Now with Ranch That’s Trying Too Hard

While most fast food restaurants want to try and get as much mileage as they can out of their basic ingredients, combining the same five items or so in different ways to make new “flavors”, every once in a while the restaurants are willing to break out of their shells and try something a little different. For years, Wendy’s would bring back a seasonal delight, their Mushroom Melt (under various names with slight variations), featuring a lot of sauteed mushrooms and melty, cheesy sauce, and it was quite the winner. It was different enough to stand out from their menu, with ingredients you didn’t normally see from the company.

Obviously Wendy’s knows they have a winner there, and it wasn’t exactly a hard burger for them to make: take the usual burger setup, remove the fresh veggies (that would only get in the way), slap on some cheese sauce that they already had ready for their baked potatoes, and then add in some mushrooms. Suddenly it was a big new thing and people loved it. It morphed over the years, sometimes featuring portabella mushrooms, sometimes included as a variant of the Baconator, but it would return regularly… until now.

Now, instead of a mushroom melt we have Wendy’s new Mushroom Bacon Cheeseburger which sounds like it should be the same thing, but very much isn’t. While the name sounds similar, with bacon and mushrooms, along with cheese, all in the mix, the actual final form is different enough to be considered something else. Instead of cheesy sauce slathered on the burger, the Mushroom Bacon Cheeseburger features slices of cheese along with creamy garlic spread. And that spread alone changes the flavor of the burger substantially.

In basic construction, this is a Wendy’s burger like you would expect. I got the Single because I wanted to taste all the ingredients and not have everything get overpowered by the beef (plus, while I am eating fast food for this investigation, I do like my heart and didn’t feel the need to dump two or three beef patties on it). This meant I could sample the burger in a form factor that put the other ingredients forward and I could see if the balance was right. And let me tell you, it is not well balanced at all.

I like Wendy’s burgers in general. Because they use fresh beef (never frozen, as per their motto), their burgers have a slightly different texture to them. They do feel fresher (albeit not any healthier) and I appreciate that about their burgers. I generally also like that their burgers come with fresh ingredients, including lettuce and tomato, by default. Naturally, on a burger like this, that balance is different as the fresh ingredients aren’t included, but by and large I feel like Wendy’s has a good balance for their burgers with the right amount of toppings to give their sandwiches solid flavor.

That balance, though, is missing here. The big flaw is that creamy garlic spread, which overpowers everything else. It tastes like ranch, but a kind of ranch that’s putting on airs. It’s strong and very flavorful, but honestly too flavorful. When I bit into the burger I didn’t taste bacon, or mushrooms, or burger, I just tasted the garlic spread. And that’s not to say that the spread is bad tasting, per se, but it does overwhelm everything else, dominating out all the other flavors to the point where it didn’t taste like a burger at all. It was losing something in the process.

What the burger needed was something to balance it out better. While the construction of the burger is similar to the mushroom melt, which didn’t include the fresh ingredients of lettuce and tomato (let alone mayo) because they would have thrown off the mouth feel, this Mushroom Bacon Cheeseburger is absolutely crying out for some fresh veggies to kick everything up. The garlicky ranch needs lettuce and tomato to accent the flavor more, to add in crunch and a little acidity, and make it all feel more nuanced.

Honestly, if I’m paying for bacon and mushrooms (and since fast food prices have spiked in recent years, I’m not only paying for it but paying out the nose), I want to taste those ingredients. The only way I could on this burger was if I pulled those ingredients off specifically, wiped them clean of the garlic sauce, and then ate them on their own. They’re all lost in the garlic flavor, and while maybe you could pick out a little of their texture, the flavor was absolutely not there. It was all dominated by the garlic spread.

I hesitate to call it outright bad, but at the same time it wasn’t really enjoyable. I think the burger could have benefitted from a complete restructuring. Ditch the bacon and mushrooms entirely as they aren’t adding anything, and then make this a Garlic Ranch Cheeseburger, with the spread, lettuce, and tomatoes. Or, better yet, make it a Garlic Ranch Chicken Sandwich, putting the lettuce, tomato, and garlic spread on a crispy chicken sandwich. That actually sounds delicious, and a might bit better than this mish-mash of flavors that doesn’t amount to much.

I don’t think Wendy’s is wrong to make a garlic spread and slap it on sandwiches. I just think the way they constructed this particular burger doesn’t work. With more time in the hopper, and swapping around ingredients, they could put the garlic spread to good use. The Mushroom Bacon Cheeseburger was not that good use.