You have asked- Is it BBQ?
My question is – Is it food?
One month ago I decided to never set foot in a McDonald's again. I had come to this decision after years of very infrequent visits to the golden arches for occasional “on the run” lunches . I usually go out of my way to avoid fast food restaurants, much preferring local family owned ethnic restaurants of pretty much any persuasion. My aversion to fast food is not specific to McDonald's. I feel the same way about Burger King and Wendys' and KFC. I avoid them, if for no other reason than that they do not serve alcohol.
Occasionally, if I was really hungry, and really, really, pressed for time I would pull into a convenient MickyD's for a burger or chicken “McNuggets” and fries, and a coke. Those quick lunch alternatives started to fall out of favor last year, when we found ourselves in the middle of one more E Coli scare, this time traced to industrial methods used to manufacture processed hamburgers. I do not recall McDonald's even being part of that specific story, it was just the whole industrial mass produced hamburger story that was so unsettling. There are certain things that we really shouldn't know about. I, like Mark Twain, would rather be left in the dark. I read about how “lean beef” from one factory in South America is combined with “fatty beef” from some other factory before adding fat scrapings for texture and then shipping it all to some other Midwest food processor to make it look pretty and package it. I decided right there between the fatty beef and the scrapings that I could live without any and all hamburgers, unless I ground them myself in my own kitchen. This was not a big sacrifice since I rarely ate hamburgers anyway.
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| From HuffPost |
What I did really enjoy was chicken nuggets, which was the next part of my McDonald's experience to be shaken with another new story, compliments of the HuffPost. They ran an article about mechanically separated chicken, and how exactly "chickens" become "nuggets". This was one more piece of information that I could have lived without. Don't get me wrong - I know full well that chickens do not have nuggets; I just really didn't want to know how chickens came to BE nuggets. The mechanical separator – pictured here – is used to scrape every last morsel of edible chicken from the carcass, and then extrude it into a soft ice cream like extraction that comes out looking like something between coffee ice cream and puppy poop. That was enough for me. No more chicken nuggets. That article prompted McDonald's to start processing their nuggets with alternative methods, starting last month, but they had already lost me.
Since then I have managed to keep myself nourished without any help from McDonald's, and hadn't even given them any thought until last month when the company announced that the McDonald's rib sandwich – the McRib – was going to go on a six week farewell tour, with a national promotion ending December 5. I recalled a McRib being on the McDonald's menu in past years, but I thought it had been pulled for lack of demand. Being a soft touch for all things barbecue, and having no recollection of ever eating a McRib, I decided I had to find out what all of the hullabaloo was about. So yesterday, on the way from the Hudson Valley to Schroon Lake, I pulled off the Northway at exit 18 and purchased a “McRib Value Meal” for $4.27, including tax.
The McRib title certainly suggests that it is a boneless rib sandwich, but that is most definitely not an accurate description. The “patty”, which I will get to in a moment, is served on a six inch white bread “hoagie” roll, which tastes like it sounds. The patty is slathered with “BBQ” sauce, and topped with chopped raw onion and pickle slices. The predominant taste comes from the sauce, which has a cloyingly sweet hickory flavor, and the raw onion. The sauce tastes pretty much like many supermarket sauces you would find on the shelf below the Heinz sauces, and selling for $.50 less. It would probably be called something like Uncle Josh's Real Old Time Hickory BBQ Sauce. I apologize if there actually is an Uncle Josh's BBQ sauce; I really am trying to make this stuff up. I would say it is a Kansas City style sauce, but I don't want to offend an entire town. The sauce tasted like corn syrup mixed with artificial hickory and tomato flavors. Sounds yummy, yes? (Note to McLawyers – I said it “tasted like”, not that it was.)
The "rib" part of the meal is harder to explain. I'm not sure I can tell you what it is, but I can definitely tell you what it is not – a rib. Bones or no bones. It is molded into the shape of a small rib rack (how cute is that!), but it tastes like some type of processed pork-like “sausage” product, except that a sausage would have some seasoning. This had no discernible seasoning, and absolutely no discernible flavor of any persuasion. All you taste is the sauce, which tastes pretty bad.
In any event, if you have not yet tried a McRib, you are not missing much. If you are expecting anything that remotely resembles barbecue, don't waste the $4.27. Fortunately for us BBQ hounds, the real deal cannot be mass produced. Ribs take time, and seasoning, and more time. The sauce is optional. If you are interested – my rib seasoning recipe can be found here and my BBQ sauce recipe can be found here. There are more and even better recipes at AmazingRibs.com. I assure you that yours will be better than Micky D's. I will however miss their fries.
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