Review: The Double Sausage McMuffin with Egg

While the Chinese lay claim to the revolutionary invention of the noodle, Western culture has given us the Sausage McMuffin with Egg. And while we celebrate the likes of Alexander Graham Bell and Henry Ford, the heroic inventors of these culinary staples remain anonymous. Thus is the cruel indifference of history.

As any civilized foreigner living in Taiwan knows, a proper Western breakfast is impossible to find. Yes, there are a few pretenders who claim to fulfill the promise of bacon, eggs, toast and hashbrowns, but all versions of these deceptively simple dishes are marred by fatal flaws. Half-cooked sweet bacon anyone? Watery scrambled eggs? How about some warm, sweetened white bread with margarine masquerading as toast? Or maybe a couple of cocktail wieners that we refer to as ‘sausages’...Please.

Thus when us true gourmands are lucky enough to awake on a Sunday morning before 10:30, Where do we head for guaranteed nourishment, comfort, and hangover relief? You guessed it: McDonald’s. And when we arrive, we don’t waste time gaping at the photos of the various breakfast sandwiches on offer, we order up the undisputed king of breakfast sandwiches: the Sausage McMuffin with Egg. In this sandwich we find, not only a day’s worth of calories to keep us trucking, but also a complex mélange of textures and flavour sensations. The sour, crispy yet chewy English muffin; the supple and mysteriously formed egg; the gooey, sunshine happiness of the cheese; and most important, the greasy, salty, goodness of the sausage patty. I have always been fully satisfied with this sandwich. Remove or substitute any of the ingredients, and you will have an inferior product. But what if one were to zero in on the tastiest of these ingredients—the sausage patty—and double it. I had never considered such a move. Would this not be like doubling the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere? or adding an extra set of breasts to a perfectly formed young lady? Or would it in fact be achieving what the Chinese refer to as Shuang Xi: the elusive ‘double lucky’?

It was like Christmas morn when I unwrapped this new creation. And when I first beheld it, I’m not ashamed to say the image of baby Jesus in swaddling clothes flashed before my eyes. There it was, the breakfast sandwich I knew so well and loved so dearly, but with twice the meats. I sucked back a string of drool as I raised it to my eager lips. My eyes rolled back into my head and I sunk my teeth in. BOOM! My head snapped back as an H-bomb of sausage exploded in my mouth. It was sausage, sausage and then more sausage. The delicate blend of delights that one finds in the Sausage McMuffin with Egg proper, had been replaced by an obtuse sausage delivery mechanism. The problem was not an excess of meat per se, but rather an excess of the grease and salt carried by the meat. Even for a salt and grease lover such as myself, it was overpowering. This sandwich is like the embodiment of a lost Aesop’s fable, with the moral of the story being: “too much of a good thing is not a good thing” or “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. Give the Double Sausage McMuffin with Egg a pass and stick to the original.