McDonald’s and Burger King dipping sauces compared: which are best?

I tried every single dipping sauce at McDonald’s and Burger King.
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The sauce makes or breaks the chicken nugget.But between McDonald’s and Burger King, which chain makes the better sauces?I tried all the sauces from both chains to see which had a better selection overall, and I found that both chains excelled in different areas.While McDonald’s had better sauces to go with chicken nuggets, Burger King had a more interesting selection that paired well with other sides on its menu, like onion rings.Sign up for Business Insider’s retail newsletter, The Drive-Thru, to get more stories like this in your inbox.Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.Sauce is to chicken nuggets what salt is to bread. Without sauce, a chicken nugget has little charm. It’s simply a deep-fried pebble of machine-pulverized poultry.With sauce, a chicken nugget becomes so much more: a vehicle for sugar, spice, and everything nice; an avenue to the flavor-filled fantasies of every afterschool ambler and every station-wagon wee one.So which sauce is boss?To find out which chain can best get you your sauce fix, I tried every single dipping sauce at McDonald’s and Burger King. Here’s how they stacked up:

At McDonald’s, I bought a 10-piece order of chicken nuggets and every sauce available:

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Sweet & sour, honey mustard, honey, spicy Buffalo, ranch, hot mustard, and tangy BBQ.

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First on the docket: tangy BBQ sauce.

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Tangy it was, and also very, very sweet. It was very sweet and very sour, but minimally smoky.

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For a BBQ sauce, it was pretty light on the barbecue spices.

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Second up: classic ranch.

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McDonald’s ranch is surprisingly yogurty — so much so that it almost tastes like Dannon yogurt.

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It’s creamy and sweet, but there isn’t much of the herb seasoning that makes ranch taste like ranch.

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Third: the classic chicken wing sauce, Buffalo.

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I was impressed by how much like actual buffalo sauce this one tasted.

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Sour and spicy, McDonald’s buffalo sauce brings some serious heat.

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Fourth on McDonald’s dossier: honey mustard. Disclaimer: honey mustard was my favorite sauce as a child. I put honey mustard on pizza in middle school.

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The honey mustard is slightly more watery than the other sauces.

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It’s very sweet but also has an enticingly complex mustard flavor. Well, relatively speaking.

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It’s the perfect dipping sauce.

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Sweet n’ sour seems like a meaningless name when most of McDonald’s sauces already are sweet and sour.

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And that’s compounded by the fact that this sauce isn’t even sour. It’s just sweet.

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There’s also an unpleasant flavor of uncooked soy sauce and maybe ginger from a jar?

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It’s supposed to mimic some kind of Asian-ish taste, but it just tastes bad. This is by far my least favorite sauce.

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It’s like honey mustard, but stronger.

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It isn’t spicier, but it’s sourer and has an overall more intense taste that hits all the right notes.

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Lastly, I tried McDonald’s honey packet. I remember the days when McDonald’s used to give you a whole dipping cup full of honey.

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Now, honey comes in a half-sized cup. It’s hard to even get your nugget wet.

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It’s very sweet, very potent, and tastes kind of like chicken and waffles. Without the waffles.

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At Burger King, I ordered a 10-piece chicken nugget, large onion rings, and, of course, all the sauces.

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On the table were BBQ, Buffalo, ranch, honey mustard, sweet & sour, and zesty sauce.

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First up: BBQ sauce.

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Sweet, tangy, and peppery, Burger King’s BBQ sauce tastes surprisingly like real BBQ sauce.

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It still isn’t the smokiest sauce I’ve ever had, but I could definitely taste this on a rack of ribs, or at least on a pulled pork sandwich.

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By any measure, it’s far superior to its McDonald’s counterpart.

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Next on the table: ranch.

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Now Burger King’s ranch is what ranch should taste like.

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It’s creamy, but it’s not just creamy.

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It’s also sour, herby, and flavorful. Yum.

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Third on Burger King’s roster: Buffalo sauce.

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Burger King’s Buffalo sauce is creamy for some reason. The spices are slow to kick in.

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It tastes more or less like Buffalo sauce, but it’s just not very spicy.

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Compared to McDonald’s powerhouse Buffalo, Burger King’s is just kind of wimpy.

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It’s hard to go wrong with honey mustard.

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But Burger King manages to do just that.

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Its honey mustard sauce is sweet, watery, and tastes only very faintly of mustard.

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But lest I forget, Burger King’s dipping sauces aren’t just for its nuggets.

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Sometimes what’s bad on a nugget is good on a deep-fried ring of onion.

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In this case, Burger King’s crispy and delicious onion rings save its honey mustard sauce from flavor oblivion.

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After tasting McDonald’s sweet n’ sour sauce, I had low expectations for Burger King’s equivalent.

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But the monarch of meat proved me wrong again, this time by producing a sweet and sour sauce that lives up to its name.

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Make no mistake, this is no slapped-together sauce. There’s no strange and offensive taste, and it’s actually both sweet and sour.

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It tastes just like orange chicken sauce, actually.

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With so many fans online lamenting the zesty sauce shortage, I had high expectations.

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It was much less spicy than I expected, seeing as it contains horseradish, and it has a much nuttier flavor profile than any other sauce.

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Horseradish and onion, while perfectly fine condiments, don’t quite jive with a chicken nugget.

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My course of action was clear: onion ring, meet zesty sauce.

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Suddenly, this sauce was perfect. Nothing brings out the flavor of onion like more onion.

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I could eat onion rings with zesty sauce all day.

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When it comes to which has the better sauces, the two chains are both better in different ways. McDonald’s has better honey mustard and Buffalo sauce, and its hot mustard is out of this world.

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Burger King is better at pretty much everything else. But how good a sauce tastes depends on what it goes with, and that’s much harder to figure out at Burger King.

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For just nuggets, McDonald’s sauce selection is probably slightly better. But Burger King has nuggets, onion rings, and cheesy tots — and a sauce that’s best for each.

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Features
McDonald’s
Burger King
Chicken Nuggets

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