Taco Bell offers a spicy take on a saturated product with some fun new sauces.
Taco Bell is one of the more interesting fast food chains to introduce a fried chicken product, considering it's menu mostly consists of ground beef in different vessles. The company has tried other experimental chicken items before — like nacho-sized "chicken chips", and that time they made a chalupa where the chicken was the shell — but it's notable Taco Bell has resigned to the most familiar iteration of processed poultry. The safest bet for a fast food joint is a good old fashioned chicken nugget.
Despite the regularness of this product category, I believe Taco Bell has differentiated its chicken nuggets enough that it may have newer consumers choosing these over other big chains, especially those who prefer spicy chicken. But would an average Taco Bell customer pick these over their usual menu item? Here's my taste test.
Taco Bell's chicken nuggets are crispy, crunchy, and thick. You defintely get more meat out of a bite than something from McDonald's, Wendy's, or Burger King. My order in particular looked like they were cooked a little more well done than what I had seen in advertisements and other reviews, so that might have contributed to the crunch factor. The undefined shapes also feels a bit more authentic than the bone, bell, ball, and boot. One nugget I receieved was heading into the long tender category.
The chicken nuggets had a nice kick of spice — more than you would think, but nothing too spicy for regular Taco Bell customers. Taco Bell says the chicken is "marinated in jalapeño buttermilk and breaded with tortilla chips", which I didn't know until after eating them. Initially I thought it was a pretzel crust (that's how crunchy we're talkin). A tortilla chip crust is a fun idea, especially for Taco Bell. The experimentation continues.
These certainly had enough flavor on their own, but I was particularly excited to try the new dipping sauces.
Taco Bell introduced three new dipping sauces with the chicken nuggets: Bell Sauce, Jalapeno Honey Mustard Sauce, and Fire Ranch Sauce. I also grabbed some of Taco Bell's other sauces to try with the nuggets, like their Diablo and Fire taco sauce and the Avocado Verde Salsa. Taco Bell lets you choose 2 sauces for every purchase of a 10 piece, so I had to buy more to try all three.
The first sauce I tried was the Fire Ranch, which is branded as a Hidden Valley product. The sauce comes in a red container, which really stands out among the white or black ones you see at other restuarants. It feels special. Fire Ranch Sauce is great, better than what I usually have from Hidden Valley. It's unclear what the relationship is there. It had that cool ranch flavor mixed with hot spice, and paired really well with the nuggets. I've always loved Wendy's spicy chicken nuggets with its ranch dipping sauce, and this is a very similar flavor profile.
Next up I tried the Jalapeno Honey Mustard Sauce. This is where I got the pretzel taste, as you can imagine. The sauce is a lot thicker than the Fire Ranch, and starts to feel more like something from Chick-fil-a. Honey Mustard is typically not my go-to dipping sauce for chicken, but if it's yours, this will probably be your favorite of the three. I'm guilty of adding spicyness to most of my meals, so I did appreciate the jalapeno twist — but honey mustard feels out of place on a Taco Bell menu. Would you put this on a taco? I don't think so. The Fire Ranch I would!
That brings me to the third dipping sauce: Bell Sauce. This is probably the most "Taco Bell-like" sauce for the nuggets, as the name suggests. It's got a smokey chipotle flavor, and it's also pretty thick, similar to something mayo-y you'd put on a crunchwrap or dip a quesadilla into. Personally, this is my least favorte of the sauces – mostly because it wasn't anything special. But it did taste like the sauce you should be dipping a chicken nugget from Taco Bell into.
To understand how well the chicken nuggets fit with the rest of the menu at Taco Bell, I decided to taste them with sauces that weren't specifically created for the nuggets. I thought the signature taco sauces paired really well with them! The Diablo sauce had a nice hint of lime that really stood out with these tortilla-crusted nuggets and the Fire sauce is actually a really great dipping sauce for these as well. Eater's Bettina Makalintal pointed out she could see the nuggets being tossed in Fire sauce in a future menu — I'd be eager to try that.
Both the nacho cheese sauce (from my Nacho Fries) and the Avocado Verge Salsa mixed well with the nuggets, but it didn't stand out among the rest where I felt I unlocked a secret menu item. The previous Naked Chicken Chips were not my favorite because of this.
The Fire Ranch sauce was the clear winner for me. I'd like to try these head-to-head with Wendy's spicy chicken nuggets and ranch, because I think the Taco Bell chicken nuggets with Fire Ranch might come out on top. After the chicken nuggets were gone, I finished off the Fire Ranch with my Nacho Fries, which made that weak french fry product a lot more desirable.
Overall, these nuggets and sauce (particularly the Bell Sauce and Fire Ranch) really do feel like they make sense in the Taco Bell pallete, and I hope they keep them around longer than a "limited time." Does Taco Bell need these? I don't think so. But I'm not a frequent Taco Bell customer, so if I were accompanying a friend who wanted to go, this is probably the food I would get there. The Honey Mustard option hints at a push to bring in a different kind of customer.
So if you're craving for spicy chicken on the interstate highway, Taco Bell's nuggets may be preferable over other budget food options. But if you're heading to Taco Bell anyway, these will probably be a second or third choice over your favorite menu item after your initial curiousity.
