chicken has always been the jewel in the crown.

What, then, is Mark Morford's problem? Here it is: he writes out of San Francisco, right? Well, he's jealous, and starving for good, honest, down-home food. Around 'Frisco, no Crisco. He's got too many culinary possibilities to choose from, in complicated foreign combinations, and all entirely TOO FRESH. I know. When I visited the soon-to-be-famous Chez Panisse in '75, we had the pris-fix dinner (same entree' for everybody and then only $10!) of freshly-caught "free-range" trout, poached, of course (fried forbid). Fresh bread, fresh greens, etc. After the meal, the fresh young chef/proprietor, Alice Waters herself (for-real), came around to the very small number of tables at that time--squeezed into the second floor of a residential home in Berkeley--and offered us fresh-picked fruit from (I'm sure) a freshly-woven basket. Oh, the surfeit of it! Makes you want to vomit.

No, wait. I know Morford's real problem with the Kentucky Fried Double-Down Chicken Sandwich. Yankee-bias. Yep. That's it.
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#49 In Praise of the KFC "Double-Down" II

Moreover, I like it because, truly ... 'tis a silly thing. A whimsy. Last post's Mark Morford suspects some dark capitalistic conspiracy behind its debut--analogous perhaps to tobacco companies spiking the addictive levels of nicotine in cigarettes to ensure future levels of consumption. In this case the "get-'em-hooked" agent would be FAT, along with the "God knows what's in the 'special sauce'"--as he puts it--KFC's way of slipping us a chemical mickey on the sly. Hate to give Morford this, but several recent studies that would have bolstered his case have found that "... eating foods rich in FAT and SUGAR can cause changes in the brain comparable to those observed in drug dependency"(here). Withdrawal symptoms, even.

No surprise. We're hot-wired genetically, I believe, to crave the agriculture-free Double-Down because of those couple-million years of hunting/gathering. Meat. Fruit. We've had only a blink of evolutionary time in the pastoral and agrarian departments, and are a little behind the Darwinian curve. Grain-gluten is a problem of genetic non-adaptation for vast numbers of people, depending on their DNA history, and the majority of the Orient is lactose-intolerant, unless the milk has been chemically altered. As in the fermented dairy-miracle, cheese. There it is, right in the middle of the Double-Down. As a popular advert says, "So easy, even a cave-man can do it"--eat the KFC thing, that is, without any fear of upsetting his hunter-gatherer tummy.

And that's still you and me, really. Further, this is why, in terms of weight-loss, the high-protein/never-mind-the-fat/low-carb diets seem to suit us best. The old/new Atkins Diet WORKS, and so do its knock-offs like The Caveman Diet, The Paleo, The Stone Age, etc.--much to the chagrin, amazingly, of most of the Medical Establishment, some of whom, not so amazingly, can be caught promoting their own dietary falderal. Decade after decade, in one clinical test after another, the late Dr. Atkin's (heart-attack, no comment) has beaten his rivals every time. For weight-reduction and sustainability.

For, although we've attained sapient homo-hood, when it comes to food we're still Homo Erectus. In fact, it was none other than our expanding, energy-sapping, nutrient-demanding (requires about 25% worth) BRAIN that necessitated such high-protein nourishment, way back in the day. That meant big animals, and lots of running to get them. There's your truly sustainable diet-regimen! And once our efficiently bi-pedal, whiz-kid ancestor finally caught up with the exhausted, out-classed, four-legged auroch or ibis ... he gorged. Next meal could be a long way off, in all senses. But he also made sure to take home a doggy bag for apres-diner gorging by the stay-at-cavers. Before the hyenas showed up.

Today, no need to be the long-distance runner. We modern cavepersons can find our quarry at the neighborhood food-court. The KFC Double-Down "sandwich" is the perfect hunter-gatherer meal--that is to say, unmitigated MEAT--rich in quick-burning animal fat for the chase, and just the right kind of high-octane protein to feed the brain that plans and executes it. However, after you've gorged (that genetic imperative that we haven't yet gotten over), after the finger-lickin' and doggy-baggin'--it would be nice to have a savanna nearby, and a willing antelope handy ... to work it all off. (more)
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#48 In Praise of the KFC "Double-Down"

The ultimate Atkins Diet sandwich. Finally got rid of any deference to unhealthy bread-bunnage altogether--that white, overly- refined, gluten-laden, fattening abomination used traditionally as a mere convenience to stabilize the real food inside. And keep your hands clean. What? Not really necessary, considering that the Colonel made his fortune touting the animal residue left behind on our upper-phalanges. Finger-lickin' Good!

In fact it was kind of an apostasy that Kentucky Fried got into the "chick-fillet" competition a few years ago. A sandwich? At KFC? Shoulda stayed pure; it was enough they "chickened"-out to the food-police and buried "Fried" under innocuous initialism. (It's rampant: BK? DQ?--someone needs to inform me as to the offense borne by any of the words replaced. "Burger"? "Dairy"?--well, maybe "Queen." Taco Bell daren't follow the trend. Or Boston Market.)

