Burger Review #1: The Big Mac

Welcome back to the very first burger review here at BBR. I thought long and hard about what to review first, and decided on, arguably, the most famous burger in the world. Yep, it's the McDonald's Big Mac!

One of the signature products of the McDonalds "restaurant" chain, the Big Mac has been around since the hippy-laden days of the mid-sixties. Fun factoid: Big Mac is also the name of the burger-headed policeman whose continued incompetence has allowed the Hamburglar to continue his crime wave for many decades now!

Let's not waste any more time - on to the review!

APPEARANCE: Perhaps the only "restaurant" where plates and cutlery are looked upon with disdain, the Big Mac was provided to me in a battered cardboard box sitting atop a thick wad of napkins.

The One and Only Big Mac. Thank God.

I'm not sure whether the napkins were for the burger or the box, for both were glistening with a sheen of grease. Undeterred, I pressed on and opened up the box...

As far as the McDonalds marketing folk would have you know, this is what a Big Mac looks like:

Okay. Not too shabby-looking. This, however, is what I was served:

Hmm... a slight difference between the two. One is a tall, proud tower of a burger and icon of the biggest fast food empire in the world. The other a slumped, disshevelled lump wallowing in its own filth. SCORE: 3

INGREDIENTS: Two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun! Yes, we all know the jingle, but how does it measure up in reality? The two all beef patties were small disks of a greyish, meat-like substance. Any thinner and they'd be transparent. The special sauce was a thick, pale yellow, and had mingled with the copious amounts of limp lettuce and raw onion to create an unholy amalgam not unlike vomit. In fact, this is what I imagine Ronald McDonald spews up after a hard night on the bottle:

It was inside Ronald and now its inside YOU.

I thought I had been stiffed on the pickles, until I spotted one solitary slice trying to make a run for it from one corner of the burger. This delightful combination of ingredients was served within the sesame-seed bun, which included the baffling divider layer that sits in the middle of the burger. Whether this third bun layer is to aid in the stability of the burger or just to act as filler and compensation for the lack of meat, is unclear. I imagine one poor McDonalds worker accidentally ordered way too many bun bottoms than bun tops, and the Big Mac was invented as a solution.

The list of ingredients is quite good, but the quality of said ingredients is beyond disgraceful. SCORE: 3

HANDLING: This is the one area where I thought the Big Mac could score well. Alas, Ronald's signature dish stumbled here as well. As soon as I picked up the burger, half of its lettuce filling spilled out into the box. From there on it was smooth sailing, as the burger can be grasped easily in one hand or two, and the structural integrity was sound. That is until the last few bites, when a dollop of the luminous secret sauce shot out on to my lap. SCORE: 5

TASTE: It only took ten minutes for me to get this burger home from the restaurant, but in that short time it had become stone-cold. The first bite was like sinking my teeth into a cold bun, and then having my mouth injected with acid. The secret sauce is obviously some kind of toxic bioweapon that the government has seen fit to trial on the populace. The burning, stinging sensation as the sauce hit my tongue was a unique experience. As I laboured my way through the burger, I could hardly tell that there was any meat or cheese in there at all. It was just mouthful after mouthful of bun, lettuce, crunchy onion, and slatherings of poison. SCORE: 2

AFTER EFFECTS: Not too bad at first, mainly just a general feeling of unease and impending doom. As time went on, however, the masticated remnants of the Big Mac formed a heavy lump in my gut, torturing me from beyond the grave. I have had worse, however. SCORE: 5

VALUE: The Big Mac by itself costs AUD $4.50, which came as a surprise to me. I had expected maybe $2.95 at the most, but it seems the global financial crisis has hit Ronnie hard. The 'value meal' (with fries and Coke) costs AUD $7.15, so it should really be renamed 'meal'. I still expect my stamps to cost thruppence, though, so maybe I'm old-fashioned. SCORE: 6

In closing, I have no idea how McDonalds has sold so many millions of these burgers. Were they laced with cocaine back in the day? This was a truly harrowing experience, and the only positive I can take from it is that we can only go up in quality from here. Right??

Now, please excuse me while I go purge this burger from my system and make my own 'secret sauce'.

FINAL SCORE: 4/10