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Getting Ribbed - The McRib Review By: PoisonRamune, the Apathetic Lizardman They say absence makes the heart grow fonder, I say absence makes you forgot how something really was. I had heard various rumors that McDonalds would be bringing the McRib back in early December, this immediately made me very excited as the McRib is one of the few things I actually like from McDonalds. However, after getting my taste of the first McRibs of the season, I was a little disappointed. Maybe it’s because we’re in the middle of a huge recession or maybe it’s because I chose to get my McRibs from a McDonalds in East LA, but these McRibs had a noticeable loss of quality compared to previous years’ McRibs.
In case you’re part of the uninitiated, the McRib is a specialty/promotional sandwich offered every few years or so at McDonalds. It’s basically a processed BBQ pork rib patty sandwich with a generous spread of onion and pickles. The sandwich also seems to have a strange cult following of people who candidly obsess over the McRib and constantly wait for its unexpected return back onto McDonalds menus. The bizarre underground popularity of the McRib has even made its way into popular culture. The sandwich has been mentioned and parodied in various TV shows and movies including very mainstream shows such as The Simpsons and 30 Rock.
As I mentioned before the sandwich is normally very good; however, this last time I sampled a McRib it was incredibly lacking. The key to making BBQ delicious is the sauce. I’ve never had a bad BBQ with good sauce, nor have I ever had good BBQ with a bad sauce; a delicious slurry of spices and emulsifying agents is simply essential for stuff like this. Sadly, the BBQ sauce really misses the mark here. What used to be a semi-sweet powerhouse of tangy spice is now bland brownish red mockery of BBQ sauce. In fact, it’s almost like they dressed ketchup up with food dye and some seasoning mix in a lame attempt to try to fool the public. Another problem with the sandwich was the quality of the vegetable spread. The pickles were fine, since you really need to be retarded to fail at curing a cucumber in brine. However, the onions were very nasty almost to the point where I feared they might make me ill from eating them. I may not be an expert on produce, but I know for a fact that “fresh” onions shouldn’t crumble like a cookie when biting into them. The off texture was so surprising to me; I actually began to dismantle my first sandwich just to ensure that the weird mouthfeel was from the onions and not some sort of unexpected addition to my sandwich.
I will say that the quality of the meat is still pretty good for being part of a fast food sandwich. It’s relatively tender for a patty that’s made out of pressed pork rib and more often than not the patty actually does have that tight muscle taste of rib meat. Even so, it did make me very sad that the meaty flavor was the only thing I was looking forward to after discovering the drastic change in the sauce’s flavor. It’s sad that the McRib has changed so much since the last time it made its way back into McDonalds. It makes it very hard to recommend a sandwich that used to be good, but has underlying lost much of its edge this time around. However, I do feel it’s fair to mention that other people have reported the McRibs are just as good as ever in other locations. So as I said before, these might have been problems exclusive to the Monterey Park McDonalds, since they have a knack for screwing up my order nearly every time (though these sandwiches do come as pre-frozen servings, so I figure there has to be some sort of consistency in quality, whether good or bad).
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