McDonald’s honeydew McFlurry – Ten Thousand Taste Buds

Disclaimer: The first part of the post was an invited media tasting

Credit: McDonald’s Singapore

If you love the Ebi Burger from McDonald’s, look out for the new Cereal Ebi Burger and accompanying sides from 3 September 2015, for a limited time only. Omy Blog kindly invited me for a special launch event of the new McDonald’s Ebi Burger. Ebi is prawn in japanese, and I wanted to see what would be coming up before the rest of Singapore, so treated myself to the rare McDonald’s indulgence. Yeah it’s not the healthiest meal ever, but I haven’t had Macca’s for a few months, and I do enjoy their Asian-themed burgers that I don’t get in Aus… So I brought myself to the AMK Park Macca’s (which reminds me of the stand-alone Macca’s restaurants in Australia; it’s one of the rare ones I see in Singapore with a drive-thru). Sorry for the poor quality photos; I’ve been moving house (or room, rather) and my organisation is a bit messed up so I forgot to charge my camera battery and had to resort to the iPhone in horrible night lighting.

The new Ebi burger trumps the one I tried last year. For reference, the one last year was a wasabi flavoured sauce with a carrot/cabbage mix which felt almost like coleslaw. This year’s Cereal Ebi Burger (à la carte from S$5.35) has a crunchy cereal bun topped with chives and roasted white sesame (it’s a soft white bun with a sprinkling of cereals on top, not multigrain unfortunately…). It has the same whole crisp small prawn patty as last year, with a cereal coated batter and a mild potato flavour which gave the patty a pleasant mealiness. Sandwiched between the butter lettuce leaf lies a shrimp flavour mayo paste with a spicy lingering heat (some of the ingredients include onion, garlic and chilli padi). The sauce made the burger quite moreish with just the right level of spiciness, combining the different Singaporean-esque flavours; but the spiciness level may not be enough for many Singaporeans, it is certainly nowhere as hot as McSpicy.

The crispy sweet potato fries (à la carte from $3.25) are coated with an ever so thin, crispy and light batter and they were so darn good! I love sweet potato fries anyway, but these ones were really addictive; the batter made the fries crispy for a long time, unlike other sweet potato fries which become soggy. I adored the sweet and salty interplay of flvaours. They should really make these a regular, just like the yummy twister and shake shake fries; or maybe not because then I would be patronising McDonald’s too much haha.

The Honeydew McFlurry ($2.90) had a strong and pleasant honeydew taste, similar to the honeydew vitasoy flavour. It is flavoured with a sweet honeydew powder, but it is mixed in thoroughly and not in green strands / chendol like the picture seems to suggest (there was a small lump of powder that was not mixed well into the ice cream, but otherwise it was totally smooth). For textural contrast, there were crushed cones on the iconic soft serve. While I enjoyed the dessert, it was too cloyingly sweet for me; if I were to get it again, I would request for less honeydew powder. It would also taste better if there were fresh honeydew chunks in the McFlurry (a bit of wishful thinking since I’ve never seen Macca’s offer fresh fruit in their ice creams before!).

We also got to try the chill drinks: Ribena Chill ($1.95) and Mango Peach Chill ($2.45) (basically slurpees with Ribena or a mango peach sjora style syrup; the Ribena being a bit sweeter) that were refreshing albeit a bit of an overload of sugar.

The ‘Ebi-Kase’ special set meal includes a Cereal Ebi Burger, a glass of coca cola (small) and crispy sweet potato fries (medium), available for $7.45. To healthify your meal slightly (and kudos to you if you can really resist those addictive sweet potato fries), opt to swap the fries for a corn cup (no extra charge), or a garden side salad of whole leaf lettuce, red and white cabbage, crunchy carrots, corn, tomato and a Japanese dressing (top-up $1.20).

Thank you Omy Blog and McDonald’s for the invited tasting.

McDonald’s
10 Ang Mo Kio Street 12, Singapore 567740
Tel: 6451 3365
Opening hours: Daily, 24 Hours
Website: https://www.mcdonalds.com.sg
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mcdsg

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Reprise for my second Ebi Burger at Hougang Avenue 8 McDonald’s (anonymous identity) on 11 September 2015

So the first post had really lousy photos and I also wanted a quick lunch so with my trusty Canon G7X in hand, I went to the neighbourhood McDonald’s for comparison.

The prawn patty tasted a bit different this time, it seemed there were less whole prawns and more of the starchy/fish paste filler instead. A bit disappointing, but I suppose it makes sense that they’d make the invited event more impressive than the real thing. The sauce was still nice though, and the batter still with a nice cereal crunch.

When I went into the Maccas store, I could tell the sweet potato fries were sitting there for quite a while as it was about the end of the stash. Not wanting to wait until they cook the new batch, I asked if I could have a non-salted sweet potato fries (because this trick works for the regular potato fries: if you ask for the non-salted one, they always make it fresh and hot for you and it tastes so so much better than mushy fries minus the sodium overload). Unfortunately, this trick did not work as the server insisted that there is no salt added to the fries. I didn’t dare ask for a newly fried sweet potato fries though, which was unfortunate because I did not enjoy the stale sweet potato fries (tasted doughy and not at all crispy). Dipping it into the garlic chilli sauce helped me to get through it. The sweet potato fries also taste good with the ice cream (come on, I know many of you guys would’ve dipped the Maccas french fries into the soft serve as a kid, no?).

This time I was smart and asked for less powder for the honeydew McFlurry. So it was better, less sweet yet with an adequate honeydew flavour punch and the nice cornflake-like crunchies (which remind me of Rice Bubbles in ice cream, one of the simple pleasures I made for myself sometimes in Australia; although I just realised…there’s no Rice Bubbles in Singapore?! Maybe it gets soggy too fast in this humid weather?). It is still very sweet though haha.