A dish inspired by a childhood in Georgia where the PlayPlace was a hot spot for finding other Korean families.
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For Those of Us Who Love McDonald’s Sweet-and-Sour Sauce
A dish inspired by a childhood in Georgia where the PlayPlace was a hot spot for finding other Korean families.
Credit...Linda Xiao for The New York Times. Food stylist: Sue Li. Prop stylist: Nicole Louie.
By
Eric Kim
July 14, 2021
In May, when McDonald’s started offering a BTS-branded meal — Chicken McNuggets, a medium Coke and fries with two new sauces, Cajun and sweet chili — fans of the K-pop boy band swarmed stores around the world to snag a taste. Others collected the sauces to resell on eBay. I found it hard to escape the marketing, and the mayhem. I saw ads for the meal everywhere: in my Twitter feed, on TikTok and YouTube and, one night in early June, on a walk home from drinks with friends in Manhattan. There it was, splashed across a McDonald’s storefront. I stopped in to try the meal for myself.
Save for the two limited-edition sauces and the purple packaging — a color deeply associated with the band and its fandom — there was nothing particularly special about the food. It was a regular McNugget meal (which, to be clear, is great). The Cajun sauce, a mayonnaise-forward number, delighted me with its mustardy heat, the nose-clearing kind. The sweet-chili sauce tasted like hard candy spiked with red-pepper flakes and reminded me of my favorite McDonald’s sauce growing up: sweet-and-sour.
As a food writer, I often feel pressure to write about homemade meals. But as a reader, I know there are many food experiences outside the kitchen that can mark us indelibly, too. It’s easy to wax lyrical about a perfect roast chicken, but what about a Chicken McNugget dipped in sweet-and-sour sauce? While the sauce, a mainstay of American Chinese restaurants, usually has a tomato-y element, the appeal of the McDonald’s version lies in its simpler taste and its use of apricot and peach purée. But it’s the texture that makes the sweet-and-sour a work of art. You can see it whenever an
A.S.M.R. YouTuber dips a McNugget into the sauce: The amber liquid balloons around the chicken like a raindrop growing bigger and bigger on a waterproof surface. When the nugget emerges, it appears to be draped in a thin, perfectly even layer of sauce every time — no excess. The two were made for each other.
I’ve dipped many chicken nuggets in my life. But when I was a kid in Georgia, the special lure of McDonald’s was the PlayPlace, a plastic fantasy world of slides, tunnels and, more often than not, a ball pit. I remember the way everything in the ball pit was slicked with grease, each plastic sphere and surface sticking to my skin as I played Marco Polo with my brother. The PlayPlace was also where my mother went to meet other Korean parents with little children. I can still hear her refrain: “Excuse me, are you Korean?” Back then, there weren’t many Korean people in Georgia, especially when my parents immigrated to the United States in 1983. These outings were a salve for all of us: As my mother and her new friends gossiped over French fries and Sprite, my brother and I hopped around the playground, intermittently running to her for that chicken and that sauce.
Years later, when I ordered that BTS Meal, I asked for a couple of packets of sweet-and-sour in addition to the two special sauces. As I worked from home the next day, I stared at the leftover sauce sitting on my desk and thought: How hard could it be to recreate this for lunch? I went to the kitchen to try a homemade version that hit the same notes as that rectangular packet with the lime green label that I grew up adoring. I found that apricot preserves gave me the fruity sweetness I wanted, especially once it was stirred through with a little rice vinegar, soy sauce and onion powder. Though I can’t say this sauce was an exact replica, the flavor was flooded with a savory quality, the kind that makes you smack your lips. For more intrigue, I speckled that shiny, honey orange surface with a pinch of red-pepper flakes, inspired by the sweet-chili sauce from the BTS Meal. The pepper made it sing.
Now I needed something to dip. My mother taught me that a potato-starch coating helps you get the greatest crunch on fried food, so I dredged some tofu that was sitting in my fridge and cooked it in a pan. It’s certainly not the same thing, but it’s wonderful how the texture of pressed tofu, pan-fried until shatteringly crisp, eats a lot like a Chicken McNugget and cooks up gorgeously every time. But the real test was how the homemade sauce draped the tofu — after all, the true joy of a nugget lies in the dipping. When I dragged a piece of tofu through the shiny sauce and lifted it, the coating was thin and perfectly even. They were, as they say, made for each other.
Our favorite chicken nuggets are dipped in a homemade copycat of McDonald's sweet and sour sauce.
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