Ex-McDonald’s Chef Reveals the Closest Alternative to Big Mac Sauce — And You Can Find It at Walmart

With hulking butter buns bundled with sizzling hot patty and tasty clusters of veggies, a burger is the closest thing to life. But the pleasure would be incomplete unless you have sauce dripping down your lips as you chomp it down. While there’s a motley of dipping sauces in the market, McDonald’s Big Mac Sauce has gained Kardashian-level stardom in recent years. In a TikTok video, McDonald’s ex-chef, Mike Haracz (@chefmikeharacz), shares where you can buy an alternative to this Mickey D’s “secret sauce” for your homemade burgers and snacks.  

McDonald’s Big Mac® Sauce is a longtime topping companion to the infamous Big Mac. Although it is believed to be a disguise of the Thousand Island dressing, fans have reportedly commented against this rumor. According to McDonald’s website, its special Big Mac Sauce features ingredients like mayonnaise, yellow mustard, sweet pickle relish, soybean oil, water, egg yolks, distilled vinegar, spices, onion powder, salt, garlic powder, vegetable protein, sugar, and caramel color.

Haracz checked their website and noted down these ingredients, as well as the sauce’s nutritional information, to find a sauce in the market that could be the closest cousin to this sauce. “On the McDonald's website, you can actually remove the bun, the cheese, the lettuce, the pickles, the onions, and all you're left with is the Big Mac sauce, which then gives you a breakdown of calories per serving,” he explained.

“This is if you don't want to make Big Mac sauce at home,” he added. For those who are interested in making this Big Mac sauce at home, he has pinned a recipe video on his TikTok channel. The chef’s hunt boiled down to one item he discovered in the market that “almost exactly lines up” with McDonald’s sauce. It’s the “Great Value secret sauce.” Although the two sauces are “almost identical, there are a few differences probably due to water activity and food preservatives. When you taste this, you’ll notice that it’s slightly sweeter, but this is the closest thing you could get from the supermarket,” the chef said while flashing the bottle of Great Value sauce on the camera. 

“So happy hunting. Your Walmart might be out of it. It was hard to find,” he told the viewers before wrapping up the video. In the comments section, hundreds of people jumped in to say thanks and share other sauce products that they found to be similar to Mickey D’s secret sauce. “We got the secret recipe from Todd Wilbur at the store, and it was real close,” shared @diggitytech. Many people added requests for Haracz, asking him to hunt alternative products for McDonald’s other dipping sauces, such as tartar sauce, pickles, breakfast hollandaise sauce, honey mustard sauce, sweet-n-sour sauce, and hot mustard sauce.

At the mention of hot mustard sauce, one woman jumped in and wrote, “I read somewhere that Great Value Southwestern such is supposed to be like McD's Hot Mustard,” commented @katie. Your beloved life-saving burger is incomplete without this secret sauce. So make sure you choose the best product, whether it is from Mickey D’s or somewhere else.

You can follow Mike Haracz (@chefmikeharacz) on TikTok for food and gaming content.