The McDonald’s McRib is a perfectly mediocre sandwich wrapped in an intoxicating aura of rarity and mystique. Is it as good as the legends say? Of course not. It’s a mystery meat sandwich encased in pungent barbecue ooze. But ultimately, it’s as hard to separate the McRib’s mythical status as it is to remove the sauce stains that wound up everywhere.
McDonald’s brought the hard-to-find sandwich back to menus this week, so get ready to hear a lot of opinions that you don’t care about -- kind of like the Spotify Year In Review in sandwich form.
McDonald’s McRib
The McRib is your vagrant and capricious uncle who you only see once every few years. Sure, he’s a little weird, but you love Uncle McRib. Everything’s fun when he’s around. You get to stay up late, eat ice cream for breakfast and apparently pour a bathtub full of barbecue sauce onto a sandwich.
But then you wake up the next day and there are tire marks from an ATV on your lawn, $100 in cable fees for boxing pay-per-views in your mail and sauce stains that you’re still cleaning up a month later.
The McRib works as a sort of Bigfoot of the fast food industry. It’s fun to think it’s out there and even chase after it. But what do you do once you find Bigfoot? You take a picture, move on with your day and then realize that it smells way worse than you realized it did.
So what does it taste like?
This sandwich has smell. It has so much smell.
Long before you ever get a chance to open the bag and examine the contents, the scent of the barbecue sauce is already working its way through every barrier between itself and your nose. No bag, box or mask will stop it. It’s like the cartoonish tendrils of scent that make Looney Tunes characters float up and get pulled toward the scent of a pie. Except in this instance, it’s a Kool-Aid Man full of barbecue sauce breaking through your car window and shooting you with a Super Soaker of tangy brown syrup-perfume.
In principle, the sandwich is fine. There’s a nice roll that’s soft and chewy. The pickles and onions add a nice contrast of flavor and texture. The pork patty tastes like pork, barely. Unfortunately, nothing in the sandwich is secure, slipping and sliding between the buns like the toppings on a poorly cooked pizza.
Everything about this sandwich is tied to the sauce. You don’t taste it as much as your tongue gets yelled at.
The “tangy” sauce has some good elements, but it hits way too hard to work with anything else. It’s like playing a marimba with a sledgehammer.
The actual “McRib” patty is a pressed patty of rib meat of questionable origin. It’s a little unnerving in how soft and loosely bound it is. The meat almost crumbles like hamburger as you chew. But it does taste like pork, carrying a nice meaty flavor once you manage to pick it out of the otherwise busy sandwich.
So is it any good?
This sandwich is a roller coaster. If you want to hop on for the ride of overbearing flavor that is the sauce, you might like it. Once that gets under control, there’s a solid-tasting pork patty in there with a couple of nice toppings and a bun.
If not, the McRib is going to take your taste buds through a miserable whirlwind of loops and corkscrews while your tongue hangs on for dear life.
The final word
There’s a good sandwich in here somewhere. But here’s the thing: I don’t think this should be a pork sandwich.
Listen, I shouldn’t have to tell you that the McRib is not a naturally occurring shape of meat. It’s like a chicken nugget. There’s more stuff happening to the meat than you probably want to know about.
So if it’s just going to get blasted with barbecue sauce and pork flavoring, why even use pork. There are plenty of meat substitutes that could work here. The McRib does not do a great job of copying the texture of actual pork. It’s way too loose and crumbly.
At this rate, McDonald’s should just partner with one of those faux-meat companies and start selling the McFib.
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“I ate it so you don’t have to” is a regular food column looking at off-beat eats, both good and bad. It runs every other Thursday-ish at noon-ish.
You can send any praise/food suggestions to nomalley@masslive.com. Please send all complaints about giving up unethical factory meat to twesterh@masslive.com. He gets two shout-outs this week because he’s awesome and deserves so much credit for being an awesome reporter, friend and dad. You can check out the rest of the series here.
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