Special sauce

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For the hip-hop group, see G. Love & Special Sauce.

Special sauce is the informal name given to the variation of Thousand Island dressing used in the McDonald's Big Mac hamburger. The name derives from a 1975 advertising campaign featuring a list of the Big Mac's ingredients: Two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun.

Although the precise recipe for what McDonald's itself now terms Big Mac Sauce remains a secret, the ingredients are as follows: Soybean oil, pickles, distilled vinegar, water, egg yolks, high fructose corn syrup, sugar, onion powder, ketchup, mayonnaise, corn syrup, spice and spice extractives, salt, xanthan gum, mustard flour, propylene glycol alginate, sodium benzoate and potassium sorbate as preservatives, mustard bran, garlic powder, hydrolyzed (corn gluten, wheat, and soy) proteins, caramel color, extractives of paprika, turmeric, calcium disodium EDTA to protect flavor.

At one point prior to 2004, McDonald's had lost the original recipe for the secret sauce. In daily usage it was abandoned starting in 2000 with the goal of reducing costs. The "secret" recipe was later recovered by one of the original sauce suppliers. ^[1]

The sauce differs from thousand-island dressings, and it is a common misconception that it does not. The Big Mac sauce is rather thicker at room temperature than almost all salad dressings, and even more so when refrigerated. The degree of sweetness may also be a significant difference, depending on the specific thousand-island dressing being compared.

Despite many urban legends regarding additional ingredients being "added" to the sauce by less than hygenic employees, Big Mac Sauce, tartar sauce, and mayonnaise are all delivered to McDonald's restaurants in sealed canisters designed by Sealright, from which it is meant to be directly dispensed using a special calibrated "sauce gun" that dispenses a specified amount of the sauce for each pull of the trigger^[2]. Its design is similar to a caulking gun.

The term "special sauce" is often used colloquially to denote a secret business process or method that provides some peculiar advantage to its user. Its semi-ironic connotation is that most everyone knows in general terms what the "special sauce" is (at McDonald's, after all, putting a particular type of thousand-island dressing onto a burger transforms the burger into a Big Mac), but the particulars are secret and somehow "special." The term is particularly used in tech and other venture-backed industries: for example, pre-IPO Google stated here that "since how we determine search results is the core of our business, there are some ingredients in our "special sauce" that we can't share," while Ask.com claimed here that its own search algorithms are "the best special sauce."