McDonald’s is no stranger to limited-time food gimmicks. In the same vein as the Rick & Morty Szechuan Sauce, McDonald’s has a new limited-time sauce, the Jujutsu Kaisen Special Grade Garlic Sauce. Despite the questionable nature of this publicity stunt, I wanted to know one thing – is the sauce good?
I knew about this campaign since it was announced but I forgot that it existed until when it was happening. For one day only on July 9th, if you ordered from the McDonald’s app, you could snag some Jujutsu Kaisen themed Special Grade Garlic Sauce. Why it is garlic-themed? No idea, but when I realized that today was the day it went live, I thought “Why not?” I had vivid memories of the Szechuan Sauce fiasco and I expected a similar rush to grab this sauce, so I expected nothing to be available at my store.
So to my surprise, they had plenty. My girlfriend and I went onto the app, saw it was available at our store, put in an order, and then grabbed it. I know that may sound banal, but after dealing with the hellscape that was collecting Amiibo, I was prepared for the worst. But no, we ordered a burger, fries, some nuggets, got our sauces, and then drove back to our home.
After we sat down (and after my girlfriend tricked me into thinking that my burger already had two bites taken out of it because I’m gullible as hell), I was ready to try it. After separating the Gojo-themed label, which I got a laugh out of, I was surprised at how dark the sauce looked. It didn’t look like a garlic sauce but more like a BBQ sauce. It was about as thick as a BBQ sauce too, but that may just be the consistency of all McDonald’s sauces. I could easily see the black pepper chunks in it and it smelled like pepper more than anything else, but it was the taste that mattered to me.
My goal was to try the sauce with each of the three main McDonald’s staples and see how they stacked up. After taking a single bite of a nugget drenched in this sauce, the first thing that hit me was pure garlic. It overpowered everything about the nugget to the point where it didn’t even taste like one of their nuggets. McDonald’s nuggets have a specific taste I could only taste oozing garlic. As for the pepper that I smelled, I weirdly didn’t taste any pepper. I guess there was a light tang at the end of each bite when I let it sit for a while, but it was less peppery and just tasted like more garlic.
The same situation happened with the fries. The saltiness of the fries helped to weaken the garlic, but the garlic had complete and total control over each bite. And look, I like garlic a lot, so I wasn’t too upset by how potent the garlic was here, but those who are only mild fans of it may be immediately turned off by it. What was universally a bad idea was putting the sauce on the burger. I don’t know if anyone normally puts McDonald’s dipping sauces on their burgers, but after securing a part of the burger that my girlfriend didn’t bite, I spread some sauce on, took a bite, and instantly regretted my decision.
I know that there are people who will mix mayo with ketchup, but the garlic sauce didn’t blend at all with any of the ketchup, onions, or pickles that were on it. It was like mixing oil and vinegar and the ketchup and garlic fought in my mouth but never came together. It just left a bad aftertaste, but considering I’m probably the one person in the world who thought to put Jujutsu Kaisen Special Grade Garlic Sauce on a burger, I don’t think anyone else will make the same mistake.
Look, I can’t say that I approve of the method McDonald’s took to make this marketing stunt work but at the end of the day, I didn’t care about any of that. I just wanted to know if the McDonald’s Jujutsu Kaisen Special Grade Garlic Sauce tasted good. For what it’s worth, it was pretty alright. If it was available on their menu normally, I’d probably order it, though it wouldn’t replace my beloved sweet and sour sauce. My curiosity was satisfied, and now I can sit back and watch people try to flip these sauces on eBay for ludicrous sums of money. Because of course people are already doing that.
