Seeking Chick-fil-A's new Honey Pepper Pimento Chicken sandwich

The heat has finally broken (temporariy), giving us a much-needed respite and letting us breathe with comfort. But over on social media, things are heating up with talk of Chick-fil-A's new sandwich, the Honey Pepper Pimento Chicken. It's a long name for a sandwich, and it sounds like there's a lot of different things going on, and there absolutely is. Let's discuss.

This Monday was the first day you could snag the new HPP sandwich, and I was in line that day. I got there right before 3 p.m., and it wasn't too horribly busy, so it was a good time to beat a crowd. I ordered the HPP (I opted for an original patty, but you can get it grilled or spicy, too), and I went ahead and ordered the new shake, too, the Caramel Crumble. The food came out in good time, and everyone was so nice; they always are there.

I confess, I tasted the shake first. It came out in a Styrofoam cup, so I didn't get to see the shake from the outside. I don't know why, but that disappointed me. I guess I've become accustomed to being able to see the swirls of flavor that lend taste to the ice cream of the shake, although a Styrofoam cup is better insulation than plastic and doesn't sweat. Never mind, time to taste.

The shake was thick, super sweet and heavy with caramel flavoring that almost bordered on butterscotch. The taste was all right, but it did have one thing that put it over the top for me. Normally, I don't like little crumbly bits in a shake. I like it smooth, rich, with the only texture being the thickness of the frozen ice cream. But this shake had two distinctly different crumbles in it (note: the internet tells me that there is only one kind of crumble in this shake. Maybe that's true. It probably is. But I tasted two, and maybe it was just a size difference in the crumbles. You can make up your own mind. This is just my opinion.) The first was a crispy crust type of crumble, crunchy and full of butter. The second was waxier, like a chocolate chip is waxy, but tasted of butterscotch. That second one was delicious, and I didn't mind chewing a bit.

A couple of sips of dessert first was delightful, so on to the sandwich. I cleared my palate with some water, waited a minute to give the sandwich a fair shake, and opened the box. The smell was enticing, sweet and peppery. I could see clear honey oozing off the side of the chicken filet and pooling in the box. This was going to be messy. I took off the top bun to get a good look at what I'd be eating and saw a respectable but not crazy spread of pimento cheese topping the fried chicken. Recognizable shreds of cheddar cheese made up the bulk with little bits of red pimento. Then that was drizzled with honey, which combined with the pimento cheese as I ate to thin it and make it more of the consistency of, for instance, Big Mac sauce. I saw green slices on the bottom of the sandwich and thought, "Huh, they still used pickles." But no, no they did not, which I discovered in my first bite. Fairly mild, spicy heat washed over my tongue, and it wasn't completely unpleasant, but it did shock me. What I thought were pickles were instead pickled jalapenos. I picked them off and enjoyed the little dollop of flavor they left behind.

The cheddar cheese in the pimento spread was sharp and had a little bite for cheddar. This was balanced out by the sweetness of the honey and the spiciness of the pepper. I mean, this sandwich hits almost all of the major tastes: sweet, bitter (from the stronger cheese), salty and savory. There was a lot going on, so much that I lost the familiar flavor of the chicken patty, that perfect seasoning of spices that I enjoy from Chick-fil-A. All the other flavors overwhelmed it, and the chicken became just another platform for the toppings.

The HPP is creative, and you will find nothing else like it anywhere else right now. Variety is the spice of life, as William Cowper wrote in 1785, and he's still right.