McDonald's Hot Honey Menu Review: Here's What's Actually Worth Ordering

McDonald's is far from the first fast food restaurant to contribute to the hot honey world. With the success of Taco Bell's Hot Honey Diablo Sauce, Pizza Hut's sweet heat wings and pizza, and my love for using hot honey in the kitchen, I had high hopes that McDonald's offerings would be an enjoyable addition to the hot honey legacy. The day the hot honey flavors officially hit stores, McDonald's was kind enough to order McDelivery so I could try the new flavor right from my home. With this tasting, my goal was to figure out if you need to run out and try this hot honey menu while it lasts.

McDonald's hot honey menu's basis is in its hot honey-flavored sauce. These sauce cups are available all day. In the morning, you can order a Hot Honey Sausage Egg Biscuit. Then, for lunch and dinner, three menu items get the hot honey treatment: snack wrap, McCrispy, and the bacon McCrispy. Hot honey comes on all of these menu items, but you can always add more sauce to your order or even put hot honey on other items from the menu.

Some recommendations are based on firsthand impressions of promotional materials and products provided by the manufacturer.

To determine if the hot honey menu from McDonald's is worth a try, I sampled the included items on the day they came out. I made my decision based on the flavor of the sauce and how it played with the flavors of each individual item. Before tasting, I imagined that a nice mix of sweet and spicy with a pleasant flavor that mingled well with both chicken and sausage would make for a positive outcome.

The hot honey menu takes McDonald's menu staples and adds some new hot honey sauce to the situation. During breakfast hours, the chain offers a Hot Honey Sausage Egg Biscuit with a biscuit surrounding a sausage patty, egg, and slathering of the hot honey sauce. The Hot Honey McCrispy Sandwich is a typical McCrispy filet with some crispy jalapeños, lettuce, mayo, and hot honey sauce all atop a potato roll. The bacon edition of the McCrispy adds (no surprise here) bacon on top. You can also order the Hot Honey Snack Wrap, which is your basic Snack Wrap with a McCrispy strip, lettuce, cheese, and hot honey sauce.

The sauce is clearly the star of the show, and you can also get the hot honey all on its own in a dipping cup. In general, the hot honey menu offers a slight twist to the items that are already there.

McDonald's hot honey menu officially released in stores on January 27th, but it began cropping up in some locations a few days before that. Though I didn't sample until January 27th, I noticed placards for the McCrispy sandwiches at McDonald's drive thrus in the days leading up to the release. This is a limited-time offering, and it's unclear exactly how long it will last.

The Hot Honey McCrispy and its bacon alternative are both pricier than a regular McCrispy or a spicy one. At my closest location, the Hot Honey McCrispy cost $5.99 and the bacon ran $6.99. A regular, no-frills McCrispy was $5.19 and a Spicy McCrispy was $5.39. However, there was no up charge for the hot honey Snack Wrap. Regardless of which flavor Snack Wrap you order (ranch, spicy, or hot honey), they all cost $2.99 per Snack Wrap.

Regular McCrispies are very basic sandwiches, consisting of only a chicken patty, bun, and pickles. They have 470 calories, 26 grams of protein, 46 grams of carbohydrates, and 20 grams of fat. A Hot Honey McCrispy Sandwich, on the other hand, is a little more robust. It clocks in at 660 calories, 27 grams of protein, 62 grams of carbohydrates, and 34 grams of fat. Predictably, the Hot Honey Bacon McCrispy ups those numbers to 770 calories, 33 grams of protein, 63 grams of carbohydrates, and 43 grams of fat with its addition of bacon.

The breakfast topping and the snack wrap have smaller metrics. When you enjoy a Hot Honey Snack Wrap, you'll take in 350 calories, 17 grams of protein, 38 grams of carbohydrates, and 15 grams of fat. However, you'll often be getting a meal of two Snack Wraps, so you might as well double those numbers. McDonald's morning fare, the Hot Honey Sausage Egg Biscuit, offers 550 calories, 17 grams of protein, 41 grams of carbohydrates, and 35 grams of fat, only slightly higher numbers than a Sausage Biscuit with Egg with 530 calories, 17 grams of protein, 38 grams of carbohydrates, and 35 grams of fat.

I wanted to love this hot honey sauce, since I enjoy most hot honey foods. However, I found this hot honey missing some key components. The joy of hot honey is that it still tastes like honey, but with a delightful kick. McDonald's hot honey tasted sweet, but not like honey. Looking at the ingredients, it was immediately clear why. The sauce's first three ingredients were honey, water, and sugar. That extra sugar came through far too strongly, and I believe its addition actually hid the honey flavor.

