Adding something usually meant for coffee to Starbucks Japan’s Sausage Pie.

As Starbucks fans know, many times the coffeehouse’s menu is simply a starting point, and your drink isn’t really complete until you’ve customized it just to your liking. Recently, though, we’ve been hearing about a Starbucks Japan food customization hack that’s gone viral, and so we decided to try it for ourselves.

This is a customization for Starbucks Japan’s Sausage Pie, which is the chain’s take on Japanese-style sausage bread, but with a crisp pie crust casing instead of a soft bun. On its own, the 380-yen (US$2.50) Sausage Pie is already a great choice if you’re in the mood for a meaty bite to eat, but rumor has it that it becomes even more delicious if you customize it by adding caramel sauce.

Yes, caramel sauce. The same stuff Starbucks keeps on hand in case you want to add a squirt to your latte or Frappuccino.

There’s always a little bit of nervousness that comes when making a “secret menu” kind of order, and we felt an extra dose of apprehension on account of how conceptually unusual this one is. But Starbucks Japan prides itself on excellent customer service, and when we followed our Sausage Pie order up with a request for caramel sauce, the staff didn’t miss a beat, and politely asked “Would you like it all across the pie?”

We said yes, and this is what we got in return.

With the pie crust itself being a golden brown, the color of the caramel sauce doesn’t stick out very much, so the visuals aren’t anything unusual. Would the flavor be so easy to accept, though?

Yes it would.

The flavor profile starts off with an instant hit of sweetness, and the caramel makes its fragrance felt too as you go in for a bite. The pie is flaky in texture but not dry, with a nice, buttery moistness that blends magnificently with the caramel. Our major worry had been that the sweet caramel notes would drown out the meatiness of the sausage, but nope, everything came together in a rich, delicious dance of distinct flavors across our taste buds.

Maybe the biggest surprise is that the caramel even plays nicely with the whole-grain mustard that’s inside the Sausage Pie. While you might not expect mustard to pair well with a dessert flavor, there actually is a precedent of sorts in honey mustard sauce, and it turns out that honey caramel is also a very pleasant, more decadent combination.

So yes, the Starbucks Japan fan community got this one absolutely right, and adding caramel to the chain’s Sausage Pie is definitely worth trying, especially since caramel sauce is a free, no-charge customization! And if you’re more of a whipped cream fan, we’ve got a Starbucks secret about adding that to an ordinarily savory dish too.

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