Review: Carl’s Jr Jalapeño Chicken Tender Sandwich

Carl’s Jr. recently released a new addition to their Chicken Tender sandwich family: the Jalapeño Chicken Tender Sandwich. This would be an appropriate time to post a possibly inappropriate commercial for this sandwich; however, in an unfortunate development, Carl’s Jr. declined to put out an advertisement of this nature, or as far as I’m aware, any advertisement. Nothing would please me more than seeing Kate Upton or someone of equal hotness (good luck finding that) devour one of these sandwiches in slow motion and then spit it out. Although they never do show that second part, for reasons unbeknownst to me. Oh wait I remember now, it’s because that would be gross. So I guess the reason is beknownst to me after all. When you’re done Googling whether “beknownst” is really a word, come back and I’ll tell you about the sandwich.

So the Jalapeño Chicken Tender sandwich features two chicken tenders, Santa Fe sauce, jalapeño coins, pepper Jack cheese, red onion slices, tomato and lettuce on a plain bun. I can’t remember the exact price, but I think it was around $2.99. On this particular visit, I also got a Chocolate Chip Cookie Ice Cream Sandwich for $1.69.

I won’t lie; as soon as I unwrapped the sandwich, the first thing I did was take off the tomato slice. For me, tomatoes serve no purpose on a sandwich other than increasing the probability that it will fall apart at some point. Unfortunately with this sandwich it didn’t make much of a difference. A weak bun created a very messy situation. Jalapeño coins and red onions didn’t help, nor did the fact that the chicken was in tender form.

As for the flavor, this sandwich had quite a bit. Obviously, the main point is the chicken. The tenders were very good; fairly moist and juicy. Good flavor as well. Then you’ve got the jalapeños, which really dominated the sandwich. They were hot and plentiful. It was hard to tell how much flavor the cheese and sauce provided due to the major heat, so I did separate taste tests. The cheese was pretty mild, and the Santa Fe sauce was more tangy than anything. It’s a mayo-based sauce with a hint of Chili P. Still, neither of those components provided much more than some necessary creaminess to counter the jalapeños. The lettuce was Iceberg which I always hate because it has no flavor, but it was kind of nice here as it cut into the heat as well. I also don’t care much for raw red onions in general, and they didn’t belong on this sandwich.

In all, the Jalapeño Chicken Tender sandwich was a little hot for my tastes. My heat tolerance is pretty average if not slightly below, so you may have different feelings on the piquancy. Due to my bitchassness and the fact that it’s impossible to keep in tact, I give this sandwich 5/10.

After eating something spicy, the best thing to have is ice cream, so the Chocolate Chip Cookie Ice Cream Sandwich came in very handy here. It features two Otis Spunkmeyer cookies around a scoop of vanilla ice cream. It’s made fresh, too – I even saw the drive thru jockey scooping the ice cream. The cookies were decent; a fair number of chocolate chips and a solid molasses flavor from brown sugar. The ice cream, on the other hand was delicious. My enjoyment was probably somewhat due to the fact that I just had about 10 jalapeño slices, but I really think it was good vanilla ice cream.

There is one major flaw, though. As with the chicken sandwich, this ice cream sandwich was near impossible to eat. The cookies are very cold and therefore hard, creating a situation whereby taking a bite squeezes the ice cream out of the edges of the sandwich, causing a sticky mess. I did find one solution, though: take the top cookie and put it on the bottom, so you have two cookies with ice cream on top. This way, you bite through the ice cream instead of the hard cookie, eliminating the mess. Overall this is a good ice cream sandwich, and 8/10 sounds about right.

In conclusion, your enjoyment of the Jalapeño Chicken Tender Sandwich rests solely on the shoulders of your heat tolerance. If it’s above average, give this sandwich a go. The chicken tenders are good and the jalapeños are fairly hot. As for the Chocolate Chip Cookie Ice Cream Sandwich, while there’s nothing special about it, it is cookies and ice cream.

I do have one request for Carl’s Jr: MORE KATE UPTON PLEASE. I’ll just leave this here.