Which fast food restaurant has the best chicken nuggets?

My friends and I like chicken nuggets. A lot. But with all the different restaurants and their own varieties, we wondered, which is the best. We decided to do a chicken nugget taste test. We had others cut the nuggets to remove their identifying shapes and colours, then place them onto  plates labelled A through F. We decided to judging the nuggets based off the three F’s; The face, the feel, and the flavour. We ate the nuggets plate by plate discussing them as we went and reaching a consensus.

Here are the results, ranked from the worst nugget to the nugget champion.

6. Wendy’s Chicken Nuggets

The Face: Wendy’s chicken nuggets are a very dark colour and have a lot of spices visible. The look is almost like tree bark and that foreshadowed their taste.

The Feel: The nuggets had a rubber-like texture and were harder to chew than any of the other fast food nuggets we had tasted.

The Flavour: The Wendy’s nuggets really tasted like nothing, despite all the spices visible on the outside. They were bland and dull as dishwater.

5. Tim Hortons Chicken Strips

The Face: When you take a look at the Tim Hortons chicken strips, you will be able to tell that they aren’t evenly baked. The nuggets are discoloured in certain places–truly unappealing to the eye.  

The Feel: These nuggets are as dry as a desert. They are excessively textured and really stringy.

The Flavour: These strips need a little more work. The seasonings are a little boring: they taste like plain old salt and pepper.

4. McDonald’s McNuggets

The Face: McDonald’s McNuggets have a yellowish-orange outside batter. If you eat as many nuggets as we do, you can definitely identify these from the rest.

The Feel: When you bite into McNuggets, you can feel the oil bursting through the crunchy skin giving that true fast food feel. The crunchy outside and soft inside play off of each other perfectly.

The Flavour: McNuggets are very addictive. The nuggets themselves don’t have a strong flavour but we feel that the more the fatty the food, the better the taste.

3. Burger King Chicken Nuggets

The Face: The golden brown colour of the Burger King nuggets draw your eyes’ attention. The nuggets were perfectly and evenly cooked. You can clearly see the spices incorporated into the nuggets–the picture above does not lie.  

The Feel: The entire nugget had a delicate texture; neither the exterior batter or the chicken felt crunchy. It may be a personal preference whether you like your food to have more texture or not–our group was evenly split about that with half of us preferring our foods on the softer side and half of us preferring crunch. Those preferring crunchy food felt these nuggets had a slightly soggy texture.

The Flavour: Burger King nuggets are similar to the taste of McDonald’s McNuggets–subtle but satisfying–although they were a little drier. Only a couple of us could tell these apart from the McDonalds Nuggets because of the similar oily fast food taste.  

2. KFC Popcorn Chicken

The Face: Like the recognizable McNuggets, KFC is one of nuggets that you will always be able to identify by its small, round bubbly crust giving it its iconic popcorn-like size and look. Even after the cutting, we all secretly could tell these were KFC’s nuggets. When we saw the nuggets whole we could identify the look of the nuggets immediately.

The Feel: These “popcorn” nuggets stay true to their name. They had a popcorn like texture ; very crunchy. They were kind of cold on the outside and warm in the inside. The crust has balls of batter that create a perfect crunch-to-soft ratio, just like popcorn.

The Flavour: Kind of like McDonald’s nuggets they have a hint of oily taste that seems to be attracting to our taste buds. They have a hint of spice that gives the nuggets a kick that makes you want more.

1. A&W Chicken Strips

The Face: The Chubby Chicken from A&W is the perfect thickness. The outside of the nugget has a very light-coloured coating and the ratio of crust to chicken is perfect.

The Feel: The difference with A&W nuggets and the other fast food nuggets is that when you take that first bite into the nugget, it has a real chicken texture. The chicken wasn’t too stringy and didn’t break like rubber. It was meaty and felt satisfying.

The Flavour: The flavour of A&W Chubby Chicken tastes like actual chicken! As well, the spices they are using are consistent throughout the whole nuggets. We felt that if you sneakily placed this chicken in a meal and served it to people, they would think that you worked hard to season the chicken yourself.

At first we all thought that Burger King’s nuggets were going to be the worst and McDonald’s would be the best, but it didn’t turn out that way. We were also so excited to try Tim Hortons new nuggets because Timmy’s nuggets were a brand new addition to the Tim Hortons menu. But, eh! At least they tried. KFC smartly thought of the way people think–“they are really small, so I can eat more”–attracting their customers to buy a larger amount. And most of us never really ate at A&W often, so we were so surprised to find out that in the end those were our favourite.

So if reading the word “nuggets” a hundred times hasn’t ruined your appetite yet, now you know the best places to go to satisfy your craving.