Who knew cheeseburgers could have sex with other burgers?
Sometimes, the kitchen geniuses at McD go too far.
I am starting to wonder whether I shouldn’t just quit all my jobs and do snarky reviews of terrible fast food items. I would have work for life, that’s for sure, seeing how fast just one chain cranks out one terrible idea after another.
I described my McRib, as charitably as I could, as splotching of goo on cardboard. I am not entirely certain what four-letter words to use to convey the utter despair that enraptured my soul when I diswrapped my newly-acquired Surf N’ Turf. Below are the picture from the McD website and the one from my kitchen table. Which one looks like the best arrangement of 560 calories?


Yum, right. Of course I tried it. And it’s surprisingly not as awful as it looks. I imagine it tastes almost half decent when it’s put together the way St. Ronald intended.
You know what really goes well with fish? Pickles. That’s the ingredient that makes tartar sauce so irresistible. I’m a huge fan of Filet-o-Fish and have been since I was a kid. There is also cheese in it — half a slice of deeply processed “American” kind and lordy it’s a heavenly mix when that’s the thing you’re craving. Weirdly enough, adding two small meat patties with onions and pickles didn’t destroy the experience, contrary to what I was expecting. It’s the mustard and ketchup that were decidedly de trop. Especially as there was rather a lot of it in the model I brought home.
One has to wonder whether there is a point past which the geniuses who toil at the McD Experimental Kitchen will refrain from venturing but apparently it’s not until well after they’ve tried mixing meat, cheese and chicken.
A few years ago when the chain brought in chicken for breakfast I was so offended I immediately had to go try it. And I was mesmerized. Somehow that combination of spices on the chicken patty with the weird sauce and the cheese works. When I’m road-tripping that’s often what I grab for brekkie if there’s no Starbucks around. It offers a good layer of fatty goodness that typically carries you a solid 400km.
The chicken cheeseburger also uses that small seasoned chicken patty (not the same as in the classic McChicken, unless they’ve changed that one too while I wasn’t looking). And fortunately in this case the ketchup doesn’t offend so much. In fact, not much is truly wrong in this bizarre concoction if you’ll pardon the shoddy assembly work performed, if that’s the word, by area teenagers.
My 17-year-old (former McD employee to boot) ate that one and pronounced it “a confusing mess of tastes and textures.” I stole a bite and must agree it’s confusing. Maybe that’s what they’re going for. Something so terribly hard to pin that you keep going back, in search of some answer to the question of why on earth you’d let your burgers have babies together like that.

