Popeyes is finally on the pickle bandwagon, and it’s quite a ride

At some point in my research into pickle-flavored, pickle-glazed, and otherwise pickle-centered foodstuffs, I stumbled across a candy dubbed, quite prosaically, sour pickle balls. The product would seem to trade on not just our bottomless appetite for sharp, briny snacks but on the name of America’s fastest-growing recreational sport.

Shameless as they may be, sour pickle balls don’t fare too well with those who have actually purchased the candy. “Hands down the NASTIEST thing I have ever put it my mouth,” one verified buyer wrote.

I don’t mean to pick on poor sour pickle balls. I suspect they already lead a life of quiet desperation, knowing their existence is entirely predicated on the country’s fugitive whims. Sour pickle balls knew they had but one shot at making a name for themselves in the fleeting economy of trend/niche products — and they blew it.

As the mountain of pickle-flavored snacks — or even funky-flavored pickles — piles up at our feet, I’m reminded by how neatly many of these products fall into two broad categories: those that are delicious, and those that are, to borrow a phrase, nasty.

Most of Popeyes’s new pickle menu belongs to the former, though I feel like I need to affix an asterisk to this statement.

Introduced on April 1, the fast-food chain’s pickle menu was no joke. Its handful of pucker-inducing products — sandwich, lemonade, fried pickle chips, wings with sauce — goes where many others have gone before. As a reminder, here’s a brief list of the forebears (and I haven’t even begun scraping the bottom of the pickle barrel): pickle pizza, pickle cotton candy, dill pickle chips, dill pickle Virginia peanuts, pickle cupcakes, spicy pickle vodka, dill-pickle-flavored ice cream, pickle sandwich, pickle corn dog, strawberry-Kool-Aid-flavored pickles, candied-flavored pickle chips, Flamin’ Hot dill pickle Cheetos, wicked pickle marshmallows and of course Dua Lipa’s pickle-and-jalapeño Diet Coke.

Then there’s this thing called “glickles,” which I clicked on despite fearing it was NSFW. Everything that glitters is not gold.

In that carefree summer of 2019 — only months before a virus turned our world upside down — Popeyes introduced a chicken sandwich that upended the fast-food industry, leading to shortages and hastily arranged copycats that couldn’t measure up to the new masterpiece found at Louisiana Kitchens across the country. Feeling flush with its success, Popeyes went on a bender, releasing a variety of limited-time offerings, perhaps hoping to catch the same lightning in a bottle. It never did. Its truffle chicken sandwich and fried flounder sandwich, among others, barely dented our consciousness, an admittedly difficult thing to do when the phone in our hands is always pinging about the latest novelty/tragedy/lunacy in the public realm.

The pickle menu at Popeyes, however, has pierced the noise of daily life, if only until May 5, when it is set to end. J. Kenji López-Alt, the cookbook author and self-proclaimed “pickle lover,” called the menu “shockingly good, like some of the best fast-food I’ve ever had.” Chefs have been praising it, too, including one who DM’d me with a phrase that I can’t print. It was a spicy alternative of “stuff is good.” Reviewers have mostly gushed over the briny offerings.

I’ve tried the menu multiple times now, and each time I’m struck by the pickle sauce concocted for the occasion. It’s spicy, sweet, dilly, and acidic, a combination that strikes a neat balance between Popeyes tradition and Popeyes gimmickry. But the sauce is also gritty. I mean, gritty gritty. Like the kind of grit that lingers on poorly washed spinach. When you swipe a finger through the mixture, its spices — garlic, onion, ancho chile peppers, according to a Popeyes flack — sit on the tongue like sand. Perhaps that’s not surprising. The sauce, I suspect, was not designed for straight consumption. Its meant to burrow itself to the cracks and crevices of Popeyes’s famous chicken coating.

The sauce really pops with the wings, whether bone-in or their boneless brethren, that chicken breast comic relief from the Great Recession. Sauce clings to the craggy surfaces, delivering alternating waves of heat and acid, the kind that tingles the lips and, on occasion, sends electrical currents down your jaw line. The dill flavor is pronounced, but the sweetness isn’t far behind, serving as a kind of mediator among warring ingredients. Many of these sensations can be lost, or muted, in the pickle-glazed sandwich, sometimes because the sauce (replacing the traditional slathering of mayo) has been applied sparingly or because the brioche bun runs too much interference. If you can pull it off, ask the counter employee for a side of pickle sauce to add to your sandwich as needed.

The pickle chips are not sauced, but coated in a batter that has, on two occasions, arrived thick, pale, and underfried, leaving a floury aftertaste. One Popeyes location, however, fried them to a golden crisp, which allowed the specimen buried within the shell to express its essential brininess. The chips come with a container of ranch dipping sauce, a condiment that may be superfluous depending on your desire to mess with the bready interplay between batter and pickle. I prefer to slam them straight, at least when they’re done right.

To my surprise, the real showstopper here is the pickle lemonade, available frozen or simply chilled with ice. Go with the latter. The drink rides an invisible line, pulling together tart, sweet, and briny flavors so seamlessly that you couldn’t remove one ingredient without the whole thing collapsing. If there is one item that I’d argue for permanent Popeyes menu inclusion, it’s this beauty, especially as the days grow longer and the temperatures hotter. The pickle lemonade is pure refreshment.