Big Mac Salad Is The Ultimate McDonald's Quick Fix At Home
Sometimes a McDonald's craving hits you at the worst possible time. Perhaps it's the middle of the night and you don't live near a 24-hour McDonald's, or maybe you've been trying to eat more creative keto-friendly food lately. In this scenario, you may think you have no other choice but to ignore your craving, but the truth is you can get your fix by making a Big Mac salad at home.
A salad may seem like the furthest thing from a Big Mac, but with the right ingredients, it can taste pretty close to one. The key is the dressing. Big Mac sauce, as it turns out, isn't too far off from Thousand Island dressing. Thousand Island is made with a combination of mayonnaise, onion, relish, ketchup, vinegar, and, occasionally, hot sauce and paprika. Big Mac sauce shares the majority of these ingredients, with the exception of ketchup. What this means is that it's relatively easy to turn Big Mac sauce into a dressing that will give your salad that quintessential McDonald's taste.
How to make a Big Mac salad
There are many recipes for cheeseburger salad out there, but to make a salad that tastes specifically like a Big Mac, it helps to stick as closely as possible to the actual Big Mac ingredients. For example you'll want to make sure to use shredded iceberg rather than romaine lettuce, and American instead of cheddar cheese. In place of a hamburger patty, you can simply use seasoned ground beef since you'll be mixing it into the salad anyway.
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To assemble a Big Mac salad, you'll want to start by browning the ground beef. One TikTok creator recommends sautéing it with garlic and onion as well, but in a Big Mac the onions are actually raw, so you may want to mix them into the salad later along with the pickles. When it comes to the cheese though, it's best to add it along with the ground beef so that it gets melted, like on a real Big Mac.
As for the dressing, you'll have to make a few mods to your homemade Big Mac sauce. Since it's a thicker consistency than salad dressing, an extra splash of vinegar or pickle juice will help thin it out. Once it's liquidy enough, you can go ahead and drizzle it over the lettuce and other mix-ins to complete your Big Mac salad.
You can order a Big Mac salad from McDonald's, too
When McDonald's first introduced salad to its menu in 1986, its intention was to give customers a lighter alternative to other entrees. McDonald's salad options therefore included flavors that were very far removed from the classic Big Mac, like Oriental Chicken. Salads haven't been on the U.S. menu since 2020, but even when they were available, cheeseburger salads weren't one of the offerings. Today, however, it's possible to custom order one.
As a former McDonald's employee documented in a TikTok, the easiest way to go about it is to order any burger of your choice, and ask for no bun and extra toppings. The content creator ordered a Quarter Pounder Deluxe, which comes with mayonnaise, ketchup, and mustard, resulting in a more thousand-island-like dressing, but if you'd rather use actual Big Mac sauce as your dressing, simply order a Big Mac. Either way, you'll get a pretty tasty salad out of it.