Around lunch time yesterday, resident Klat artist Andy Ward and I embarked on a long and arduous journey to our nearest Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant to be among some of the first people in the American West to taste the Double Down Sandwich. This now famous concoction saw a couple test markets some months back and now it's being served nationwide. As promised in a previous article, I endeavored to march my skinny ass to that KFC, which involved going uphill both ways, with the sole purpose of making it less skinny with the help of a sandwich made almost entirely out of fried chicken. Here are the results.

The walk to the KFC was pleasant and not too difficult. The exercise built up a decent appetite, but not one that was so intense that any food would have tasted good. No, I didn't want to bias my taste test any more than it already was. I admit that I've been unusually invested in the Double Down, that I've defended it where so much of the media has given it flack. All the same, that only serves to put a fine point my current opinion that the Double Down, for all its absurd conceptual glory, isn't long for this world.

More than anything, eating a Double Down is a lesson in the intuitive design of the traditional sandwich. The reason we place, say, meat and cheese between two slices of bread instead of just holding said meat and cheese in our hands is because that's messy and rather difficult to eat. There are a lot of adjectives one can use to describe the Double Down, but messy is perhaps the most apt. My very first experience with my Double Down was to be squirted with a tiny spurt of searing chicken grease. Yes, the packaging clearly says "Caution: Hot", but that's really beside the point. It's supposed to be hot. In fact, I shudder to think what a Double Down would taste like cold. It only makes sense, though. Eating a sandwich made out of fried chicken is basically like eating a hamburger without the bun. Of course you're going to feel the singular sting of hot grease.

Once I got into the thick of the Double Down, I discovered that there was surprisingly little cheese involved, though not for a lack of effort on KFC's part. At one time there may have been a significant amount of cheese on my sandwich, but the aforementioned chicken grease had a way of rendering any other non-solid components of the dish flavorless. Neither the cheese nor the special sauce could overcome the sheer amount of liquefied fat that literally drips off the Double Down. Also strangely subdued is the slice of bacon in between the two pieces of chicken. As a rule, bacon ought not to be subtle. It's a salty, savory piece of smoked meat. That I barely noticed it was more than a bit disconcerting.

Around the time my first napkin became completely translucent with grease, I started to realize that KFC hasn't even really tried to make the Double Down an honest sandwich. In reality, it is very clearly one boneless chicken breast lazily slathered in bacon, sauce and cheese, with another piece of relatively unmolested chicken stacked on top. There is no attempt to keep the two pieces of chicken together nor is the top piece any different than the boneless breasts you'd find in one of KFC's traditional meals. This lack of effort is disappointing to say the least.

At around the halfway point, Andy (eating his own Double Down) started inexplicably bleeding. The leading theory is that the sandwich's grease gave him an instant pimple that burst due to its sudden, rapid expansion. He probably doesn't have to worry about infection, though. I'm fairly certain after this experience that the Colonel's secret blend of 11 herbs and spices consists of salt, pepper, pepper, salt, pepper, salt, pepper, pepper, pepper, salt, and pepper. Any microbe that can survive such an environment probably deserves to kill somebody.

Both Andy and I finished our Double Downs with little problem, but the walk home was considerably less leisurely than the trip to the restaurant. Every hill was an enemy, every block a struggle against unconsciousness. I suppose that's what happens when you eat a pile of food that glistens with all the terrifying beauty of a pulsar. I really wanted the Double Down to be good. I wanted it to taste like a collection of meat, cheese and primordial fat ought to taste, which is to say decadent and glorious. Instead it's bland and underwhelming, an awesome idea with some really shoddy execution.

And no, I neither gained nor lost weight from this experience and my average heart rate has not changed.