It was also a little unclear where the actual spice comes from. There was a mention of red bell pepper purée, but that's barely going to give any zip. My best bet is that cayenne pepper was hidden somewhere in the ambiguously labeled "spices" section of the ingredients, but I couldn't be sure. In the end, the spice was significant, but because so much of the sauce was missing a honey flavor, as a simple dip, without any other food, it tasted much more blah than I expected.

Bright and early, well before McDonald's breakfast ends, McDelivery showed up at my door. What a way to greet the day. I eagerly opened the bag and began snapping my photos, taking advantage of that lovely morning sunshine (the camera always eats first in this line of work). My first impression of the sandwich is just how messy it is. This definitely isn't the type of grab-and-go sandwich you'll want to take on the run with you unless you have a stash of baby wipes in your car.

For flavor, it was very, very sweet. Perhaps this was unsurprising given that we're dealing with hot honey here, but the flavor was more sugary sweet than honey sweet. The difference in flavor is notable and seemed an odd pairing with the sausage. Although I enjoyed how the biscuit tasted with the hot honey, I wondered if a chicken and waffle sandwich might have behaved better than sausage in this situation. The spice and sweetness of the sauce simply drowned out the flavor of the pork sausage patty. The sandwich appeared to be in something of an identity crisis with a truly confusing and rather lackluster combination of flavors.

I have an odd relationship with McDonald's Snack Wraps. I used to love these little guys and was thrilled they came back. Then, I got one bad order of Snack Wraps where the texture was wildly off, and they've had an uphill battle since then. Thankfully, there was no texture issue here. Instead, I found that there needed to be more of McDonald's new McCrispy strips to play with the hot honey flavor. Though I always love a bite of tortilla and sauce, the absence of the chicken in some bites was just really obvious here.

I would have liked for McDonald's to remove the cheese for these snack wraps and replace it with the crunchy jalapeño bits and mayo. These swaps may have created a more well-rounded snack. Instead, it was largely tortilla and sauce, and I was left wondering where the chicken had gone. That sweetness really jumped to the forefront here with the tortilla as its only thing to cling to, but subsequent bites revealed more heat, which I enjoyed.

I love a great chicken sandwich, but I'm typically more of a simple sandwich person. Hand me a chicken patty with mayo and pickles on a great bun, and I'm set. So I was skeptical of the Hot Honey McCrispy Sandwich.

I found the sandwich delectably juicy, and I must admit that it's probably been a while since I had a McCrispy because these patties have gotten notably great. They're juicy and tender in all the right ways. Paired with lettuce, mayo, and these crispy little jalapeño bits (where have you been all my life?), and there was a winning sandwich. Though the hot honey sauce did not work well with all items on the new hot honey menu, it sure did here. I was surprised by just how juicy, sweet, and perfectly spicy the bite was.

The sauce performed so differently here from the sauce cup that I had myself questioning whether it is the same sauce. In the end, I think the McCrispy just offers a better mix of ingredients and flavors. Still, this was a messy one. Get some extra napkins.

Guess what? Bacon made the sandwich even better. Just that smallest addition of smokiness supported the extra sugar in the sauce in a way that reminded me of the candied bacon my husband makes on our smoker. After all, hot honey is one of the condiments even Bobby Flay adds to bacon. Everything worked in harmony here to create a bite that has the smoothness of the potato bun, sweetness and spice from the sauce, and a tender texture with the chicken patty.

I didn't imagine bacon would make too great of a difference, and I'm not normally one to request that bacon be added to my sandwiches, but I would definitely make an exception here. The sauce did an admirable job of changing the entire composition of these McCrispy sandwiches, all while ensuring they did not lose out on texture and moisture.

Yes, the hot honey menu is worth a try, if only for the two McCrispy sandwiches. I didn't love the Snack Wrap or the breakfast sandwich, but I was completely blown away by the McCrispy sandwiches. It's not often I am so split on a menu, especially since I didn't love the new sauce on its own. This just speaks to all parts of a sandwich needing one another to work.

Unfortunately, the star of the show should be this new hot honey sauce, but as a dip, I found it to be too sweet with not enough honey flavor and spice that's just left alone to fend for itself. It felt like an attempt to create Mike's Hot Honey, but unfortunately missed that mark. The ingredients of the sauce really paint a full picture here. Mike's Hot Honey has three ingredients: honey, chili peppers, and vinegar. McDonald's hot honey sauce has over 15. Still, it tasted surprisingly great on the McCrispy sandwiches.