Trying the Arby's Diablo brisket sandwich.

I will have a different sort of "spicy" review up soon, as I complete my Masokitties toy series, but today I have some beef with Arby's, so let's talk spicy food.

First, let me introduce the participants in this event.

Starting with myself, Aidan, raised on Midwestern casserole cooking, but having gotten into spicy foods about four years ago. (As an aside, Midwestern food is not bland. A good dish of Funeral Potatoes can make you smile even at a funeral. It definitely doesn't have spicy heat anywhere in its flavor profile, though.)

Next up, the sandwich in question. From the Arby's website: "Smoked brisket with ghost pepper jack cheese, fiery seasoning, fire-roasted jalapenos, pickles, lettuce, mayonnaise, and a Diablo BBQ sauce on a toasted red chipotle bun. Served with a free snack size Vanilla shake to help cool you down. Trust us, you’ll need it."

I did not get the shake, by the way, they were offered "while supplies last" and less than a week into the probable month+ of this being their headline sandwich, my local place was out of them.

So how was it?

It was actually hot, we'll start there. I'm at the point in my journey through "spicy" where many mass-market spicy foods don't feel hot to me at all. (Flaming Hot Cheetos, the KFC spicy chicken sandwich, which I've been having now and then since there's a KFC about three blocks from our new house, Panda Express Kung Pao Chicken, etc.) This sandwich made me sweat, made my nose run, made me need something cooling after, the full experience. It was hot.

It was also mediocre. Not entirely awful, the brisket was fine, the pickled jalapenos were pickled jalapenos, is it even possible for those to be bad? The cheese was meh, though, the BBQ sauce nearly tasteless other than the heat, and the bun was horrible. I could get a really delicious and amazing hot-n-spicy Arby's sandwich by buying a bottle of good hot sauce and pouring it over the beef on their regular roast beef. This thing was not good. It was edible, but it was so incredibly bland. I know that's a weird thing to say about something that made me sweat, but "heat" isn't a flavor. It's a chemical reaction that makes your pain receptors go off. This had that in spades, and not much else.

To me, the point of gaining spice tolerance is to be able to taste delicious flavors you wouldn't otherwise enjoy. For example, the habanero salsa I make every year! It'll clean your sinuses out that's for sure, and if you're not used to heat, you probably wouldn't enjoy it at all. But for me it's bringing so much more than mere heat to a dish when I add it. It's so good!

Western "pepperhead" culture though, often isn't about that. Just look at how this sandwich is being marketed. "Take the Diablo Dare!" It's not about cuisine. The point of the Diablo sandwich isn't food, it's to laugh at the guy who's first to dive for the cooling milkshake. And yes, I use "guy" there in a masculine sense, because this is a male thing. The Diablo Dare, like most other Xxxtreme Spicy Hot! mainstream foods, is for dick measuring. To prove that you're more manly by standing more pain.

But I didn't get into spice through western pepperhead culture. I got into spice through Thai food. And let me tell you, the flavors of a good Thai curry are amazing, and it's well worth building up a tolerance so you can fully appreciate the hotter dishes! Sure, people still dick measure when they go order Thai, but the chef isn't making the food for that purpose. The food is being made to taste delicious, first and foremost.

If western hot food culture were more focused on flavor and less on using idiotic marketing gimmicks about how HOTHOTHOT it is (they even spiced the bun, guys, so you know it's hot! Never mind that they ruined the bun doing so, as both the taste and texture are awful) then this might have been actually good and not merely meh.

Or in other words, toxic masculinity ruined my lunch.