If the tender is more pure product, more Jonathan Waxman, the nugget is more food science, more Wylie Dufresne, more manipulation - a polite way of saying more processed. I’ll take a chicken nugget any day over a chicken tender. Until you try a better version at Wendy’s. But dipping the engineered and salted protein disc that is the McNugget into a peel-away plastic-container filled with pure honey (and nothing else) is nearly a peerless fast-food experience. Biting into a Quarter Pounder mimics the sensation of chomping down on an oil-soaked sponge.
The McNugget, by contrast, is an amalgamation of over 20 discrete ingredients - rib meat, breast meat, botanicals, chicken skin, sodium phosphates, autolyzed yeast extract, sodium acid pyrophosphate, safflower oil, dextrose, and other oddities - that are mixed, cut, molded, and fried in vegetable oil laced with the ominous-sounding (but innocuous) anti-foaming agent known as dimethylpolysiloxane.Īnd yet, the McNugget is the more delicious creation.
Say what you will about the McDonald’s Quarter Pounder the hamburger patty is made of nothing but USDA-inspected beef. No food is perfect, but the masterpiece of molecular gastronomy known as chicken nugget is aggressively imperfect.
