McDonald's $23,000 Big Mac Special Sauce – gross or great?

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/feb/04/mcdonalds-big-mac-special-sauce-gross-or-great

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Forget the Fat Duck – $550 for a meal is chicken feed. Somebody is about to pay more than $23,000 for a jar of sauce. Special sauce, that is.

The special sauce in “two all beef patties, Special Sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun” to be exact.

McDonald’s Australia is offering customers around the country the chance to buy 25ml tubs of Special Sauce for 50 cents during February, while stocks last.

It has also produced a 500ml limited edition squeezie bottle of the sauce, with one to be auctioned off for the Ronald McDonald House charity. The bid as of Wednesday morning was $23,100.

Who knew that the Big Mac could potentially become the symbol du jour of gastronomic extravagance? But then the sauce does have a cult following, with people all over the internet claiming to have uncovered the secret recipe that is actually not so secret, after all. (McDonald’s publishes all the ingredients on its website and in 2012 even posted a YouTube tutorial on how to make it.)

Guardian Australia managed to get its hands on a bottle of the stuff, emblazoned with the words: “Everything tastes better when it tastes like the Big Mac.”

But does it? We decided to find out.

With salad

Since it seems to be basically a cross between thousand island dressing and tartare sauce, our first test was a salad.

We transformed Guardian Australia subeditor Janine Israel’s healthy lunch with a squirt of the stuff. It’s fair to say her expectations were low. But in the event she found a snap pea plus the sauce was “a crunchy-creamy revelation”. So far so good.

With gravadlax

Rumour has it that the original recipe for the Special Sauce was a take on a Danish tartare sauce that is a common accompaniment to gravadlax. So I took myself to the shops and enlisted some professional help.

Belinda English is a trained chef who has worked as a public relations consultant for a coterie of high-end brands. She has a taste for the finer things in life and didn’t seem impressed to be recruited as a taste tester for McDonald’s Special Sauce.

“Have you seen what’s in that stuff?” she asked me when we met. “High fructose corn syrup, colourants, preservatives. Basically all the things you’re supposed to steer clear of.”

I responded by handing her an appetiser of Finnish rye crispbread topped with Huon gravadlax and Special Sauce.

She lifted then lowered her shoulders in a shrug of disappointment and said: “Delicious.” There was genuine sadness in her eyes.

With a cheese sandwich

We took our rare and privileged position as the world’s tasters seriously and assembled a variety of much-loved Australian meals.

First up was a cheese sandwich. I can say this for sure: Big Mac Special Sauce is bloody good on a cheese sandwich.

English enjoyed the cheese sandwich too, although about 10 minutes after eating it, she observed: “You know what, it just tastes like McDonald’s. Not matter what you eat, you can still taste that sort of nasty sweet vinegary flavour in your mouth afterwards. It takes over the flavour of everything.”

With a mixed grill

Any decent Aussie barbecue offers a mix of lamb, chicken and sausages. Our mixed grill interpretation for the Special Sauce was lamb cutlets, a chicken leg and a sausage.

We picked up our dainty little French-trimmed lamb cutlets and dipped them in a splodge of Special Sauce. It tasted fine. Nice, even. Although, after a second dip, I decided not to go back for a third and concluded the lamb tasted better sans sauce.

Then came the sausage, which blended into the Special Sauce with such aplomb I couldn’t taste the difference between the two. Texture was the only giveaway to help distinguish the sausage from the sauce.

English was more sanguine about the sausage-Special Sauce combo. “Actually I’m left with the taste of sausage in my mouth after that, not sauce,” she said.

I stared at the chicken and hesitated. I must declare a prejudice: for some reason, I couldn’t imagine chicken tasting any good with Big Mac Special Sauce and it was with much trepidation I took a mouthful. I wasn’t sick afterwards, but it’s not a mouthful I’d go back for either.

With a roast

Earlier, I’d asked English what she’d cook if she had a $23,000 bottle of sauce in her kitchen containing eggs, mustard, relish, onion, garlic and spices – the basic ingredients in the secret recipe. Her answer was: “a standing rib roast with wilted greens and thrice-cooked fries”.

We were both very keen to try this masterpiece.

It was hard to bear. Special Sauce is not a good match for a rib of beef, which is kind of hard to believe since it could have passed for a decent bearnaise once plated.

“It’s too sweet,” declared English. “When you cover something in a sauce that has 30 ingredients in it, it doesn’t matter what the quality of the meat is like because all you can taste is the sauce.”

It is certainly possible we had overdosed on Big Mac Special Sauce by this time, but it’s odd that it was such a good match for salmon and cheese, but not great with any of the meat we tried it with.

Perhaps it is not supposed to be consumed with every element of your dinner, or in five courses. Too much of a good thing, and all that. Then again, when you’ve got a jar of sauce worth $23,000 in your kitchen, what are you supposed to do with it – save it “for good”?

McDonald’s has definitely made the right decision in restricting the average customer to a 25ml tub. Smear on some salmon and enjoy!