Perfect McDonald’s Sweet ‘n’ Sour by Adding Soy Sauce
Moving always requires a certain amount of downsizing, and unfortunately my bag was one of the things I let go of on my last move. This could have been a mistake, since I didn’t realize how much I leaned on these little sauces during culinary disasters.
I was slowly stockpiling my new bag, and a fresh (though meager by my standards) supplies came in handy literally last night. I spent a couple of hours shoveling dirt from a pickup truck into newly built garden beds and I didn’t feel like cooking. Luckily I had a bag of frozen dumplings. Unfortunately, I didn’t have everything I use to make the dipping sauce, as well as the dipping sauce itself.
So I walked over to a new bag drawer where I found a few soy sauce packets, various Popeyes merchandise, and a few bright green McDonald’s Sweet ‘n’ Sour cans. The latter , if you remember, is already an almost perfect sauce. It’s sweet and sour (obviously), with apricot , peach, vinegar, and most importantly, corn syrup. (Emulsifiers won’t hurt either.) It’s really good, but tastes like McDonald’s , which is what I didn’t want from my dumplings. Luckily, the addition of soy sauce did the trick. I mixed a couple of bags of soybeans with the contents of the green bath and began to soak.
The results were pretty darn good. The intense, deep salinity of the soy accentuated Sweet ‘n’ Sour’s more sugary qualities, reinforcing the savory flavor and softening that characteristic, somewhat industrial McDonald’s flavor. Mixing the two is a good idea, that’s what I’m talking about.
You don’t really need to measure. Just add a packet (or roughly a teaspoon) of soybeans to a whole Sweet ‘n’ Sour bath, try and add more if you like darker and saltier dipping sauces. If you want to get creative, add one or two teaspoons of ginger syrup (store-bought or homemade) or ginger sushi brine. Far from being a real dumplings sauce, it tastes a lot fuller than it should. It also pairs well with chicken nuggets, fried mushrooms or delicious grilled carrots, to name just a few of the things that just came to my mind.