On Aug. 31, McDonald's announced new and returning items to its menu for the month of September.
One of the new items is the Smoky Nacho Cheese Sauce (S$5.50), which will be available from Sep. 17.
The cheese sauce is packaged in a squeezy bottle, similar to the limited-edition curry sauce bottle which was launched previously.
The adorable packaging alone deserves full marks for featuring Stuart the Minion.
Photo by Fasiha Nazren.
And here are the ingredients to manage your expectations and not expect it to taste like some artisanal cheese sauce:
Bob the Minion showing the ingredients of which, probably half I couldn't recognise. Photo by Fasiha Nazren.
Not the first fast food cheese sauce
This sauce, however, has some odds stacked against it.
After all, other fast food restaurants like KFC and Long John Silver's already have cheese sauces as part of its regular menu.
And the closest thing McDonald's had to a cheese sauce, the cheesy loaded fries, wasn't much to rave about.
But the smoky nacho cheese sauce, surprisingly, seems promising.
Photo by Fasiha Nazren.
Hint of barbeque
After opening the packaging, one would notice that it smells more like barbeque than cheese. A plus point if you don't like the typically pungent and artificial scent of most store-bought nacho cheese sauce.
I paired the sauce with McNuggets and it went oddly well together.
Photo by Fasiha Nazren.
Now here's yet another reminder to manage your expectations: It does have the artificial cheese flavour one would often associate with cheese sauce.
But it does taste different from the other cheese sauces I've ever tried, and not in a bad way.
Just like its scent, the sauce has a noticeable barbeque tang to it. McDonald's probably calls it the smoky nacho cheese sauce for this very reason.
The smoky flavour, thankfully, wasn't overpowering the usual lemak (rich), cheesy flavour one would be used to with other cheese sauces.
Overall (and surprisingly), this has got to be one of the least jelak or surfeiting cheese sauces I've tried.
However, I'd imagine it would go better with the more superior McDonald's Spicy Mcnuggets than the regular McNuggets.
Then again, anything is better with Spicy McNuggets, but I digress.
Rating: Surprisingly-good-for-fake-cheese-sauce-but-still-not-better-than-curry-sauce out of 5. A strong contender in the fast food cheese sauce arena. Will probably slather it on everything I eat now.
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All images by Fasiha Nazren.