I worked at McD’s 20 years ago, but we had an automatic bun toaster similar to the one enalzi linked to. They don’t grill the buns on the griddle. Sometimes the machine broke, and we were forced to sell burgers with untoasted buns, which is probably what happened to dwyr. But outside of rare occasions every bun was toasted. Everyone acting surprised that McDonald’s toasts their buns just wasn’t paying attention. They’ve always toasted their buns.
Sometimes people would request their buns extra toasted, and we’d accommodate them if we could. Also, there’s a setting that can be changed, so I have no doubt the toast level of the buns varies somewhat between restaurant locations. But burnt buns are obviously a mistake that some underpaid employee didn’t care to fix. I highly doubt that’s just how they do things now.
I never once noticed my bread was toasted back when I ate their bread. It never seemed hard enough to be toast, so it must’ve never been toasted all that long. And it’s not as if I could watch them make my food.
For a while in the 1990s there weren’t toasting their buns. Somewhere on USENET is a discussion I participated in to that effect, and a Mickey D’s representative chimed in stating how they were using new bun formulations, blah, blah, blah, that didn’t require toasting.
From the industrial perspective, toasting prevents the bun from getting soggy from absorbing all of the ketchup and mustard. Skipping the toasting step, then, would offer both capital investment and headcount savings, improve dock to dock time, and save millions. Except when customers rebel because we like the taste of the Maillarded buns.
I was one who scoffed about toasred buns but I ate at McDonald’s today and noticed that the buns are toadyed, and quite a bit. My wife had a cheeseburger, I a quarterpounder, and both were darkly toasted. Not at all burnt, mind you. I just wanted to reverse my obviously misstatement above.
You can get an untoasted english muffin. I’ve been ordering that for 30 years even though I’ve never seen it listed on a menu, even toasted. So, I’m sure they could do it with buns.
Just wanted to say that I used a toaster very similar to that, except mine was about 50 years old, when I was a breakfast cook. I imagine most restaurants do, though I only worked at one. Sometimes things got stuck in there and would burn up or otherwise be inconsistent due to the settings being off. I ran a few hundred slices of toast, muffins, bagels, biscuits and other breads through there every day 7 days a week. If the thing got stuck and a few orders got a little darker, we’d serve them. if something got burnt, redo it (except for the burnt requests). A lot of people requested the muffins run through twice and those ended up being very inconsistent on the second run through.
Just FYI – today we picked up burgers again. This time I checked before we drove away: the buns were toasted again, but nothing at all like they were the other time. No black spots, no dry crumbly texture throughout both sides of the bun.
So I guess I was just the victim of some sort of toasting accident that time.