Even if you’re not a fan of Rick & Morty, you’ve probably heard about what’s been going
down with McDonald’s and their Szechuan Sauce.
Really, it’s kind of amazing. Because a cartoon character
had nostalgia over a discontinued dipping sauce made as a tie-in to the movie Mulan, a massive fan outcry resulted in
McDonald’s bringing back the sauce for a limited time. Less amazing is how the
Golden Arches’ lack of planning resulted in them running out of sauce very
quickly and rabid Rick & Morty
fans nearly burning every McDonald's to the ground in an extreme childish backlash that doesn't even surprise me anymore from today's internet fanboy culture.
But McDonald’s apparently listened to whatever death threats
they were receiving, because they just re-released the sauce again in larger
quantities and for a longer stretch of time. As a fan of Rick & Morty, Chicken McNuggets, and re-releasing discontinued
movie tie-in foods (Ecto-Cooler’s return was the best thing to come out of the
new Ghostbusters), I figured I’d try
the sauce out this time since I, like most people, missed out in October.
So, does the fabled Szechuan Sauce live up to the hype?
Unfortunately, it does not.
When I first took a bite of a nugget dipped in the sauce, I
didn’t taste much flavor, so I figured I just didn’t put enough on the nugget.
After covering the chicken in more sauce and then sticking my actual finger in
the stuff, I came to the realization that the Szechuan Sauce just doesn’t have
much of a flavor to it.
It’s a very thick and sweet sauce, with a near microscopic
hint of Asian spices and tang. It tastes less like a teriyaki dipping sauce and
more like someone added a tiny bit of teriyaki to some corn syrup.
It doesn’t compliment the chicken well, either. Chicken
McNuggets are fine on their own, but the dipping sauces usually enhance the
rather basic flavor. Honey mustard is my go-to choice. With the Szechuan Sauce,
there was barely a difference between that and a naked McNugget. I only used
one of my Szechuan packets for my 10-piece McNuggets, resulting in me eating
the last two or three nuggets with no sauce. I enjoyed them exactly the same as
I would have without the sauce.
The real disappointing part is that I attempted to make
Szechuan Sauce myself before they re-released it, and my homebrewed concoction
was much better. Thanks to a few different internet tutorials, I found that by
mixing two parts of the Sweet & Sour dipping sauce with one part of the
Tangy Barbeque sauce, you get a strange sweet and tangy sauce that you could
almost see being served at a lesser-tier Chinese restaurant. It was full of
flavor, and I was expecting something similar to that with the official
Szechuan Sauce re-release. But what I got was a watered down version of these
terrible teriyaki chicken wings I had once at a local pizza place.
I’m not sure if this is the same formula McDonald’s used
when they initially created the sauce in 1992 (or even the same formula used to
re-create it in October), but I certainly hope the Golden Arches changed up
their recipe at some point, and that the 1998 sauce was much better.
I hate to say that Rick Sanchez has terrible taste, but if
this sauce tastes anything like the original release, I can’t see it as
anything somebody would obsess about in a dream world. And I certainly don’t
think this was worth almost taking Ronald McDonald to the guillotine in a Szechuan-based French Revolution.
Final verdict: 2/5
Now if Rick &
Morty wanted to help bring back something worthwhile, bring back Taco
Bell’s Triple Steak Stack. That is still, to this day, my absolute favorite way
to get terrible indigestion.
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