Kotas Reviews the Sonic Pickle Juice Slush

We are definitely in the dog days of summer now. Not only did I see a dog in my neighborhood this past week, I saw two! On two different occasions! What is this world coming to anyway? Oh well, I suppose nothing matters anymore. Black is white, up is down, dogs and cats, living together...Mass Hysteria! So to celebrate the impending heat death of the universe (only several million billion years to go!), I decided to give in and try a little something at a drive in. Ladies and Gentlemen, today we review the Sonic Pickle Juice Slush.

Not really the fastest thing alive, is it?

Apparently pickle flavored stuff is a food tread this year. I mean, I don't really see it as a "new" trend, as there have been dill pickle flavored things out on shelves for a while, particularly potato chips. Still, I hadn't seen it as a 'sweet' before, so while it may not be that new, it's certainly new to me! I mean, I like red bean paste, so I'm not a stranger to the concept of the 'normally savory sweet thing', but pickle juice? Really? Let's get one.

It's not easy drinkin' green.

I'll be honest, I don't often go to Sonic for food. I mean, it's fine and all, but it is rarely convenient to go there rather than somewhere else, and Sonic's menu doesn't have enough pizzazz to pull me away from other options I might pass on the way there. Still, the fam and I were on our way back from Dollywood when we're like "Food is good. And hey, a Sonic! Let's go there." Thus you now know the long pointless build up to this story. Holy crap that shit is super fuckin' PICKLE colored ain't it? It isn't NEON green, but it's damn near and smells just like pickle juice. This is gonna be a bumpy ride for sure.

You know, I was expecting to absolutely hate this, but it's not bad. The sugar counteracts the sourness of the pickle juice and makes it almost refreshing in a weird Gatorade kind of way. It absolutely tastes like a pickle, but not a sweet pickle or bread and butter or anything like that. It's definitely dill pickle, but...less sour? Maybe slightly sweet? It's an odd flavor indeed. So odd I puzzled over it for half an hour while we ate lunch. It went fairly well with the burger I ate, but it wasn't something I would want a lot of. I don't even know if I would ever want it again, and I didn't finish the serving I had, though that was a matter of "we only have so many cup holders and we have better drinks than this to put in them". Still, I drank half of it, and I can't say I didn't enjoy it. Mostly, it left me somewhat puzzled. A very interesting flavor, if not a preferred one.

On the FACE Rating System, this gets a baffled 0 Faces. It's not a bad flavor, but it's also not a flavor I think I would seek out on any kind of regular basis. I would recommend it as a sharing drink, and one you don't get a lot of, though if you love it, awesome. I am mostly just confused by it though. Super interesting, super weird.

Kotas Reviews The Sonic Peanut Butter Caramel Pie Milkshake

We're still wrapping up business from last year here are Kotas Reviews Everything, so prepare for more food reviews. I think I will try to review more non-food things this year, but that doesn't mean we can't have fun with desserts, right? Because I love dessert. Granted, desserts are not helping my already far too ample waistline. With that in mind, let us turn to today's subject, the Peanut Butter Caramel Pie milkshake from Sonic.

And that is the Medium shake folks.

Good Lord this thing is enormous. I got the medium shake, expecting a cup that was roughly 16 oz. But look at this thing! LOOK AT IT. It is more like a 24 oz cup, and it is topped with whipped cream and a cherry. I didn't measure it, but it was certainly bigger than I thought it would be.

That's what she said!

Note the graham cracker dust on the top there? That's not merely decoration. I believe it constitutes the pie portion of our little adventure. How does it taste? Well, it took me approximately 7 minutes to answer that question, because Holy Jeez is this shake thick. How thick? Well, have you ever seen one of the old paste jars, where you take the cap off and there's a little stick attached to the inside of the cap, and you are expected to smear the paste with that? When you would open a new jar of paste, that applicator stick would be buried in paste, and require some effort to extract. This shake was not quite that bad, but almost. My cheeks collapsed painfully trying to pull some of this shake up through the straw. I had to wait for it to melt enough to try and drink.

I finally managed to get some of the shake onto my tongue, and it was certainly peanut buttery. Mixed in was plenty of that graham cracker dust, so it was pie-y as well. You know what it wasn't? Caramel. There was only the veiled suggestion of blasphemous caramel within this tangled skein of a shake, and it was not very present. Of course, getting any kind of good taste was difficult because of the prevailing thickness of the shake. It took 45 minutes for me to consume this shake, most of that time waiting for it to melt so I could drink it. In the end I resorted to a spoon to mix it up to speed the process. The final insult? This bombshell was 1600 calories. I should probably be dead, but hey, I guess I was just made stronger. At least my cheek muscles are stronger at any rate. 

On the FACE Rating System, this shake gets 1 frowny face. It doesn't taste bad, but it is missing 1/3rd of its advertised flavors. I am being generous with the pie flavoring too, since it was just a ground up graham cracker. The peanut butter part of the shake was fine, and fans of that flavor would probably like this....but they would be better served just getting a plain old peanut butter shake. It was also so thick as to be a chore to consume, even after waiting a reasonable (and then unreasonable) period of time to let it melt, like, say, a car ride home. Totally not worth the calories to bother eating, and a lazy entry into the boutique shake flavor market.