The chain's well-known sauces have been with us for what seems like forever. We've been getting the tangy barbecue and — my personal favorite — sweet and sour sauces in our Happy Meals and the flavors haven't changed. Even the fabled Szechuan sauce, the Hope Diamond of McDonald's dipping sauces, is still just the way we remember it. So instead of trying to reinvent what already works, the world's most ubiquitous fast-food chain is offering two new sauce flavors: the Sweet and Spicy Jam and Mambo sauce.
Anyone who's eaten a McNugget knows the sauces don't work only with the fried chicken lumps. Everyone's dipped their fries or even a hamburger in the sauces, so the best way to test them is to try each sauce with one of all three items.
With Chicken McNuggets
The Sweet and Spicy Jam, a rich, gooey, sugary sauce with small flakes of red pepper, really goes well with the McNugget. It's surprisingly complex: the sauce starts out sweet and delivers a healthy bit of zing on the back end. The Mambo sauce is all spicy from beginning to end but the flavor alone is not good. It's actually kind of metallic. I wish I had asked for some sweet and sour sauce packets to finish off the nuggets.
With French Fries
The fries also work well with the sweet and Sweet and Spicy Jam because of the saltiness. You get separate waves of all three flavors in just one bite. The Mambo sauce works a lot better with the fries than it does with the McNuggets. For some reason, the metallic aftertaste isn't there. McDonald's fries tend to be more on the bland side so this saves me the trouble of using an emergency hot sauce stash to add some flavor to them.
On a Hamburger
The basic McDonald's hamburger, which consists of a single patty, chopped onions and a precise squirt of ketchup and mustard, can also benefit from the new sauces. Putting jam on a hamburger sounds like something patients do that makes doctors leave the profession, but it adds some much-needed tang to an otherwise bland burger. The Mambo sauce offers one step up for the burger, which isn't saying much.Nothing will replace the sweet and sour sauce, but depending on how you use them, these two new flavors could stick around for a lot longer than the fabled Szechuan sauce.
