Audio By Carbonatix
The Guilty Pleasure: The Meat Mountain Where to Get It: Arby’s, locations nationwide (participation may vary) The Price: $10 What It Really Costs: It’s a doozy, but not quite as bad as you think.
I’m stunned by the existence of a new off-menu item at Arby’s, the Meat Mountain. As the story from the company goes, Arby’s stores put up a poster displaying all of the different meats they use, attractively stacked in one very tall pile. People took a look at the poster, and said they wanted one of that. Never mind that the poster was just for looks, the giant stack of meat had to be theirs.
Given the eager-to-please nature of the local Arby’s employees, I’m not at all surprised that the staff made one for these nice guests who were clearly out of their minds. Arby’s brass caught wind of what happened, and unleashed the sandwich nationwide as a secret menu item, hoping the hot mess would go viral.
It worked.
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Now, you can take ten dollars to most any Arby’s in the country and order one monstrous sandwich. It has on it turkey, ham, beef brisket, corned beef, Angus steak, two chicken tenders, two slices of cheese, a strip and a half of bacon, and of course roast beef, all on one convenient bun.
Much to my surprise, it’s a pretty decent sandwich for a fast food place. It’s a bit hard to tell the difference between one meat and another in a bite, but the whole combination is quite savory. The addition of chicken strips adds crunchy textural contrast, and the bun is sturdy enough to hold up to all the meat jammed in between.
Given the plethora of protein, you would expect this to be quite the caloric sandwich, and you would be right. However, it’s probably not the caloric neutron bomb that you imagined.
By my estimate (using the nutrition information from Arby’s along with some good old-fashioned math), the entire sandwich is “only” about 1,000 calories.
If the Meat Mountain is made according to company specifications, the calorie content is in line with large sandwiches at other fast food joints. Several items on the menu at Carl’s Jr. are more caloric without even trying. Jack in the Box’s Bacon Ultimate Cheeseburger is just over 900 calories, and Wendy’s Baconator is 940. And, it’s less than almost any burger that you might order at a sit-down casual restaurant.
The scary number is the sodium, clocking in at a whopping 3,400 milligrams. That’s a full gram more than the FDA says you should eat over an entire day.
Should you order one? That depends. How hungry are you? I think it’s worth splitting one with a friend, if anything just for the novelty of getting a sandwich with almost everything possible on it.
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