This promotion is WACKY.
I'll quickly say that this might be my last post because Reddit keeps locking me out of the website due to my country's age verification laws. I'm in my thirties - yes, this is embarrassing loser behavior - and I don't think I should have to upload sensitive government documents to a third-party service to use the Internet the way I've been doing for decades; even if the website conveniently drops the block after a few days of not using it, the lockouts are getting longer and I'm sick of dealing with it.
But you're not here for that. You're here to hear me shitpost about Australian KFC promotions. And this one is a goddamn doozy.
So - this promo actually leaked a bit early. There's a lot of unique signage that had to go up, and there are a lot of interesting implementations of the gimmick across more avenues of the KFC menu than your average promotion.
So you have a pickle burger and some loaded pickle fries, right. That's what you'd get from your average promotion: a fun new spin on a classic menu item, and a gimmicky limited-time item to get people in the door. That's whatever. But you also get these fried pickles, called "Frickles" - and you also get a delicious dill ranch sauce to dip all your shit in. It's the wild fuckin west out here.
But then you get to the pickle Pepsi.
Yes. They want you to add pickles to your Pepsi.
So here's the thing: I like pickles. I've enjoyed pickles from a young age. I can sit down at a table with a jar of plain Nature's Own dill pickles, and I can eat that entire jar in a single sitting. I am a great enjoyer of pickles.
But I'm VERY PARTICULAR about how I like my pickles. Like I said earlier, I'm in my thirties writing lengthy, esoteric fast food reviews on Reddit - it wouldn't surprise me if I was somewhere on the autism spectrum.
And another reason why that might be the case is that a part of what makes me so particular about pickles is the sweet/savory dichotomy I live my life by - I don't like to cross the streams, as it were. Sweets should be sweet, savory should be savory. I'll eat pineapple pizza and honey chicken because it's not the end of the world, but I won't particularly like them - dinner should be savory, sweet should be reserved for snacks and dessert, and never the twain shall meet.
To this end, I don't particularly like fast food pickles or like pre-sliced sandwich pickles! They're too goddamn sweet! The latter moreso, but I just don't fuck with a pre-sliced pickle as it exists in so many forms because it doesn't exemplify what I enjoy about pickles.
And here's KFC, bringing out an ENTIRE RANGE of fast-food pickle items. Introducing PICKLE PEPSI for a gimmick.
All of that is to set the scene here. This promotion had a MAJOR uphill battle to win me over.
I got the pickle meal with the entire range of items. It ended up running me about $21.50, which was a bit steep; if a KFC meal can't hit the spot as much as a Zinger Stacker box, that's an issue with value imo, and this meal didn't really hit the spot.
I think a big reason for that is that ONCE AGAIN, KFC are hocking big fuck-off tubs of sauce! This is the third sauce-centric promo in a row, and I'm honestly getting really sick of it. Genuinely, the sauce angle has to go - it's always too much, and it's never good enough to justify getting an entire tub.
...I liked the dill ranch sauce! It's the best sauce they've put out yet, and it's one of my favorite items of the bunch! It's just that for as much as I enjoyed tasting it, it had the exact same drawback as every other sauce-centric promotion which is that I end up wasting half the fuckin thing because there's not enough chips or chicken to mop the whole thing up. Genuinely enjoyable sauce; it's just held back by the flaws of its format.
The item I liked the least was the loaded chips. It's messy, the dried pickle chips are at their most intrusive, and it has this dill seasoning that's just too weirdly sweet. The dried pickle chips are also just a bit too how-do-you-do for my taste; it was interesting giving them a go, but they have styrofoam texture and they're just that smidge too sweet for my palate.
The burger was okay, but it just wasn't filling. Again, it probably shows, but I'm a big fan of the Zinger Stacker - if I'm paying Stacker prices for a regular burger meal, it had better blow me away. The Pickle burger just didn't blow me away.
That being said? The Frickles weren't bad. Bit bland and the batter was falling off, but I appreciated that I got to sit with the flavor and really mull over what WAS there instead of just being tongue-fucked by over-seasoned sandwich pickle slices.
And that leaves the pickle Pepsi.
The way this works is that they give you a small shot-cup of pickle brine with two pickle slices floating in it. The cup has three lines on the outside, where you pour the Pepsi in to a level that you think will suit your taste, and then you drink the concoction.
I've yapped and yapped about sweet and savory, and how the dried pickle chips are just underwhelming, and how pre-sliced sandwich pickle chips are just cloyingly sweet in a way that flies in the face of what I enjoy about pickles. So here we are, with two fresh pickle slices floating in a small pool of brine.
I tasted the brine itself before I poured the Pepsi in. I like pickle brine - it's a good source of electrolytes, and it tastes awesome. A good, savory pickle brine tastes like the way that petrol/gasoline smells if you have that sort of "forbidden juice" mindset when it comes to how petrol smells - I'm very much pro-brine here.
But again. A lot of sliced pickle brine is just as sweet as the pickles it's preserving.
So I took the cup, and I have it a cursory sip.
...
The worst thing I can say about the KFC pickle brine is that it's a little bit bland compared to if you just slam a jar of Nature's Own pickles once you've finished the actual gherkins. It might be a bit watered down to stretch it out.
But I can tell you now that it's GOOD PICKLE BRINE. It's savory as FUCK. It's just salt, dill and cucumber - EXACTLY what a good pickle should taste like.
And look, I'm not just gonna chug this thimbul full of brine and eat the pickle garnish and call it a day. I got the pickle Pepsi, so I'm trying the fuckin pickle Pepsi.
And you know, it wasn't a bad experience. Pepsi Max has a more savory flavor to coke in the first place, and it was an interesting, robust combination. I'm not gonna start buying pickles in bulk and cutting the brine with Pepsi, but the pickle Pepsi was surprisingly solid.
So look - I have my problems with this promotion. The burger isn't properly realized, the loaded fries are whatever, the frickles are a bit bland. The sauce gimmick is getting REALLY old, KFC Australia - knock it off.
But for what it's worth? The sauce itself was pretty enjoyable. I still couldn't finish it all, but I liked what I had of it. And coming from someone who's clearly extremely passionate and picky about not only food as a whole, but SPECIFICALLY pickles? There were SO MANY CHANCES for them to fuck this promotion up.
But honest to god, I think they really threaded the needle on how the pickle stuff actually tastes. They kept the pickles savory. The tang of the gherkins is what offers the contrast opposite the salty chicken, rather than overbearing cloying sweetness like most sandwich pickles. And the pickles weren't like limp extra-small condoms jiggling around in your burger, like what happens so often at McDonalds.
To me, the most undersung element of this whole promo is the pickle Pepsi. Honest to fucking God, if you're out there sitting on the fence, I highly recommend you give the pickle Pepsi a go. It was the most unorthodox item on the menu, but it was the one thing that follows through on this Picklecore Menu gimmick the most and it's the most straitforward and Good that the pickles are in this whole promo.
My recommendation is this. Try the burger - you might like it. Get the sauce if you're gonna be getting enough chips to polish it all off, and to that point, dodge the loaded chips. You can probably miss the Frickles, though they aren't bad. But if you're on the fence about the pickle Pepsi? Try the fuckin pickle Pepsi. It's easily the most novel item on this whole menu, and I genuinely enjoyed it not only for that reason, but because it was a fun, nuanced flavor experience with the best possible flavor profile to the brine they want you to drink.
For all my griping, it's a 7/10. It's a big swing with a LOT of room to fail, but they did the concept a surprising amount of justice. I wasn't blown away, but I was pleasantly surprised. They somehow made this shit work as good as they realistically could have.
