I tried McDonald’s limited edition chilli double cheeseburger and one thing really surprised me

Having taken over the fast food world and come to dominate the global burger market like no other company on the planet, McDonald’s certainly know how to do one thing, which is to churn out surprisingly unimpressive grub which is nevertheless carefully engineered to tickle all the dopamine receptors in every single part of the human brain.

This fact certainly hit me square between the eyes when I was sampling the restaurant chain’s new limited edition chilli double cheeseburger recently. I think I went into the whole experience naively, incorrectly imagining that the fast food purveyor famous for cheap culinary thrills would be serving up some heaping pile of homecooked chilli con carne.

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Alas, they were not. But what I got instead was surprisingly impressive in a completely different way altogether.

Having unwrapped the paper and retrieved my diddy-looking burger, all creepily yellow plastic cheese and sugary bread with the hint of char-grilled beef patties sticking out ever so slightly, my first impression was ‘wow, that’s small’. The burger looked emphatically underwhelming, with just a hint of deep green jalapenos suggesting it was something new.

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Then I took a bite and stopped. The flavour that hit my taste-buds was one with which I was familiar and which I’d dare say you and everyone else is also familiar too. It was smoky and spicy and tangy and so much like chilli that I stopped and pried open my disappointing burger to see what was under the bonnet. What greeted me was a chilli relish-like jam.

But it tasted so definitely like genuine chilli that I paused and scrunched my face up with each bite. It dawned on me that the vast multinational company behind this morsel in my hand had perfected a dupe-based relish recipe which perfectly mimicked the sensory experience of eating chilli without the need for carne. This was chilli sans carne.

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It was almost a bit weird, but then I remembered at which restaurant I was happily dining and recalled the fact that I had shelled out a grand total of just £2.49 for this scientifically-perfect food-based trickster in my mitts. It was not the roiling mess of steaming chilli I had envisaged, but this burger genuinely surprised me. It wasn’t half bad at all.