McDonald’s New “French” Creme Brulee McFlurry is Bonkers

Imagine if your Dad made you eat an ice cream cone you dropped at the beach…and it somehow tasted awesome.

The McFlurry is a dessert with a troubled back story. Launched in the mid-1990s as a blatant Dairy Queen Blizzard ripoff it was always just a little…not right. For starters, the opening of the cup, shaped to help mix the dessert, made eating of eating the icy-treat akin to playing a game of Operation as you try to manoeuvre your (over)laden spoon through the narrow opening. And that same top of the cup evidently wreaked havoc on various rodents trying to rock the Elizabethan collar once disposed of.And the spoons, designed to both be the mixer of the dessert and the tool for eating it, may have seemed ingenious to the industrial designer in charge, but to the lay person just felt like something that would take eons to break down in a landfill. Mostly though, it was just never as good as the Blizzard—and thanks to several price increases (a regular-size checks in at just under $4 these days) it’s barely even cheaper.But then some genius—spurred on by McDonald’s supremely weird “World Taste Tour”—said:”What if we mixed a whole swack of granular caramelized sugar grains into a McFlurry…you know, like the French would.”The result is one of the weirdest desserts in a long while. The granular sugar has the texture and consistency of sand and it doesn’t dissolve in your mouth so the effect of eating it feels like eating ice cream that’s been rolled in…sand. Yet…the sugar really does approximate the caramelized sugar shell that adorns the top of every properly made creme brulee in a way that just adding caramel flavouring never does. So if you can get past the texture (a big ask, we know) and overlook some of the cloying sweetness it really does taste like creme brulee. A weird creme brulee but still…. But, like Ponyboy Curtis says, “Nothing gold can stay.” The World Taste Tour ends on July 29, so only a few more weeks to enjoy this sand dessert classic.