With the Double-Down at least KFC is back to tradition: you're hands-on with cooked chicken-carcass again, and gonna get fried-chicken-grease on your fingers, unless you go prissy and use knife and fork. Or a napkin? Yes and no. EVERYBODY KNOWS that if you use a paper napkin directly following a good chomp on an "original-recipe" skin-crusty thigh-bone, say, then those icky-sticky (oh my) patches of napkin-fiber will be permanently epoxied to the tips of your fingers. The result is worse cosmetically than un-etiquette-ly inserting fingers in mouth first. Then the napkinning. Everybody knows that too.

I come to the D-D's defense because all the whiny food-nannies on the planet are against it. Even to the point of attacking the innocent barnyard creatures whose dead flesh (or fermented products therefrom) go into the making of it. Specifically, one Mark Morford who asks us, in his subtitled "One Sandwich To Kill Us All"--

Did you notice? How in in one pseudo-food item, you are consuming not one, not two, but the mutated, chemically injected flesh/by products of fully THREE different distended, liquefied, industrially tortured creatures? Feel the love, pitiable animal kingdom. (SFGate/HuffPost 4-11 here)

Great article, actually. Pretty much a pitch-perfect rhetorical rant, but you can see his sub-textual agenda. Not so much concerned with OUR health as that of industrialized food-fauna. Along the way, he also gets around to the evils of processed food, and, yes, capitalism. These are points to be made perhaps, but his stalking horse--that the D-D is a "fistful of nausea" in your mouth and a "toxic zoo in your colon [love it]"--just doesn't argue well at all. In fact, the guy may be a little muddled with some sort of anal retention/obsession about the whole thing. Listen to this:

For well I know this horrible CRAPBUCKET OF CHYME [wow!] joins a very long list of fast-food nightmares you should never put anywhere near your MOUTH, unless you deeply hate yourself and don't give a damn anymore, and you want to die fat and stupid like that rotting thing you found in your rain gutter.

Now, I must say, not much NOT to like about that. How about the nasty way he's got the whole alimentary canal covered, literally or allusively? He even attacks the digestive hygiene of your house! Problem though with the "chyme" analogy. If you're not familiar, chyme is "the semi-fluid mass into which food is converted by gastric secretion and which passes into the small intestine." You would definitely need a BUN for that. (more)
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#20 Semi-Homemade Marinara a la Mosteller

As Monty Python was wont to say, "And now for something completely different." Here's a red-sauce recipe that I've been asked to share with the Myriad Readers. The basic un-homemade thing about it is the jar of store-bought spaghetti sauce, unless you count the sine-qua-non ingredient: ANCHOVIES. Difficult to go out and catch for yourself these days.

Nothing can beat the field-fresh tomato, of course, as the true base for what Italian homies call "red gravy." But I gave up some time ago, and capitulated to the super-market jar of marinara, especially after my gardening days were past. A so-called vine-ripened tomato from Food-Lion? ... fugetaboutit. It's even risky to rely on a local "farmer's-market" product, unless it looks a little scruffy, and has a tell-tale ring of yellow around the stem. A giveaway-sign of being homegrown. Hard to find though, and--even if you're lucky--it still takes some skill in preparation and a lot of time on the stove to cook/reduce fresh tomatoes to the proper consistency for a good red sauce. That peeve out of the way:

• 1 jar high-quality marinara sauce like 4Brothers Tomato-Basil
• 1 3-oz tin anchovy fillets in olive oil
  
• 1/2 cup chopped white onion
• 6 cloves garlic
• 12 Kalamata (or assorted) olives, halved
  
• 1 tsp dried Italian herbs
• 1 tsp dried parsley
  
• Extra-virgin olive oil to cover
  

Directions: Reserve store-bought marinara. Put all other ingredients in 8-in sauce pan (don't drain anchovies) . COVER with olive oil. Bring to a boil. Turn heat way down. Simmer for 6-1o minutes, using fork to make sure anchovies are crushed and assimilated. Add to over-the-counter red stuff. Stir. Repeat. Serve over pasta of choice.

Remember: this just ain't gonna work without the anchovies. They give the sauce its rich earthy flavor and body that can't be duplicated otherwise. If you've got some deluded, hardcore--"eeeewww"--anchovy-phobes at the table (maybe even yourself), don't tell them, and nobody will know the difference. Enjoy their compliments, and the apres diner pleasure of the following:

--That was really good. What's your secret?
--Do you like anchovies?
--Eeeewww!
--You just ate some.

Bonus tip: an inch or two of anchovy paste from the tube and whisked into your Vinaigrette will make a salad incandescent. But don't tell.
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