Even though we wish the McDonald’s breakfast would last all day, sometimes it’s worth getting up a little earlier than usual to take a peek at the breakfast menu (but here’s why the all-day breakfast menu ended). The hotcakes are unmistakable, and so are the Sausage McGriddles, but we can’t forget about the forever immortalized Egg McMuffins (which we placed fairly high in our ultimate ranking of McDonald’s food items). Although if you’ve been ordering from McDonald’s for a while, you may have realized that those crispy, fluffy Egg McMuffins people enjoy today aren’t quite the same as they were in the past.
In 2015, McDonald’s changed how the Egg McMuffin was prepared by swapping the use of margarine for real butter. If you’re wondering where butter/margarine fits into the Egg McMuffin, McDonald’s lathers it on pastry items such as English muffins, bagels, and biscuits while also using it for cooking on the griddle. Stores reportedly made the switch gradually, depleting reserves of margarine before solely relying on actual butter for Egg McMuffin preparation. Ten years after the announcement, McDonald’s still uses real butter for cooking its breakfast items.
McDonald’s eliminated margarine in favor of butter
When McDonald’s changed the Egg McMuffin ingredients from margarine to real butter, it was part of a larger plan to restructure and improve the fast food restaurant’s offerings. The chain wasn’t doing well, so executives changed things up in an attempt to bring customers back into the restaurant. One of those changes involved shifting the perspective about McDonald’s food by making it more appealing to the masses. The same year that McDonald’s nixed margarine, the chain also stopped using milk from cows treated with rBST (a growth hormone) and stopped using chicken meat from birds that had been treated with human antibiotics.
Using real butter over margarine changed both the flavor and the quality of the Egg McMuffin, as it would with any baking/cooking swap. Butter is richer and denser, meaning the flavor of the Egg McMuffin became heartier and more robust. Butter is also firmer than margarine, filled with a lower water content, so items cooked with butter tend to have a crunchier texture. Just think about those charred edges and toasty crust on an Egg McMuffin. We can thank the switch from margarine to butter for those delicious upgrades.
