A Toronto chef spent two whole years creating a new burger for McDonald's
The new menu item was inspired by a trend in TikTok.
A Toronto chef has been working on a version of the Big Mac with chicken for more than two years, and now McDonald's is ready to unveil its new menu item to Canadian customers as early as next Tuesday — the McDonald's Chicken Big Mac.
"I remember taking a bite of Chicken Big Mac and thinking, 'Wow, it's kind of the same Big Mac, but something has changed,'" says Jeff Anderson, senior manager of menu renewal at Toronto McDonald's.
Of course, the main ingredients remained the same — the famous Big Mac sauce, toasted buns with sesame seeds, spicy cucumber and melted cheese.
"We knew we had to keep it unique. But how do you integrate the chicken part into it all? It took a lot of prep work before we had the courage to put the new burger out there," Anderson says.
At corporate headquarters in Toronto, Anderson immersed himself daily in the development of a new recipe, trying to take into account everything — the nuances of cooking time, the construction of the burger, the evaluation of the combination of ingredients.
Before joining McDonald's, Anderson graduated from the Culinary Institute of Canada with a chef's degree and worked in restaurants in Toronto and Halifax.
He got the idea for McDonald's Chicken Big Mac from TikTok, which had been trending for some time with videos of McDonald's customers replacing the Big Mac patty with chicken nuggets or, conversely, barging Big Mac sauce and adding it to a chicken burger.
