Fast food claim: If you leave out a McDonald’s Chicken McNugget at room temperature, it will eventually melt into a puddle. This food rumor, as far as I can tell, first appeared around 2013. The earliest entry, according to a simple Google search, appears on a website called Mrs Happy Homemaker. It has also been repeated by a popular food site called Eat This, Not That.
Status: FALSE. As are most of the hair-brained claims made on this website, there is not a ‘grain’ of truth in the rumor. If you leave out McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets, one of two things will happen, depending on the air’s humidity level.
The chicken nugget will either dry out or will develop mold, with the former being the most likely. But what is the premise of this myth?
According to Eat This, Not That, the reason that a McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets will melt into an unrecognizable puddle instead of spoiling is that the real chicken inside them also contains binding agents.
Since these binding agents are ‘water-based’ they will break down and thus stop holding the processed chicken together, resulting in a puddle. The authors of this site never let cooking or food knowledge stand in the way of a good headline. The ingredients in a Chicken McNugget are no mystery. Here they are, in all their infamous glory:
White Boneless Chicken, Water, Vegetable Oil (canola Oil, Corn Oil, Soybean Oil, Hydrogenated Soybean Oil), Enriched Flour (bleached Wheat Flour, Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamine Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid), Bleached Wheat Flour, Yellow Corn Flour, Vegetable Starch (modified Corn, Wheat, Rice, Pea, Corn), Salt, Leavening (baking Soda, Sodium Aluminum Phosphate, Sodium Acid Pyrophosphate, Calcium Lactate, Monocalcium Phosphate), Spices, Yeast Extract, Lemon Juice Solids, Dextrose, Natural Flavors.
As you can see, the only ‘water-based’ ingredient is water. A binding agent is nothing more than an ingredient used to bind things together. You use them in cooking all the time.
If you add eggs or bread crumbs to a meatloaf, one of the primary purposes of either ingredient is to act as a binding agent. Binding agents sometimes have other purposes, as well. For instance, eggs, specifically egg whites, help form ‘gels’ in food so eggs can be called a gelling agent.
However, unlike gelatin, egg white gels do not melt when heated. It is possible that this association between binding agents, gels and gelatin could confuse someone into thinking that foods with binding agents would just ‘melt.’
The starch in the recipe probably acts as a binding agent within the chicken nugget. Starches too, gelatinize when heated in the presence of water. This causes the starches absorb water, swell up and solidify together while binding other ingredients and thus locking them all together. This process is irreversible. Once the starches have gelatinized, they cannot easily return to their previous crystalline state. So, they will not “melt” into a puddle. Think of popcorn. Part of the process of a kernal of popcorn popping is the gelatinization of the starches inside the kernel. Once this has happened and the kernel pops and puffs up, it doesn’t reverse. No matter how long the popcorn sits, those starches remain in their new state.
As well, the white boneless chicken likely contains some amount of chicken skin, which also acts as a binding agent. These also will not ‘melt’ when exposed for some time to room temperature.
McNuggets Melt into NOTHING
The early example from Mrs Happy Homemaker does not claim that McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets melt into a liquid puddle. Instead, it claimed that the chicken inside the breading, when left inside the refrigerator for 10 days, disappeared into nothingness.
However, this experiment was prompted, supposedly, by the following claim by a McDonald’s worker that originally appeared in a Huffington Post article entitled Fast Food Workers of Reddit Tell You What Not to Eat:
When I worked at McDonald’s, I accidentally left a whole bag of about 100 chicken nuggets out on a counter for way too long. They melted. Into a pool of liquid. I never understood why. But they were completely indiscernible as being the nuggets i once knew.
Notice in this original quote that the McNuggets were claimed to have melted into a pool of liquid. However, in their experiment, the author of Mrs Happy Homemaker seems to have managed a miracle. The ingredients inside the breading went poof:
Looked dry, but otherwise ok.
I decided to check the inside by breaking it in half. Breaking it in half was not an easy feat. I pressed in with my thumb to find my finger collapsed into a crusty nothingness.
I grabbed a sharp knife, and cut open a second one to get a better look. However, there was really nothing to look at as this one was hollow as well. All four of the chicken nuggets were hollow.
My question is – where did the chicken go?
It went POOF.
If the results claimed here were real, then the author managed, through the simple act of refrigeration, to make matter disassemble itself into, well, nothing.
Where did the chicken go? I would guess that the chicken filling went into the trash after it was carefully dug out of the very hardened filling.
The commenters seem to think that what was left was a very small amount of dehydrated chicken and the rest of the ingredients simply evaporated. As can be seen by the ingredient listing above, while dehydration could cause quite a bit of shrinkage within the nugget, the idea that almost nothing would be left except a hardened shell seems unlikely.
However, as I said at the beginning of the article, if chicken McNuggets are left out for a period of time, the most likely result is they will dry out.
The filling should tend to pull away from the breading while shrinking, rather than hollowing out and clinging to the breading, thus appearing to have vanished.
As far as the frozen chicken nuggets melting into a pool of liquid? Well, that pool of liquid may well have been simple water condensing inside the plastic bag.
