McDonald’s is doing one of its menu rejigs. Goodbye to the Double Big Mac, some sort of crispy BBQ number and a terrible looking McFlurry. Room must be made for two regulars on the ever rotating burger carousel, including one inspired by the Philly cheesesteak.
I’ve always said these haphazard creations never work. The only items worth buying from Maccies are the classics, namely those from the Saver menu. The fast food chain only ever makes sense when it’s cheap and cheerful. And when you’re drunk.
Which leads me to hash browns, a staple of anyone inebriated. They’re the only old “favourite” that need getting rid of, or at the very least changed to become much better.
If my hangover is severe enough, I will, like millions of others, often shimmy toward the comforting familiarity of McDonald’s.
It didn’t used to be this way. My classic arrangement until the arrival of delivery apps would be to emerge recklessly from my bed and march with friends to the nearest greasy spoon. There we would find large, generous breakfasts of sausages and beans, bacon, eggs, a tomato or two, next to white sliced toast and mugs of big tea, and a couple of perfect hash browns.
I never used to care for a Maccies breakfast; to me, the sausage circles and the flabbily-steamed eggs were unappealing. I’d need at least three McMuffins to touch the sides. Today I must admit that the Golden Arches are, occasionally, a hangover cure as any other.
But while I’ve found solace in the squidgy endearment of McMuffins — one of bacon, a second of sausage — the hash browns upset me. They are a failure from a company better equipped to serving food post-pub, pre-sleep.
These hash browns are challenging for a number of reasons. The first is the grease. A good hash brown will be fatty, sure, but not caked in oil like some sort of lonely seagull after an oil spill. It is, in part, the over-greasing that ensures McDonald’s hash browns are woefully inadequate material to transport other morsels. A good slab of hash brown is there to support a piece of bacon, fat dutifully rendered, or a buttery egg. They are meant to be a solid foundation, but at Maccies they are nothing more than cadaverous oblongs; the tails of escaped beavers.
It is the ridiculous shape of Maccies hash browns that leads to their sinister nature. It means they are texturally taxing in the centre, the potato mixture loose and flimsy. Hash browns should be triangular.
Then there’s the colour, a trifle about which I’ll be brief: they are too pale, probably because branches of the fast-food joint become so busy in the morning that they enjoy a limited run in the fryer. Management would be likely to remind me that there are protocols and exact timings in place. I suppose every element of cookery at McDonald’s is a science; regardless, they are almost anaemic, and so it is that they are not crispy enough.
It is the delicate crispness of a properly designed hash brown that sings so beautifully to us. Each one is a dulcet siren, a carby songstress willing us to recover. Our teeth crunch down through millimetres of deeply golden crumb, into miniscule, mismatched cubes of soft potato, and there we become full up, cared for, soothed.
There is nothing soothing about Maccies hash browns. They are merely existing. Yes, I will make my McMuffins each a meal deal; I will eat the hash browns. But they could be so much better. Alas. They are nothing more than vessels of cheap oil, flapping around like slippers in the wind.
