You kind of have to wonder what took KFC so long to put together its own version of McDonald’s ever-popular Big Mac, but it’s finally here: meet the Big Boss.

In describing this creation, I’m reminded of the famous Big Mac jingle that listed its ingredients musically: “Two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun.” In fact, if you remove the beef and replace it with two breaded chicken fillets, the Big Boss is the exact same thing. It doesn’t just look like the Big Mac, it is the Big Mac - but with chicken.

Sadly for my health, a good portion of readers now expect me to routinely try these things on their behalf, so off I went to the local KFC.

Ordering the Big Boss on launch day was kind of funny. The cashier had to look up at the menu board to see what I was talking about when I asked for it, then puzzled her way through punching it into the register. There was no doubt I was the first customer to order the new sandwich at this particular KFC.

The place was nearly empty - only one other customer was there - yet my order took a while to fill. I waited about five minutes, which in fast-food land is an eternity. The preparers in the back had evidently never made the sandwich before and I could half hear them discussing theories on how what was supposed to go into it.

I didn’t mind the wait because I got a good chuckle out of watching a whole restaurant bamboozled by a simple sandwich. I couldn’t help but think how funny - and cruel - it would be if I came back and ordered the Big Boss again when the place was actually busy.

I sat down and opened the box, only to find the whole thing a disheveled mess. The top layer had slid off to the side, leaving me to put it back together. Like the guys in the back, I too had effectively just constructed my first Big Boss.

Worse, though, was the heel - which, in McDonald’s parlance, is the very bottom bun (the middle part is the club and the top is the crown - I know this from way back, when I was a child labourer at McD’s). It was flattened, as if it had been crushed by the mammoth weight of everything on top of it. I’m not quite sure how this had happened, but it made the Big Boss hard to hold.

Visually, it’s hard to say the sandwich looks appealing. As a friend asked on Twitter when I posted the picture above, “is that corn?” Those shard-like objects are in fact onions. Compare and contrast my real-world photo with KFC’s promotional glam shot:

And so I dove in. Eating the Big Boss is actually anti-climactic because it’s pretty much what you’d expect - it’s a typical KFC chicken sandwich, but a lot more of it. The chicken fillets are fully white meat, while the coating smacks of KFC’s trademarked tang.

I can’t quite say what the special sauce tasted like, other than to say it was mayo-ish. (Hey, if you want more in-depth taste analysis, go read a proper food blog.) The onions, pickles and lettuce… well, they were exactly as they should have been. All told, there were no surprises with the Big Boss - it’s exactly what it says it is: a bigger chicken sandwich, and there’s nothing wrong with that to people for whom a single piece of chicken simply won’t do.

The problem for me in the end was, again, the build quality. I’m something of a Big Mac veteran so I’m well versed in keeping such towering constructs together, yet the Big Boss still managed to confound me. Try as I might, I couldn’t keep it from constantly falling apart, so in the end I just ate its various pieces separately. I’m going to chalk this up to the preparers’ newness with the product. With luck, they’re master builders by now.

I’m not sure I’d order the Big Boss again, but that’s more down to my eating habits than because of any real fault of the sandwich. If I’m going for fast food and opting for chicken, it’s generally because I don’t want something as filling or heavy as beef, which makes the Big Boss something of a counter-intuitive order. I don’t usually gorge on chicken, but evidently some people do. This is their sandwich.