The McDonald's Ordering Hack That Simply Isn't Going To Work
McDonald's ordering tricks have been circulating the internet for years, from an employee-approved hack to get Vanilla Coke (it involves the French vanilla coffee syrup) to the adventurous breakfast idea you need to try: ordering your breakfast hash brown well-done to get it extra crispy. And then, of course, there's the old strategy of ordering fries with no salt to ensure that you get served from a fresh batch.
But there's one hack that will make a McD's employee put their foot down, and that's ordering your burger rare or medium-rare. Just like their West Coast competitor, In-N-Out, which had to squash a "secret order" hack of customers asking for pink burgers, so does McDonald's refuse to undercook their ground beef patties for what former McDonald's corporate chef Mike Haracz referred to on TikTok as "a whole legal food-safety thing ... that might not be achievable."
Fast food employees, generally speaking, will accommodate menu-hacking as long as the customer is polite and the requests aren't too outlandish. After all, working in fast food, it's likely that these workers have their own secrets for upgrading posted menu items. Everyone likes the fun, "in the know" feeling of enjoying an off-menu treat. However, employees can't cross boundaries that are designed to keep people safe.
Health codes around undercooked ground beef are meant to protect you
McDonald's own website touts that its burgers are "100% beef ... ground ... and then flash frozen." Unlike a steak, which can (and should!) be comfortably eaten at lower internal temperatures and degrees of doneness, it's unsafe to eat undercooked ground beef as per the CDC and FDA. Salmonella and E. coli are just two of the wildly dangerous illnesses you can contract from not cooking burgers at least medium-well.
The FDA requires menu disclaimers about the potential hazards of consuming undercooked ground beef if it is to be served, and McDonald's full menu doesn't carry those warnings. It does contain warnings about possible cross-contamination with allergens like shellfish and tree nuts in the fine print but says nothing about the temperature of ground beef.
To sum it up, McDonald's is not the place to go if you like a nice, bloody burger. There are tons of tasty hacks to try at the Golden Arches, but rare or medium-rare Quarter Pounders and Big Macs are not among them.