@rotuts
My order of steak nuggets lounged in a small takeout container, looking like the desiccated remnants of a backyard barbecue from the previous week. The morsels did little to stimulate my appetite: They were thick, un-sauced, unevenly charred and losing moisture with every passing second.
Get the Eat Voraciously newsletter for delicious dinner inspiration, delivered straight to your inbox.
If these limited-time beef boulders are supposed to be Arby’s answer to chicken nuggets, they lost the battle before I even popped one in my mouth. They rivaled White Castle’s chicken rings for the crown of fast food with zero visual appeal. They looked like something I might mix into my dog’s bowl.
I share all this as preamble for what happened next: I took a big bite of nugget and was shocked — and I don’t use that word loosely — at how tender it was. The meat was smoky, too, and apparently not the kind you get from a bottle. A cross-section view revealed distinct smoke rings, the pink-to-reddish hues that can result from genuine low-and-slow cooking with smoldering hardwoods. (You can get a similar reaction from celery powder, a curing agent that is indeed smuggled into Arby’s steak nuggets, but the technique isn’t foolproof.) The bites didn’t have the bark you would expect from aggressively seasoned barbecue, but they had enough onion and garlic powder to trip your umami taste buds.
🥂
Follow Dining & drinks
What struck me was how unadorned and unadulterated the nuggets looked: just sliced-up chunks of beef, seasoned, cooked and tucked into a paper container with all the fanfare of mess-hall grub. The nuggets may be the closest thing to barbecue ever served at a fast-food joint, which, I grant you, is a ridiculously low bar.
A look at the author's first steak nuggets order from a Maryland Arby's. (Tim Carmen/TWP)
More than a decade ago, Daniel Vaughn, the smoked-meats maven at Texas Monthly, submitted himself to a tour of fast-food “barbecue.” He added the quote marks to signal that, yes, he understood the difference between the real thing and the slathered offerings served up at McDonald’s, Burger King, Sonic and the rest of these wannabe smokehouses. He predictably dismissed these sad imitations, but he also reported that Arby’s actually slow-smokes the meat for its “smokehouse brisket” sandwich. (The quote marks are mine here.) The chain even created a 13-hour “commercial” to prove it — or to test the stamina of those who like to watch paint dry.
Arby’s isn’t bragging much about its process for the steak nuggets. They may “have the meats,” but they don’t have much information on how they prepare them. So I pinged a representative to learn how these morsels move from commissary (or wherever the company prepares them) to restaurant to the container that I grab at the counter. Anyone who has ever hosted a barbecue feast knows how quickly beef goes downhill once you remove it from the smoker, rest it and start slicing into it. I was hoping to gain some company insights, but the answers I received revealed little. I was able to extract a couple of things: The nuggets are hand-cut from the round section of the animal, and they’re "seasoned, seared, and smoked in a real smoker for 2 hours.” A quick glance at the ingredients also suggests that at least two additives help the beef retain moisture.
More than anything, Arby’s nuggets (nominally) remind me of burnt ends, the charred chunks of fatty brisket that are all but synonymous with Kansas City barbecue. These bark-heavy trimmings were essentially a local delicacy until 1972 when Calvin Trillin, the essayist, humorist and world-class glutton, wrote a piece for Playboy about Arthur Bryant’s in his hometown of Kansas City, Missouri.
“The main course at Bryant’s, as far as I’m concerned, is something that is given away free — the burned edges of the brisket,” Trillin wrote all those years ago. “The counterman just pushes them over to the side and anyone who wants them helps himself. I dream of those burned edges. Sometimes, when I’m in some awful, overpriced restaurant in some strange town, trying to choke down some three-dollar hamburger that tastes like a burned sponge, a blank look comes over me: I have just realized that at that very moment, someone in Kansas City is being given those burned edges free.”
From left: Arby's steak nuggets, steak nugget bowl and steak nugget sandwich. (Marvin Joseph/TWP; food styling by Lisa Cherkasky)
Later in the same essay, Trillin mentions that Snead’s Bar-B-Q in Kansas City “cuts the burned edges off the brisket with a little more meat attached and puts them on the menu as ‘brownies.’” In the intervening years, these traditions have evolved, as they always do, even with American barbecue, a cuisine that doesn’t surrender its ways without a fight. Brownies are still on the menu at Snead’s — though they now include ham and sausage options! — but burned edges have morphed into burnt ends, a dish so popular that pitmasters will now sacrifice whole briskets to create their version of the smoky little nuggets. Some are served sauced. Some not.
Arby’s nuggets are, more or less, the latest iteration: Poor man’s burnt ends. Burnt ends for the masses. Burnt ends for those without easy access to a K.C.-style barbecue joint. They’re served with a tiny tub of Arby’s hickory barbecue dipping sauce, a sweet-and-tangy concoction that, while not subtle, doesn’t completely bulldoze the minimalist charms of the nuggets (even if you may accidentally bulldoze someone yourself if you try to dunk a nug while driving in traffic.) I can’t say the same for the steak nugget sandwich: The bun, toppings and garnishes neutralize the meat, forcing the nuggets to cede control to the fried onions, mayo, pickles and Havarti cheese. The steak nugget bowl, in which the beef blocks are dropped into a container of white cheddar mac and cheese, showcases the meat better, if mostly because you can compose your own bites.
It’s hard to fathom that these nuggets will find a permanent home on the Arby’s menu, despite America’s ongoing protein craze. (A nine-piece order — $9.29 at my location, though prices vary — has about 30 grams of protein, or more than a third of what the average American man needs per day.) They seem too primal for the prissy, wax-paper-wrapped, hermetically sealed world of fast-food restaurants. Which may explain why some folks have taken to calling the nuggets “squirrel knees” and “moose knuckles” in social media reviews. Personally, I like this (relatively) straightforward injection of beef. It’s a bold move in an industry that tends to favor kooky mash-ups and sugar-rush monstrosities.
