Texas Taste Test: Dairy Queen's Texas Fiesta Hungr-Buster

Every week or so, our colleagues at The A.V. Club in Chicago hold a Taste Test, in which they sample various cuisines with a focus on the new, the novel, and the downright bizarre. But why should Chicago have all the fun? Texas, after all, has no shortage of its own fascinating food and drink, just as enticing and/or disgusting as anything you’ll find on the shores of Lake Michigan. Every so often A.V. Club Austin presents the Texas Taste Test, wherein we shovel various Lone Star finds down our gullets. If you have suggestions for stuff you'd like to see us eat or drink for your amusement, e-mail us.

This week: Dairy Queen's Texas Fiesta Hungr-Buster 

As anyone who’s ever spent even a hot minute in Texas can tell you, we are downright compulsive—like, gangsta-rapper obsessed—when it comes to sticking our state’s name on shit. Everything is built “Texas tough” for “Texas-sized appetites,” or “made for real Texans.” This is particularly true when it comes to our food: Nearly every burger franchise has attempted catering to our petty, Texas-sized need for reassurance by creating a “Texas” menu item—usually by slapping a bunch of jalapeños on it, or giving it a double shot of mustard, because real Texans like things spicy, obviously. Because we’re Texas tough, you see. Seriously, does any other state have this sort of rampant insecurity? Do the Burger Kings in Boston ever roll out a Boston Baked Bean Whopper, for example? No. Just Texas, because we have so much Texas pride, we need to be reminded every Texas-sized minute of every Texas-sized day where it is we live.

In a way, it seems sort of redundant that Dairy Queen would have to stoop to that kind of pandering: After all, around here the red-and-white Dairy Queen logo—thanks to an old but still lingering ad campaign—is known as a “Texas stop sign” (because Texans can’t see one without pulling over their Texas-tough trucks and picking up a Peanut Buster Parfait to feed their Texas-sized asses), and its slogan is still, “That’s what I like about Texas,” sung with cowboy brio. Yet here we are looking down the twin barrels of the Texas Fiesta Hungr-Buster—a substitute, it must be noted, for Burger King’s truly heinous-looking Texican Whopper, which was apparently pulled from restaurants after someone decreed its “Let’s make the Mexican a luchador dwarf!” commercials offensive—that aims to combine DQ's familiar Hungr-Buster with “Tex-Mex flavoring.”

Normally when Tex-Mex and burgers get involved, you can expect to see the beef patty replaced with cumin-spiced taco meat—like Taco Bueno’s famed Bueno Burger, for example. But Dairy Queen makes a subtle commentary on race relations here with its use of both taco meat and beef patties; it’s that integration that makes Texas Texas, you see, this uneasy marriage of Mexican and American sensibilities. But where things really get interesting is the addition of tortilla chips and spicy taco sauce, essentially piling nachos on top of a hamburger in a rare display of border-crossing parity. Here you could probably cue Lou Dobbs for 45 minutes of spittle-flecked commentary about the way old-fashioned, hardworking American burgers have been overrun with cheap Mexican food—but oddly enough, there’s no kowtowing here, on either side. The burger remains steadfast in its patriotism, not giving up its slice of American cheese, iceberg lettuce, and tomatoes just because it’s sharing land with those spicy Mexicans. There's also an ill-advised creamy layer of something called "cool dressing" that, for all intents and purposes, is mayonnaise. (It's hard to tell what it is under all the cumin and taco sauce.) Above the fragile borderline of the tortilla chips, that taco meat remains as proudly caliente as ever, drizzling its unnaturally orange taco sauce all over everything in the name of La Raza.

Oddly enough, much like Texas itself, they coexist surprisingly peacefully—though calling it a “fiesta” is a bit of a stretch. Had Dairy Queen perhaps been a little more bold about embracing the Mexican influence, and a little less frightened of hurting Texans and their Texas-sized feelings, perhaps they would have opted for shredded cheddar cheese—or at least ditched the fucking mayo. As it is, the much ballyhooed tortilla chips are immediately soggy and indistinguishable from the bun, and even though the separate meats and their respective cultures are taking up the same land in your mouth, each bite quickly ends up segregated, with the earthy zest of the taco meat moving quickly to the background and quietly fading under the bland whitewash of mayo, American cheese, and boring old white bread. Sorry, but that’s not a fiesta. At best, that’s a company picnic.

My parents are no strangers to making a dollar stretch, both of them being children of the Depression and having raised six kids on a teacher's salary. Some of my favorite recipes on this site are those inexpensive dishes that my folks made for us practically every week when I was growing up, like baked chicken, chili beans, tuna macaroni salad, enchiladas, or hamburger and macaroni. Even today, if you popped in for dinner unexpectedly, likely one of those would be on the menu that night. And if you were me, you would be darn pleased. Cooking on a budget doesn't mean you have to sacrifice flavor or nutrition.

Some of the themes that mom and dad have perfected over the years in their practical budget-mindedness when it comes to food and cooking are:

Here are ten things the food corporations, whose products dominate grocery store shelves across the United States and other countries, absolutely do not want you to know.

1. The ingredients listed on the label aren't the only things in the food. Cancer-causing chemicals such as acrylamides may be formed in the food during high-heat processing, yet there's no requirement to list them on the label. Residues of solvents, pesticides and other chemicals may also be present, but also do not have to be listed. The National Uniformity for Food Act, currently being debated in the U.S. Congress, would make it illegal (yes, illegal) for states to require cancer warnings on foods that contain cancer-causing chemicals (such as California's Proposition 65.) See articles on the Food Uniformity Act.

2. Monosodium glutamate (MSG), which is added to thousands of food and grocery products through a dozen different innocent-sounding ingredients, imbalances endocrine system function, disabling normal appetite regulation and causing consumers to keep eating more food. This chemical not only contributes to nationwide obesity, it also helps food companies boost repeat business. See articles on MSG.

3. MSG is routinely hidden in foods in these ingredients: yeast extract, torula yeast, hydrolyzed vegetable protein and autolyzed yeast. Thousands of common grocery products contain one or more of these chemical taste enhancers, including nearly all "vegetarian" foods such as veggie burgers (read labels to check). See Food manufacturers hide dangerous ingredients in everyday foods by using confusing terms on the label.