When I last visited the doctor a few weeks ago to get my raging sciatic nerve looked at, my blood pressure measured just a tick below elevated. Sodium-loaded visions danced through my head: Guy Fieri’s revolting gas station food; the botched attempt to create frozen Jucy Lucys; 30+ items of wildly varying quality, sampled at last year's Minnesota State Fair.
Then, last week, we learned of Kwik Trip's new limited-time offering, the Hormel SPAMwich. We didn't have to review KT's Mountain Dew Dunker Donuts, the Wisconsin-based gas station's latest viral-by-design LTO. But exactly 6,107 of you read Em Cassel's (generous!) taste test of 'em, so yeah, reader demand exists for culinary gas station appraisals.
And those fuckin' SPAMwiches present a local angle less tenuous than KT being headquartered across the Mississippi River in La Crosse: Hormel is the pride of Austin, Minnesota. Setting aside my own health and an inherent resistance to PR gimmickry, I had to eat the grab-'n'-go breakfast sammies.
So on Tuesday I journeyed across the Minnesota River to the Kwik Trip in closest proximity to south Minneapolis, the one in Eagan.
"I'm so glad we have SPAM," the cashier told me as I plopped the two SPAMwhich varieties—Western Omelette and Classic Brunch—near the register. "Me too," I tell him, "I'm excited." (I'm not really excited.)
After returning to my car, I examine an ingredient list that rivals Stephen King's voluminous It in length:
Suddenly craving calcium stearoyl lactylate, I began ripping open the modestly sized sandwiches, each of which were charged at $2.99 to the company credit card.
Up first: Western Omelette.
The spongey preformed egg patty should be familiar to anyone with experience at low-end hotels or high-end prisons. A speckling of pepper and onion added some welcome textural variation, but this isn't even on par with, say, the fresh-cracked protein topping an Egg McMuffin. The hamburger bun proved serviceable, even if that sort of bread feels curious for breakfast.
We're here to talk about the main event, the one that got the cashier all excited, the SPAM. I'm SPAM agnostic—it's fine. The strip applied to Kwik Trip's SPAMwiches? Pure corporate carelessness. (Here's where we'll quickly rattle off an obligatory admonishment of the 135-year-old meat conglomerate for its labor, Covid, and animal-rights abuses.) While my eggs, somehow, appeared borderline burnt, there was no evidence the SPAM had been cooked beyond the microwave zapping the whole sandwich received before sitting beneath the heat lamps. It doesn't have to be this way: Em once explored how SPAM, if prepared with care, can become a cheffy indulgence. Not so in the gas station parking off Dodd Road, where mushiness proved to be overriding SPAMwich trait.
I can recommend the Western Omelette as a trashy novelty, something to give SPAM-heads a giddy, salty thrill as the president loots the country and the world burns. The same can't be said for the Classic Brunch. If "skunky" notes pervaded the former 'wich, as my greasy notes indicate, skunkiness dominated the latter one. Unscientifically, I chalk this up to the science experiments involved in imbuing the limp croissant with buttery flavor. And to summon Groucho Marx, why did I receive such a skimpy, shriveled strip of straight-from-the-can SPAM?
Still craving anything resembling food, I popped over next door to Brianno's Deli Italia, which I'd heard good things about. In fact, when we ranked the best Italian beef sandwiches in town, at least one reader cried out, "This list is a travesty because it doesn't include Brianno's in Eagan!"
And ya know something?
That sandwich sucked, too. I spent the rest of the day feeling like shit. The end.
