Rick and Morty's Szechuan Sauce is here! In Sichuan!

Just a couple short weeks after writing a blog about the real szechuan sauce of Szechuan, the actual Rick And Morty Szechuan sauce has arrived in Sichuan China!

As of March 28, 2018 the people of Szechuan can finally enjoy the sauce that was inspired by this beautiful province of China!

Day of the arrival

I was sitting on my couch browsing Steemit and some other forums I frequent when I noticed there was a lively discussion going on about McDonalds in one of my gaming groups. It caught my attention because we try to keep the talk related to gaming but here everyone was talking about Mcdonalds. I scrolled up trying to find the beginning of the conversation from dozens and dozens of messages when I came across pictures someone posted of a 3 piece sauce set they got from a new Mcdonalds promotion.

It only took me a single quick glance to figure out this was the Szechuan sauce from Rick and Morty!

(All pictures in this blog are my own)

I had just had a hotdog lunch and was feeling quite content but I just couldn't resist. I ran downstairs, jumped on a public bike and headed towards the closest McDonalds. As soon as I entered I was bombarded with advertisements of a new "Internet Craze Sauce".

McDonalds is really working the hype on this sauce. The first advertisement you see kindly reminds you that it's a limited time event, only half a month and that each store only has 300 portions. The lady refused to give me extra sauces even when I offered to buy them, although an user in my gaming group was able to get an extra by taking a photo with a huge cardboard szechuan sauce cutout and posting it to his Wechat moments (social media).

They were offering a 5pc set that came with a single sauce packet of your choice or a 20pc set that came with a box of 3 different sauces, one of which being the Szechuan sauce! I ordered the 20pc despite being full and waited for my order.

The Packaging

The food came in beautiful cardboard packaging. A nice red painted with pandas, mountains and other Chinese features. It was really a pleasant and cool packaging and I almost wish the boxes were tins instead so I could keep them as a collectors item.

The Sauces

The 20pc came with 3 different sauces plus an extra sauce they gave as a promotional item for buying on the release day so 4 sauces in total:

1. Szechuan Sauce
2. Sweet and Sour Sauce
3. Kung Pao Sauce
4. Garlic Chili Sauce

Szechuan Sauce

First up we have the Szechuan Sauce! I was so excited for this sauce. Sichuan is known for it's spicy and numbing flavors. I love spicy foods, I'v tried ghost peppers and carolina reapers and i'm always on the search for a new favorite hot sauce. I had heard the sauce was a spicy Teriyaki like sauce and that sounded amazing!

The sauce itself looked like a teriyaki sauce and had the same consistency. I dipped my nugget in and took my first bite. Let's just say I was really disappointed. I had so many expectations for this sauce, especially after all the Mcdonald's rioting videos I saw yet the flavor was very familiar and not that different from a normal teriyaki sauce. If I had to explain it, it's like teriyaki sauce mixed with a smokey bbq sauce. You could probably mix 3 parts teriyaki sauce and 1 part bbq sauce to get almost an identical tasting sauce.

The most disappointing part though was that it had no sichuan flavor. Sichuan doesn't really have flavors like teriyaki or american bbq sauce and the sauce had 0 spice whatsoever. I even checked the sauce ingredients to see if there were any listed because I have quite a high heat tolerance and it's possible I just couldn't taste it but unfortunately there is 0 spice added to this sauce.

Sweet and Sour Sauce

Not much to say here, it's your standard Sweet and Sour sauce. If you like sweet and sour then you'll like this sauce. It was good but I liked the Szechuan Sauce a bit better.

Garlic Chili Sauce

This sauce was the extra promotional sauce for buying on release day and wasn't included in the 3 sauce box set but thrown into the bag on the side. Despite just being a freebee thrown in, this was my favorite sauce! If you've ever had a thai sweet chili sauce then it's pretty much what this sauce is but with a slightly more fruity taste. I was really surprised by the fruity flavor and actually checked the ingredients to check for something like strawberry or apple but I didn't find any references. I did find tomatoes in the ingredients but tomatoes don't bring that fruity type of fruity taste so my only guess is that it's loaded up with sugar. That's okay with me though because it was really flavorful and really delicious.

The garlic taste wasn't strong and almost hard to identify within the flavors themselves but there was something in it that cut the fruity taste a little to keep it from being overly sweet and i'm guessing that was the garlic. Despite being a chili sauce though it would be about a 1 on the heat scale.

Kung Pao Sauce

This is the real mystery of the sauces. Based on its name I was excepting a taste very similar to sweet and sour sauce because that's the flavor profile for Kung pao chicken. Opening the package though was a real visual experience. The sauce itself was thick and a bright orange. It actually looked a lot like coagulated hot pot oil. Hot pot is probably the most popular food in all of China. Sichuan is especially known for it's hot pot which is a huge pot filled with boiling red oil, dozens of chilies and numbing peppers. You cook your food in the pot and then dip it into a sauce bowl that you created yourself with various condiments. By the end of your hot pot meal, the oil from the hot pot has coagulated in your bowl and is a gross orange color.

The thick texture is basically what I'd expect the coagulated oil to be like if you gave it a mixing real quick. The flavor though was amazing and strangely tasted almost exactly like hot pot. I had such mixed emotions eating this sauce. I'd love it and then hate it and then love it again before feeling sick. Every bite I couldn''t stop imagining myself eating the coagulated leftover oil in my hot pot sauce bowl which would make me feel almost sick to my stomach. Between the taste, texture and sight it was really a confusing experience for your sensations. When I could forget that hotpot sauce bowl though the flavors were really delicious and it even had a spicy kick to it.

This is the true Sichuan sauce and my guess is that they made this to appease the Sichuan people who are probably offending over the deceptive Szechuan sauce misleading people. The Szechuan sauce isn't bad by any means, it's just completely unrepresentative of the actual flavors here.