Sam Amico
If you based it entirely on look, you probably wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between the Chick-fil-A original chicken sandwich and the new cauliflower sandwich.
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But taste? Well, that may be a different story.
Anyway, yes, you read that right. Chick-fil-A has introduced a cauliflower sandwich. That means instead of meat … it’s vegetable. Some folks will gladly make that trade.
Even if you’re not a vegetarian or vegan, you need vegetables. That is a well-known, proven dietary fact over time. So Chik-fil-A did something about it. They are adding even more vegetables to a menu that already features quite a bit. Now, though, that veggie comes in the form of a sandwich.
“We are committed to chicken, and chicken is the hero,” said Leslie Neslage, director of Menu and Packaging for Chick-fil-A, via USA Today. “But… it was becoming more and more prevalent that customers really want to find ways to increase vegetable in their diet.”
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Chef Stuart Tracy, senior lead culinary developer for Chick-fil-A, added that the fast-food behemoth “wanted it to be a purpose-built entree that was plant-forward.”
The sandwich, while a vegetable, does fall in line with the rest of the menu, Tracy told USA Today.
“We didn’t know we necessarily wanted it to be similar to the chicken experience or the experience of eating a chicken sandwich, but we knew it had to taste like Chick-fil-A,” he said.
So, about that taste. What are we talking about here?
“A lot of the development timeline was like OK, how do we get it to not be like sweaty, mushy, stinky cauliflower, but also not like raw, dry, ‘I can’t even swallow this’ cauliflower?” Tracy said. “It was a fair amount of work.”
In other words, it’s a vegetable but doesn’t taste entirely like a vegetable. For a lot of people, those are the best kind of vegetables of all.
