Is McDonald’s Japan’s new tandoori chicken curry McNugget sauce better with naan?【Taste test】

People have been saying the new McDonald’s sauce tastes just like curry, but how does it fare as a main dish?

Right now, McDonald’s Japan is running a special on Chicken McNuggets, discounting the price of a 15-piece pack to 490 yen (US$3.75) from its regular 710 yen. But while we’re always happy to save some extra cash to put towards our many wise financial decisions, what really grabbed our attention is the special McNugget sauce they’re offering at the same time: tandoori chicken curry sauce.

Since the curry condiment was released, we’ve been hearing ecstatic reports on social media of how good it is, with several people saying that it tastes just like the curry they get at their favorite local Indian restaurants. That got us wondering, what if instead of dipping McNuggets into McDonald’s tandoori chicken curry sauce, we simply ate a whole plate of the sauce for our meal, accompanied by naan, the Indian flat bread that’s one of the absolute best ways to deliver curry to your stomach?

▼ McDonald’s tandoori chicken curry sauce

In order to perform this experiment, we were going to need more than just one packet. Putting one on a scale, we found that it weighed 22.5 grams (0.8 ounces).

Subtract a bit of that for the weight of the container itself, and we figure there’s about 20 grams of curry sauce inside, and since an average-size single-person curry serving is around 180 grams, we were going to need nine packets of McDonald’s tandoori chicken curry sauce.

However, McDonald’s doesn’t sell the curry sauce by itself. When using their mobile app, though, for a 15-piece McNugget order you get to select three packets of sauce, so all we had to do was order a total of 45 McNuggets, and max out our sauce allowance with tandoori chicken curry.

Once we’d done that, the next step was to open up all the packets and pour them onto a plate.

Then we heated that plate up in the microwave…

…and we were good to go!

The tandoori chicken curry sauce definitely looks the part, with a mouthwatering color and visual consistency.

Handling taste-testing duties was our Japanese-language reporter Ahiruneko. Tearing off a piece of the naan, he dipped it in the sauce and took a bite…

…and it was…

…not so bad, but also closer to not so good than just plain good.

Ahiruneko had a hard time pinning down exactly what the issue was. To be fair, if he had to, he could eat a whole plate of McDonald’s tandoori chicken curry sauce like this, but he probably wouldn’t want to. The really weird thing is that when he tried dipping a Chicken McNugget into the curry sauce, the combination was fantastic, and tasted as delicious as curry from a curry restaurant.

But when it’s eaten without the meaty chicken flavor and texture, Ahiruneko felt like McDonald’s tandoori chicken curry sauce was too “sauce-like.” That’s not him trying to be obtuse, since he’s well aware that curry itself is a kind of sauce. In Japanese, though, the word “sauce” by itself is used to describe a Worcester-like sauce, with sweet undertones and a sort of sticky, viscous feel to it.

Those aspects aren’t really apparent when you’ve just got a dab of the sauce hitting your taste buds together with the chicken nugget. When paired with naan, though, the “sauce-like” elements of McDonald’s tandoori chicken curry sauce become a lot more noticeable, and sort of overpowering. Ultimately, it ended up like when we tried eating the chain’s butter chicken curry McNugget sauce with rice.

To be fair, none of those should be taken as marks against McDonald’s, since they never billed their tandoori chicken curry sauce as a main dish, and judged as what they do bill it as, a McNugget sauce, it’s extremely delicious. And luckily for Ahiruneko, once he accepted and appreciated the sauce for what it is…

…he had a ton of McNuggets to dip into it.

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