As far as the Big Three fast food burger chains go—that'd be McDonald's, Wendy's, and Burger King—I have a clear hierarchy in my mind. Wendy's wins by a red-haired country mile for serving burgers that actually taste like, well, burgers. McDonald's has its own unique flavor profile that keeps it afloat (when you crave a real burger, McDonald's won't do, but on the other hand, when you crave McDonald's, no other burger will either). But Burger King? I never really got Burger King.
I know, I know. Flame-broiled patties. Smoky flavor. Bigger sandwiches. Yadda yadda yadda. To me Burger King was always the weird cousin of the fast food world. Some family members—like my mom—actually enjoyed the company of that cousin while others secretly wished they would just go off and live life as a hermit.
Behold the King's Sandwich, in all its glory!
As with any time you actually look at your fast food burger in real life and compare it to the beauty shots, it's a little disappointing, right? Burger King may be the Home of the Whopper, but more often than not it looks like they accidentally placed that home on top of the Whopper before handing it over to you.
Still, Burger King is popular for a reason, and it's because it does what no other major fast food chain tries to do: Bring the flavors of an all-American backyard cookout to the drive-thru. Forget special sauces, middle buns, smashed patties, or unusual toppings. The Whopper is as 'Murican as it gets: flame-grilled beef, American cheese, tomato, onion, iceberg lettuce, and dill pickle, a dollop of mayo, a squirt of ketchup, and a sesame seed bun. There is absolutely nothing novel about the Whopper, and that's what makes it so comforting a flavor to so many people.
Sounds like the ingredients of a great sandwich to me, so I decided to recreate it, upgrading the ingredients and the technique every step along the way while still making sure that my sandwich stayed true to the spirit of the original.
Whopper patty
A Burger King Whopper patty starts out as a four-ounce disk of frozen ground beef that gets placed on a tank tread-like conveyer belt, which carries it through a cooking device that flame-broils it on one side. This sizing is important: It was originally conceived as a way to one-up McDonalds' popular Big Mac sandwich with the promise of more meat, which in turn inspired McDonald's to retaliate with the Quarter Pounder. Sort of like the whole Beach Boys' Pet Sounds versus The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper rivalry, except way less inspired and a little bit more beefy.
I say "a little bit" because quite honestly, the meat in a Whopper sandwich may as well be named "Generic Textured Animal Protein A." There's very little beefiness to speak of, though there's plenty of singed fat and acrid smoke flavor from being licked a little too closely by gas-fueled flames.
A Whopper's onions, aside from being wan and lifeless, commit one of my cardinal burger sins: They're sliced orbitally into rings. Not only does this create a harsher onion flavor (onions should be sweet and lightly pungent companions, not stinky eye-burners), but it also creates structural instability. How many times have you bitten into a sandwich with an onion ring in it only to have the whole onion pull out like a worm, dragging other toppings and condiments along with it?
To their credit, Burger King starts with whole tomatoes in-shop and slices them, applying two slices to each burger. Unfortunately, like most fast food tomatoes, they're mealy, commodity-grade specimens that offer nothing beyond watery flavor. This is an easy upgrade.
I like that Burger King is relatively generous with their pickles. A full four to five slices adorned every Whopper I ordered during my research, more than twice as many as the paltry two pickles McDonald's offers you on their sandwiches. That said, the pickles could be a bit fresher and crunchier.
If there's one single topping on the Whopper that made me scratch my head and go what were they thinking?, it's the roughly chopped iceberg lettuce. A single crisp leaf, I get. Shredded lettuce, I get. But oddly-shaped shreds that turn limp or fall out as you eat? No thanks.
I quite honestly have no problem at all with the Whopper's bun. It's soft, it's squishy, it's slightly sweet, everything a fast food-style hamburger bun should be. The only upgrade it needs is toasting on the grill instead of in a toaster.
And now we get to my biggest gripe with the Whopper beyond the beef: the way it's stacked. A Whopper starts with beef at the bottom, then gets topped with everything else, including mayo and ketchup. You end up with a very top-heavy sandwich. This is troubling in a few ways. First, it's much less stable. Pick up the burger, and the bottom and burger patty flex a little bit under their own weight. Meanwhile, the top bun stays flat, thus loosening the sandwich's grip on its toppings. Lettuce and onions spill out onto your plate, taking along a good amount of mayo with them.
Meanwhile, those pickles that were crisp when you started? With direct contact to the top of the burger patty, they quickly turn limp and soft. In fact, all of the toppings suffer from being on top of a hot beef patty where the heat rises and wilts them.