This weekend a visiting friend and I decided to grab a snack at McDonalds. He proposed some nuggets which got me thinking this might be a good chance for me to actually go and give that Szechuan sauce a try. I only haven’t had the stuff in, oh, 20 years, since the original 1998 Mulan promotion, and for as much as I’ve covered the hype surrounding it, I have yet to actually taste the stuff since then, all of which I can recall regarding it was that it was nasty to the 13 year old me.
Well, as luck would have it, I had no issue getting the sauce – the McDonalds we stopped at had plenty of it. We got our nuggets and drove on my house, knowing I was either going to have an interesting story to tell, or have to force down nuggets with a sauce I didn’t like, or one that was at the very least not very good.
I got home, opened the box of McNuggets, opened the Szechuan Sauce packed, dipped my nugget in (no smell of the sauce, I wanted the experience to be completely a surprise to my sense of taste) and began to eat.
To my surprise… I liked it. Quite a bit, actually. It isn’t anything special, just a basic sauce, but as it turns out the flavor in question is one I love. I never knew that flavor as Szechuan sauce, but I have actually used an identical tasting sauce on food from a local Asian restaurant I frequent. It would seem that over 20 years my tastes have expanded and I have grown to like that taste that the 13 year old me hated.
It’s funny, to, because I really do have to “eat crow” as they say on this one – I was wrong about the sauces taste. As I said, it isn’t special, but it’s not bad at all – actually quite good to me, at least in moderation. I find myself getting burned out on it quickly today (yes, I went back and got more nuggets) but in all seriousness I could see myself enjoying this regularly!
I still stand by my statements regarding the high demand of the sauce being people who never tried it back in the day, only wanting it because Rick and Morty mentioned it, and McDonalds capitalizing on this hype, if not helping create it to begin with. Rioting about it is stupid as all hell, but at the same rate, McDonalds should damn well have known people would have wanted it in a higher volume than their promo in late 2017 could provide.
I still feel the obsession with the sauce is absolutely absurd – it is still just a dipping sauce – but the actual substance it is tastes fine. I don’t know if maybe they changed the formula or what, but the fact remains whatever is sitting on my desk in a little sauce packet as I type this tastes fine, and I certainly would like for it to stay a regular sauce option. It’s a nice, slightly smokey subtle flavor that’s pretty solid, at least to me.
If you can get some, eh, go for it. Check it out. If you like Asian food at all, you will probably enjoy it. If not, that’s understandable.
I can’t stop laughing though at the fact that I actually enjoyed the sauce. Ironic, honestly, is the best way to describe it.
Fun times!
^Accurate depiction of me discovering that I actually liked the sauce.