Review: McDonald’s mashed-up menu hacks might be better left unmashed
Last week, McDonald’s debuted a handful of menu “hacks,” recipes incorporating standard items that fans typically dream up and share online, including a burger stuffed with chicken nuggets and an unholy, Frankenstein-ian creation that involves layering fish and chicken patties inside a Big Mac.
The world’s biggest fast-food chain’s embrace of hackery – usually the domain of consumers, not corporations – feels significant. Sure, it’s a gimmick for the Golden Arches, and like any marketing play, it’s designed to boost the bottom line. (The cost to assemble the aforementioned three-protein concoction, dubbed the “Land, Air & Sea,” is $11.)
But the marketing campaign affirms the popularity of food hacking, a pastime that has blossomed on social media, where creative diners stack, stuff and customize their way to their own bootlegged meals.
The goal of food hacks is often to save money: A widely shared recipe for a “poor man’s Big Mac” is to order a McDouble cheeseburger and ask for it to be served with Big Mac sauce. The result is a close dupe (minus the middle bun of McDonald’s iconic burger) for about half the price (a McDouble was $2.49 at my local outlet and a Big Mac was $4.99). There are innumerable suggestions online for getting the maximum bang for your buck at Chipotle – like to never ask for two scoops of anything up front, according to one former employee in a TikTok video that’s been viewed more than 2 million times. The person assembling your bowl will probably give you two small scoops, he says, whereas if you ask for one scoop, then ask for “a little bit more,” you’re more likely to wind up with double the ingredients.
But saving a few bucks is clearly not the only appeal, says Kiley Libuit, the creator of Hackthemenu, a website that catalogues hundreds of hacks for major fast-food chains. Some hackers are in it for the novelty – and maybe the “likes” their concoctions get on social media. “There’s a big group out there that likes the extreme ones – like ‘look how much I can eat!'” he says. “And others are unusual, but they still taste really good – maybe you grew up eating something like it, like hash browns in your breakfast sandwich.”
That’s a reference to one of the items on McDonald’s new hack menu, where an order of the crispy potatoes is added to a Sausage McMuffin With Egg.
Libuit also postulates that there’s another, less tangible motivation behind all the mash-ups. “People like feeling like they know secrets – things the regular crowd can’t get,” he says. He thinks that’s why people like sharing the “secret menu items” that fast-food chains don’t officially advertise or promote.
And that sounds about right to Alice Julier, a sociology professor at Chatham University who studies food and consumption. Julier notes that customizing fast food is a way for people who have grown up with so much standardization to break the mold. “It’s about being in the know,” she says. “It’s a bit of a contradiction – like, look, here’s something that’s really special, but it’s based on something that’s accessible to most people.”
She thinks the popularity of sharing hacks on social media is partly a product of the pandemic. With people eating out less, sharing their food partly makes up for the communal experience of dining in a restaurant. “It’s like with kids, what you call parallel play,” she says. “The sharing of food online is because maybe you’re not sharing it in another way.”
Libuit started his website as a project eight years ago for a class he took on coding in college, and to get started collecting hacks, he and his friends started asking fast-food employees what they liked to make for themselves. The strategy was prescient: Some of the most widely shared hacks on TikTok come from current and former employees. A video posted last month by a Chick-fil-A worker that has racked up more than 270,000 views introduced novel menu items, such as a spicy chicken patty in place of the regular one in a biscuit sandwich, and bacon added to the mac and cheese.
Some chains make a point of being hacker-friendly. In-N-Out actually posts its “Not So Secret” menu, Libuit notes, and Starbucks is known for being accommodating of any special instructions. The new hacker-specific menu at McDonald’s might be the most prominent example of a major brand embracing its customers’ freelance stylings.
Which brings us to an important question: How do these “fan-generated” concoctions actually taste?
The breakfast option is the most coherent of the bunch. You layer an oblong hash brown inside an Egg McMuffin, with the crisp of the fried potatoes (one of McDonald’s finest menu items, I’ve always thought) lending a needed textural contrast to the gummy egg filling. Of course, it’s a starch bomb, but unlike some of the sandwich’s brethren, this hack makes sense, flavor-wise. And a bonus road warriors, the mash-up is easier to consume while driving than the two components are separately.
Of the three lunchtime options on the menu, the “Double Crunchy” is the least offensive. It’s the easiest to assemble: Just slip a few nuggets under the patties of a double cheese burger and drizzle them with barbecue sauce. It’s spiritually related to a hack posted on Libuit’s site that incorporates a McChicken patty, though that concoction, one of the site’s most popular, omits the sauce.
The result was not terrible. The nuggets added a layer of promised crunch, and the sauce gave the whole thing a smoky-sweet flavor.
By contrast, I started hating the “Surf and Turf” as soon as I began to assemble it, peeling apart a double cheeseburger between its two patties, then removing a Filet-O-Fish’s top bun and layering the remains in between the burgers. The very act felt wrong, and the resulting sandwich tasted even more unholy. Fish and beef in one bite? Someone should call Officer Big Mac, because I am certain that the combination violates some city ordinance, if not the laws of human nature.
And the aforementioned Land, Air & Sea, in which the fish and chicken patties of the Filet-O-Fish and the McChicken, respectively, were inserted into a Big Mac, was truly execrable. Once I put it together, I assessed the four-pattied beast, fearing I would have to unhinge a jaw to consume it. As I finally managed a bite that encompassed all the sliding strata, the poor, overworked bun started pulling apart in my hands. And the taste was a muddled mess of flavors overly greased by an amalgamation of the fish filet’s tartar and the Big Mac’s mayo-based “special sauce.”
I admit that I abandoned my duties sooner than I should have, stopping after only one go at the thing. But by then, I was surrounded by a cemetery of castoff buns. Empty clamshell boxes and gobs of tartar sauce littered my kitchen counter. The cheese of the triple-protein stack was beginning to congeal into a raft of safety-orange wax.
The experience of it all was unpleasant. Incoherent combinations aside, since I was merely following the instructions offered by the Golden Arches’ overlords, I got none of the frisson, like many hackers do, of an outlaw defying the corporate R & D constraints. And by amassing a bag full of wasted buns and racking up a larger-than-usual tab, I didn’t have the satisfaction of getting one over on the Man by saving a few dollars. I didn’t even get the pleasure of sharing in an online community’s collective experiment.
Which isn’t to say my hacking days are over. Next time, perhaps I’ll just get my inspiration a little further down the food chain – like maybe a high-schooler with a creative new idea to share.
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