This one desperately needs dipping sauces for the sake of lubrication. The irregular shapes means that each piece also tends to have knobby bits of breading sticking out that contain no chicken. There’s a flavor like cornmeal/slight sawdust as well, and each bite leaves a powdery sensation on the tongue. The breading is solid, meanwhile, but not particularly crunchy, seasoned fairly simply with salt, pepper and maybe a bit of garlic. The bigger pieces have a somewhat more legit chicken texture inside, but it’s so badly overcooked that it has become completely stringy and fibrous. The funny thing is, many of the pieces here are big enough to be meaty and juicy in theory, but somehow none of them are-they taste like they were made 24 hours earlier, and have just been sitting around desiccating since. Texturally these ones are awful, being the driest and most rubbery of all the nuggets and quasi-nuggets we sampled. The more I look at them, the more convinced I become that they’re actually the chain’s chicken tenders, just cut into pieces, which does them no favors. They arrive from your carhop as big, irregular pieces that look either like multiple pieces of popcorn chicken fused together, or chunks or chicken tenders that have been chopped up at random. “Jumbo popcorn chicken” is an amusing oxymoron, given that taking popcorn chicken and making them “jumbo” would seemingly just produce “chicken nuggets,” but whatever you want to call these guys they’re pretty terrible. You take one bite and then wish you had better nuggets. It ultimately makes them the least interesting nugget to eat of the whole bunch, because there’s no crunch, no real meat, and nothing to engage your interest. A 90-year-old with no teeth would have no trouble gumming these down. It is so soft and spongy, it becomes the absolute pablum of chicken nuggets. The flavor actually isn’t terrible, as the nugget is decently seasoned on the exterior, but there’s just nothing going on inside. Many nuggets favor a similarly spongy texture, including the progenitor McNuggets, but never is it so insipid and artificial seeming as it is here. The breading is a fairly plain, salt-and-black-pepper affair, but the spongy interior dominates one’s attention. These nuggets are uniquely soft and flabby-the polar opposite of crispy-with a texture that feels like it was rendered via gentle cooking for hours under the twinkling lightbulb of an Easy Bake Oven. Of course this is all extremely appropriate for BK, who we have long labeled the saddest chain in fast food by far. Even if they made them free with every purchase, we’d still pitch them out. It is telling that Burger King routinely runs promotions where they give these things away at the rate of 10 for $1, and evidence of just how few people must want to eat them. Here are the actual best fast food chicken nuggets, as determined by Paste’s tasting, ranked from worst to best. Along the way we suffered through some bad nuggets, and confirmed a few that are classics of the genre. To that end, we rounded up every major fast food chain’s chicken nuggets that were available to us, and did a proper tasting, weighing the pros and cons of each. Given that the arrival of Popeyes’ new nuggets will no doubt reignite feverish internet debate on whose fast food chicken is best, we thought this was the perfect time to truly get empirical in terms of providing an answer. Others such as KFC have blurred the lines over the years with “popcorn” chicken, which is close enough that you almost have to lump it in with the true “nuggets” of the world.Įdit: KFC has also now made the jump to a more traditional nuggets, replacing their popcorn chicken, and we’ve updated this list. Many chicken chains, such as Zaxby’s or Raising Cane’s, don’t actually serve nuggets at all, instead focusing entirely on bone-in chicken or tenders. “Didn’t Popeyes already have nuggets?” you may be understandably asking, but the answer is no-true “nuggets” are actually not quite as common as you might expect. Building off the success and hype of its insanely popular chicken sandwich, which sparked the phenomenon now fondly recalled as the “chicken sandwich wars” back in 2019, the company made the next logical step-double down on hype with a new breed of nuggets. After a confounding waiting period, Popeyes has finally unleashed its new chicken nuggets on the U.S., promising a fast food poultry landscape that will never be the same again.
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