#FastFoodFriday: KFC Cereal Chicken Review: Good Cereal But Bad Combination


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If you’ve not tried any cereal chicken before, you’re either not a Singaporean or you’re allergic to chicken.

Whether it’s the calorie-filled butter cereal chicken or merely the crispy cereal chicken you’ve ordered from your favourite zi char stall or a cai png stall, it’s a dish that’ll never go out of trend, in line with other popular hawker fares like sweet and sour pork cubes (咕老肉) or kung pao chicken cube (宫保鸡丁).

I’m pretty sure 1,000 years later, your great-great grandchildren would still be having them while salted egg everything would become a retro dish.

So when KFC took the challenge of repackaging this into a fast-food chicken, purists went apeshit.

Purist Joe: KFC is ang mo. Cereal chicken is Chinese. You don’t mix them together!

Purist James: Letting KFC tinker with cereal chicken is like letting McDonald’s tinker with har cheong gai: we’ll be so pissed off, we’ll livestream ourselves pissing at the food

Purist Jin Man: Cereal chicken with bones? Why don’t we also add bones to Zinger burger?

Are their angry reactions justifiable, or have KFC made cereal chicken great again?

Since it’s Friday, we’ll waste our calories for you in this instalment of #FastFoodFriday

First Smell

When the chicken crossed the road and reached our office, the first thing we did was to open up the box and wait for the office dogs’ responses.

XiaoBeach73 was the first dog to respond, saying, “That smelled good.”

Soon, more dogs followed: the cereal chicken does smell like the real McCoy. In fact, our editor, who didn’t know we’ve ordered it, thought that someone had bought cereal chicken rice from the nearby zi char stall.

Purist Joe: Smelling goody doesn’t mean it’ll taste good. Go on, try it.

I agree with Joe on this, and so, here’s the taste test.

Taste Test

Before anything, here’s an image of how it looks like:


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KFC didn’t skimp on the amount of cereal, so it’s a good sign. But you should be able to tell the problem from the picture.

Unlike their commercial whereby the cereal defies the laws of gravity and sticks on the chicken like they’re glued to it…

…ours stay in our universe and followed the laws of physics.

Of course, we can just take the cereal and put them on the chicken, but every bite means 102 cereal would have jumped off the chicken, making eating a hassle.


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The cereal, however, is pretty good: they’re not like those found in zi char stalls that are overly sweet. They’re crispy and at the same time savoury, with just a tinge of aftertaste sweetness. I reckon they’ll actually go well with rice.

But with chicken?

Not really.

You see, the cereal chicken we’re accustomed to are chicken cubes, so every bite would mean an explosive feel of cereal in our mouth. But because each KFC chicken is big, you’ll taste the chicken meat more than the cereal, which kind of takes away the cereal taste.

Even when I tried my best to put more cereal on the chicken, the chicken taste is still way too overpowering.


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If they’ve used popcorn chicken instead of regular chicken, that might have worked.

So, is it worth the calories?

Only if you’re a cereal chicken person who loves everything cereal.

If not, it’ll be a…

Rating: 2.5/5


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