We were running late, so we swung through a McDonald’s drive through on the way home from shopping. Our order included two cheeseburgers and a McDouble. The McDouble was normal, but on each of the cheeseburgers the buns were toasted to a ridiculous extreme – the cut surfaces of the buns were not just black in spots, but the entire bun was tough and dry and crunchy! When the hell did they start toasting their burger buns??? I’m not a regular at McDonald’s these past years, but I’d have said that they NEVER toasted any of their buns, on any item I’ve ever eaten.
And now they’re going for charred black???
Even the outside of the bun, which presumably wasn’t pressed to the griddle, was hard and dry and nasty. Personally, I suspect the buns were old and stale to start with, and the crew toasted them to extremes trying to fix them up. Totally inedible, hubby tossed the first after a single bite, and the second we both just poked at before ditching it, too.
The buns described is an anomaly. We go to McDonald’s at least week?y and have never seen an overcooked bun. The op is the unluckiest guy on the planet of just yanking our chain.
MickeyDs can be horrible one visit and ok the next. I never trust them. I avoid as often as I can. I do like their tea. I have to have unsweet and its always servicable. You have to be careful with unsweet because it’s not made as often and can get yukky.
I guess I’m unlucky then. (Well, hubby was.) Maybe it was just a new employee, or the employee was new to toasting buns, or something.
But it was amazingly off-putting to me. It’s not like I expect McD’s to make GOOD food. But IME they’re amazingly consistent. Now I expect that anything I get there will have way over toasted buns.
Good thing fast food restaurants aren’t exactly rare around here.
I’ve never had a burnt one, but just the regular toasted is too toasted for me. The chicken sandwiches used to be on untoasted bread and I don’t eat them any more because it’s very rare I get one just slightly golden or untoasted at all. I don’t ask for untoasted because I’m not sure how easily they can accommodate it and I’d rather eat something else than a disappointing sandwich the 20% of the time it’d be wrong anyway.
I’ve think I had a overly toasted one, but more then that I have had stale hard bread on rare occasions. Neither was the norm.
As to if toasting is normal, IDK but I assumed they run it through a toasting machine, but very lightly. However the english muffins have to be toasted and perhaps you got there during the changeover from breakfast to lunch (and now breakfast all day),so it could have been set to toast the english muffins and burn the buns.
I’ve never had any problem getting McDonald’s to do what I wanted, though I admit that I’ve never asked about the buns. But I wonder if you can just ask them not to toast yours to avoid the problem. Surely they have untoasted ones on hand, since they can’t toast them all at once.
McDonald’s buns are lightly toasted, though, with the amount of toasting they normally get, I might be more inclined to call them “warmed.”
Now, it’s possible that, as silenus suggested, that if the OP’s husband ordered the Quarter Pounder or their new Smokehouse Burgers (both are made with patties griddled from fresh meat, not frozen), that maybe the buns are toasted slightly more. I don’t know if the new burgers have the buns toasted on the griddle, or toasted longer or anything. I’ve had the new quarter pounder a couple of times, and they certainly weren’t toasted black or dry. I don’t remember if they were toasted a skosh more than the standard bun, though, but I don’t even remember any kind of crunch or crackle biting into them.
But McDonald’s absolutely do vary. In theory, they should all be the same, but they’re not. For several weeks last year, I ordered a sausage McMuffin off the dollar menu and a coffee for breakfast three to five days a week from the same McDonald’s. It got to the point that I was rating what kind of McMuffin day it was. Some days (rarely, maybe one in ten), it was overcooked, dry, and a bit hard, like it was sitting under a heat lamp for too long or something. Most days it was toasted, but undertoasted for my tastes. Acceptable, and probably what most people expect, but not peak McSausage experience. The bun was still soft, only a touch of color, and cheese just barely melting on the sausage patty. But one day out of five, it was absolutely perfect for me: cheese fully melted, well toasted bun with a crispy, brown-and-black flecked edge, but still a chewy and not dry interior. That edge browning is key to me to separate an average McSausage from a great McSausage.
It was the same deal with those Jalapeno McDoubles they had a few years ago, which I also binged on. One day it was great, another day it was meh. So there certainly is variation, but blackened buns are a few standard deviations outside the norm.
I just noticed the toasted bun the other day and thought it was stale at first.
Our local McD just did a major renovation… touch screen to order your food… and the decor…OMG it is horrible a mix of Kramers Log cabin apartment and 70’s brady bunch living room.
Don’t know if it’s “retro” so much as seen as a bit more what a proper hamburger place would do. I don’t want to use the word “upscale,” necessarily, as even the local ma and pop grills down the street toast their buns on the griddle more than McD’s does, but a proper hamburger bun (at least IMHO) should be toasted. When I make my own burgers, I definitely want color on it.
They’ve been toasting them for decades now. But that you got was a mistake. The buns aren’t manually toasted, they’re dropped into a machine where they slide down and comes out toasted on the other side.
Looks like this:
The McDouble and the Cheeseburger buns are the same. What happened is that those buns got stuck and overtoasted. They should have been pitched, but you get what you paid for.
It sounds like you got some bad buns, not like McD’s has changed its policy. I don’t eat there frequently, but I’ve never had the experience you describe.
The CEO who took over when Mickey D’s wasn’t doing so well did two major changes to bring up sales: Limited breakfast all day and toasting the buns 10 seconds longer. I prefer the new “toasty” buns. The old buns were like trying to swallow a cotton ball.
