A blog by Cameron and Shannon

Today I’m going to tell you how to make your fast food experience more awesome. I have compiled a list of 5 tips — mine and others — that will inevitably enhance your chances of walking out of a corporate megafranchise more than just marginally satisfied with your culinary experience.

“But Cameron! My fast food experience is already more awesome,” you say, eyes wide with confusion, anticipation, and animalistic grease-lust. Well, my friend, no, it’s not. You’re wrong. It is, at best, a faded spectre — a mere muddled reflection of true awesome.

Don’t fight it. Click Read More and shut your chalupa-hole.

5. The Big Box Meal at KFC

Now, I realize the Big Box Meal isn’t so much a “secret,” but it is awesome, and will suffice as a number 5 lead-in to the secrets to come.

Not familiar with the Big Box Meal? Let me break it down for you. This sucker is KFC’s crazy and over-the-top attempt to blow your cotton-picking mind. It is, literally, a big box, and it contains the following:

• 1 Fried Chicken Leg
• 1 Fried Chicken Tender
• 1 order Popcorn Chicken
• 2 Sides
• 1 Biscuit
• 1 32-ounce drink

(The official website lists said Popcorn Chicken as ‘individual size’, and it might be, if it wasn’t stuffed in a box with 2 other forms of chicken as well as the requisite KFC sides & biscuit. It’s a pretty sizable container.)

This meal is, as a whole, completely bizarre. Where else can you order something that comes with one chicken tender? It’s like a giant sampler of things you don’t really need to sample. It’s also (at least around here) somewhere around six bucks, which is a pretty good deal for a giant schizophrenic box of chicken.

4. Taco Bell’s Other Menu

And by “other” menu, I mean “menu that doesn’t exist.”

It goes like this. About every month or two, Taco Bell’s crack team of Food Engineers choose a random combination of the 10 ingredients available at Taco Bell and toss ‘em all in a tortilla, in a bigger tortilla, in a flatbread thing, or on chips (they roll a special 4-sided die to choose). They then hand their creation off to the Faux-Hispanic Naming Team, who then totally phone it in and go home early (case in point: the recent “Cheesy Beefy Melt”).

Due to what is clearly a monkeys-at-typewriters approach to new foods, Taco Bell’s new items occasionally stray randomly into pure brilliance. A good recent example is the Cheesy Gordita Crunch - it’s a Supreme Soft Taco, doused with Baja sauce and wrapped in flatbread with a layer of real (not nacho) cheese in between.

Unfortunately, it’s not on the menu anymore. Fortunately, that doesn’t matter - in my experience, most Taco Bell promotionals are available long past their on-menu life. That’s really what I’ve been going on about for 2 paragraphs to finally tell you: Taco Bell’s menus suck. Ignore them. Order what you want.

Oh - also, for some reason, the supremely tasty Grilled Steak Soft Taco has this zippy lime sauce on it that nothing else on the menu has. Why? Go figure. Monkeys. Typewriters. Next item!

3. Burger King Having It Your Way

The King will give it to you how you like it. That’s not just a marketing schtick; it’s true. Basically everybody else (that I know of, anyway) charges for little additions to your burger to make it more palatable, like tomato or cheese. Soon enough, you’ve been nickel-and-dimed out of a cheapsie meal.

Burger King? They’re easy like Sunday morning. No matter what burger you order, you can add anything and everything to it for no charge. This is a highly exploitable situation. Forget the 99-cent Junior Whopper — you can take their basic “Hamburger” (which is slightly larger) and load it down with all the (non-meat) trimmings your little heart desires, for absolutely no charge.

2. In’N’Out Burger’s Secret Menu

The only reason this isn’t #1 is because I haven’t actually experienced it — but my personal experiences aside, if you ever go to an In’N’Out burger, keep this in mind: They have an epic selection of secret menu items.

I only wish we had known this before our one and only trip there this past January. Our Double-Double combos were tasty, but how could we have known that there were such delicacies as the 3x3 (3 patties, 3 cheese slices) Extra Toasty (dark-toasted bun) Animal Burger (Mustard-cooked beef patty, additional pickles, grilled onions)?

Bonus awesomeness: They will fix any size AxB burger, where A is your meat amount and B is the cheese. Wikipedia says the largest ever ordered was a 666x666, and the guy had to carry it out in a metal trough. I love America.

1. The Wendy’s Quad-Stack Supreme

This is a technique I invented in high school and utilized for many a lunchtime. This is the best 3-dollar food creation available at Wendy’s, no contest.

Basically, there are 3 burgers on the Wendy’s Super Value Menu®:

• Jr. Bacon Cheeseburger: 1 patty, cheese, bacon, lettuce, tomato, mayo.

• Jr. Cheeseburger Deluxe: 1 patty, cheese, lettuce, tomato, onion, pickles, ketchup, mayo, mustard.

• Stack Attack (formerly DoubleStack with Cheese): 2 patties, cheese, ketchup, mayo.

As you can see, each of these burgers has a fatal flaw. Jr. Cheeseburger Deluxe? All the condiments, but no bacon! Stack Attack? Meat meat meat, but no tomato! Jr. Bacon? No mustard! No ketchup! No onion!

The solution? Combine all three into:

• The Quad-Stack Supreme: 4 patties, 3 slices of cheese, bacon, lettuce, tomato, onion, pickles, ketchup, mustard, mayo.

That’s right. 3 dollars will get you a 4-patty Voltron burger with all essential condiments - plus, you only eat 2 bun halves, so you save on carbs! Bonus! Right?

And, that’s my list. If you have any other awesome items to add, let’s hear ‘em.