Most commonly enjoyed with McNuggets and fries, could this tasty sauce also be a handy condiment for cooking?
Whenever I go overseas, besides indulging in the local delicacies, I often like to make a stop at McDonald’s to try out the region-exclusive items on their menu that may include limited time offerings, special collaboration menus, and even a different variety of dips.
Currently in Japan, McDonald’s offers two types of sauce dips, mustard and BBQ, to go with McNuggets. Where I come from, however, curry sauce is the all-time favourite. Mildly spicy with a sweet fruity tang, this curry sauce is so popular that when McDonald’s Singapore retailed the sauce in 375 millilitre take-home bottles for a limited period of time, stocks were wiped out in a flash. We had tried to get our hands on those, but failed to, unfortunately.
In a twist of events, when some of my Singaporean friends visited last week, they very kindly brought us an overly generous serving of over 200 packets of said curry sauce. And when our Japanese editorial team laid their eyes on the heap of sauce packets, one genius came up with the idea of cooking curry. With the curry sauce. Seriously, what could go wrong?
▼ Chef P.K.Sanjun and sous-chef Go Hatori take on the challenge.
Believing that the appearance of 200 packets of curry sauce was a culinary hint from the higher beings, Sanjun and Hatori prepared the curry in the same way most Japanese home-cooked curries are made, but using curry sauce as a replacement for the typical Japanese curry roux.
Bite-sized chunks of meat, potatoes, carrots and onions were first lightly stir-fried in the pot. Water was then added, and the ingredients were left to simmer for a while, before the crux of the dish, McDonald’s Singapore’s curry sauce, was added to the pot.
According to Chef Sanjun, the moment the sauce was added, “a unique scent reminiscent of Chinese medicinal herbs, or slums, filled the room”. Unsettling smell aside, the curry looked ready to be served!
▼ Sous-chef Hatori takes the first bite.
▼ “……..”
Contrary to the smells that wafted from the pot, the curry tasted extremely sweet. Exceedingly sweet. The fruity flavours that the curry sauce had originally had mysteriously vanished, leaving nothing but sweetness.
Japanese curry itself tastes sweeter than most other types of curry, but even our Japanese team, who are undoubtedly used to the flavours of Japanese curry, were overwhelmed by the sweetness of the curry sauce curry. On an interesting note, while the general opinion was that the dish tasted incredibly sweet, Mr. Sato said that it tasted sour. We guess Mr. Sato’s tongue is made differently after all!
▼ “It’s horrible. Utterly horrible.”
▼ “This thing is sour!”
▼ “It tastes like curry with a whole lot of honey in it…”
(If you had to say whether it tastes good or bad?) “Mmm… it isn’t entirely bad so I guess I’d say it’s good.”
On top of that, our Japanese staff also described the product as “the worst in-flight food ever”, “a taste that makes one tremble”, and also mentioned that even if their girlfriends had made the dish, they would give critical feedback.
Determined to make the curry more palatable so that it wouldn’t go to waste, Sanjun added the all-mighty condiment Somi Syantan Deluxe (as seen in our previous attempt at making Pirozhki), and it did indeed salvage the dish… to a certain extent.
▼ “Well, it does taste better than before…”
Just for the record, the cooks of the day did think that the curry sauce itself was delicious! We just have no idea what went wrong…
▼ In case you were wondering, this is the genius who came up with the idea.
Images © RocketNews24
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