McDonald's Insanely Popular Szechuan Sauce May Come Back Soon

McDonald’s got a taste of the demand for its Szechuan-themed chicken nugget sauce last fall. Now it looks like the fast food giant is going whole hog for it.

The company hasn’t officially announced the sauce’s return. However, Heavy unearthed documents shared on Reddit that indicate the sauce could be available in some McDonald’s locations as early as Monday, Feb. 26.

The dipping sauce had briefly appeared in 1998 to help promote the Disney movie “Mulan.” It became a fad of sorts last April thanks to the Season 3 premiere of animated series “Rick and Morty,” where Rick declares it his life mission to get the sauce.

“I want that Mulan McNugget sauce, Morty,” he says in the episode. “That’s my series arc, Morty! If it takes nine seasons!”

The interest generated by the series inspired McDonald’s to bring the obscure sauce back for one day in October.

The end result: long lines, disappointed customers and tons of media exposure. Demand for the sauce was so high that one woman claimed she was able to trade a packet of it for a car.

The company promised to bring back the sauce to its locations during wintertime.

Photos of the sauce have been tweeted by various people who claim to be in the know.

HuffPost reached out to McDonald’s, but the fast food chain did not immediately respond. However, this tweet from Monday suggests that the wait may soon be over. 

The company followed up with this tweet on Tuesday afternoon.

Whether the sauce lives up to the hype is another matter. One Reddit user who tried the sauce said it was “amazing” and tasted like “bbq, honey, and teriyaki mixed together.”

However, “Rick and Morty” co-creator Dan Harmon wasn’t as impressed.

“I personally thought it was a sauce that was trying too hard in a world where with McNuggets sauce you just want something to taste like honey or like a BBQ sauce,” he told Entertainment Weekly in September. “It was sauce that was trying to prove it was different and in doing so it worked harder than a sauce should; it was working too hard to be a sauce.”