I Turned a Load of Takeaway Food Into KFC 'Double Downs' and Now I Need to Either Shit or Die

The KFC Double Down is sort of like looking at the face of God and the devil too. I'll describe it: it's a burger, of sorts, only that it isn't, made instead from two deep fried, finger lickin' chicken fillets, slapped together over cheese, barbecue sauce and some bacon. Where are the buns? There are no buns. The deep fried chicken fillets are the buns.

The US has had this for a while, and the UK just caught up with it – released, as it was, this month for a limited time of six weeks – and it is novelty, but it is also sort of a monstrosity. The KFC Double Down, in a lot of ways, feels like humanity's endgame: we've got so bored of burgers we're just straight up replacing what seems like an integral yet boring component (bread) with more of the party stuff (meat).

Here's a photo of me eating one:

Review: 560 calories, 26 gram of fats, 50 grams of protein, and seriously I ate the thing in basically three fucking bites.

The fillets are the same size as those you get in regular Zinger Tower burgers, but without the bread casing of a traditional burger you can rifle through it in about two minutes. Which I did, so there. It was a bit greasy, but the chicken fillets were satisfyingly chunky, if a little underwhelming for satiating a proper ravenous hunger. If forced to give a score, I would give it three doubles out of down.

This got me thinking. What else could be doubled down? Could you double down a pizza slice by folding it artfully around some chicken strips? What does a breadless Big Mac look and feel like? How about a doner? Essentially: if I take the concept of "meat goes on the outside" and explode it, huge and greasily, over the course of one horrible afternoon, what might I find out about food? What might I find out about myself?

Reader:

This was my first chance to play a sort of greasy-fingered god complex-having burger-fixated Dr Frankenstein. The recipe is thus: order a regular Big Mac with bacon, dash away the three bread bits and encase the filling in sweet harmony around two rubbery beef patties. Electrocute the corpse and watch it stir slowly to life.

And let me tell you: just like Dr Frankenstein, my own attempt at playing god ended with a bitter, life-questioning tragedy.

Eating a Big Mac without its buns is kind of like how I imagine women must feel when they pull a guy who has decided to wear those crotch-enhancing pants for whatever reason. It looks great from the outside, but once you take off the much-needed boosting accessories, all that's left is a shrivelled, limp and incredibly unsatisfying bit of meat. (Also, it has a really disgusting bit of bacon in the middle of it, but that doesn't really work with this analogy.) I was starting to feel a bit sick and I wasn't even halfway through.

Double Down rating? Two doubles out of down.

Sometimes in science we must push further than the known boundaries of human knowledge. Often, this will challenge people's preconceived notions of what is possible, of how reality works, of what truth really means. Also, sometimes we have to try and make a burger out of doner meat strips and it's fucking hard and you get covered in chilli and garlic mayonnaise sauce, but really aren't they kind of the same thing?

Recipe: roughly form a burger shape out of a large portion of doner meat, all the salad and some chips, all kind of loosely held together with my wet fingers in an unholy, glistening amalgamation.

Of all the things I had planned to do, this one generated the most fear, mainly because the idea of eating doner meat sober is kind of like a waking anxiety dream, but also because of its slippery logistics. However, it actually turned out to be one of the tastier ones to eat, mainly because I have now realised that doner meat absolutely slaps even if you're sober and I can't believe I've never known that before. I love doner meat! Science and truth for the win! Three and half doubles out of down!

At this point I truly can't stop thinking about man's relationship with the animal kingdom, specifically the large portion of said kingdom we like to regularly eat. As humans, we preside over billions and billions of yearly deaths of all types of animal, just to have something tasty and charcoal-y to eat. Is that OK? I mean, animals feel pain, and they feel pleasure, which are the rudimentary forms of what we know as hate and love, when you think about it. They are sentient beings, yet we mercilessly, unthinkingly eviscerate whole populations of them, and have done so since time immemorial, just to slice them all up and put them on top of a pizza.

Is that… right? Is it… fair?

Anyway lads, you gotta try this Domino's Double Down – honestly, it's terrific! I got two halves of a Mighty Meaty pizza and whacked some chicken strips in between, using the garlic and herb dipping sauce for a bit of moisture. It was excellent! The perfect comedown burger, I'm giving it four doubles out of down!

At this point, I sort of felt like – if this is possible – I was having two heart attacks at once, and the frequencies of each was cancelling the other out!

By now, I was basically hallucinating off food. But my last challenge was yet to come: the humble English staple of fish and chips. Oppa Double Down style.

I want to cry.

Okay, so this one is pretty straightforward: I got two cod fillets, placed some chips between the two and dribbled some tartar sauce up in there because I'm just all about giving moisture its due.

Upon taking my first bite of this absolute shit-show, basically the only bite I really put my heart into, I was instantaneously put off doing this kind of bollocks ever again. You know that overpowering taste of old grease? That kind of brown crispiness that lingers around battered sausages and fish fillets like a miasma, that immediately fills your palate with the overwhelming sensation of saturated fat, an empty, vacuous sensation, yet viciously present in your mind's eye as a taste to be entirely avoided as soon as the back of your throat is greasily touched by it? Yeah. That was the first bite of this Double Down. By far and away the worst fucking thing I've ever tasted, and this coming from a guy who's literally just spent a whole day attempting to make by far the worst things anyone's ever tasted. One double out of down, if that.

Well, I haven't so much learnt anything as viscerally felt the lessons coursing around my bloodstream, the jagged educational molecules coagulating near all the essential inner junctions of my body, but, like, with knowledge. What I've really gained from eating my way through the five end bosses of late capitalism is weirdly more of a vegan outlook on life. Do I really need all this meat to survive? No. Do humans need to figure out a more harmonious way of coexisting with animals on the planet, rather than unthinkingly farming them like inanimate objects just designed for our sensory pleasure? Yes. Did it really take me eating five insane burgers to figure this out rather than just kind of thinking about it? Also yes.

But seriously, that Domino's Double Down – you really gotta try it.

@williamwasteman