McDonald’s are a scary machine of a company. All around the world, they pump out burgers and fries to the masses for cheap, producing consistent products that, despite their many detractors, taste good. Not amazing, not impressive and not great, just good. And they should be good, McDonald’s have spent huge amounts of cash on some of the best food designers – definitely not chefs – in the world, with a brief of combining sugar, fat and protein in exactly the right proportions to make our simple mammalian brains sit up and ping some endorphins around. Along with that, they have a marketing and market research budget that puts most other companies to shame: they know what people want to push into their faces, and they have the means and expertise to supply the things that meet that need.

Among the range of in-face-pushable items they’ve created over the years, there are many that have fallen by the wayside. Limited edition and event-tied burgers that have passed their time, occasionally reappearing as and when the market researchers spy an opportunity. However, even among the hall of occasionally-repeatable burger fame, there is one entry that has a hallowed status: the McRib.

It’s never really been a ‘thing’ over here in the UK, despite the couple of times that it’s been available on the menu in the past, but in the US it has somehow become a cult item. Introduced in 1981, it was binned in 1985 due to poor sales, but somehow over the past 30 years it has continued to pop up and has become a seasonal treat. Here in the UK, we’re much more conservative in our McDonald’s choices: there’s very little on their regular menu that I don’t remember from my early forays into the world of fast food in the 1980s. That’s not quite accurate – I’m ignoring the salads, ‘healthy’ deli choices and array of chicken burgers, as I know of noone who actually eats them. McDonald’s in the UK is Big Macs, Quarterpounders, (cheese)burgers and nuggets, with the occasional pervert admitting a fondness for a Filet o’ Fish. However, in a burst of limited-time enthusiasm, the Lords of McDonald’s have deemed it time for us to join the US’s cult: the McRib is now available until February 3rd 2015.

When it comes to the world of pork products, I am, in general, a fan. Everything from high-end pig bits down to the worst mechanically reclaimed pink goo has its place in my stomach, although I do draw the line at stomach itself, mainly due to flavour and texture, but in part due to the unwanted meta-ness of digesting a digestive system. Of all of the low-end pork products on my mental shopping list, pre-formed, bbq boneless ‘ribs’, as served with alarming regularity at lunchtime when I was at school, are still very much my favourite. As someone who missed out on the last time McRibs were served in the UK, 12 years ago, and who didn’t realise they’d been on the menu before then, seeking one out for a taste was a childhood-inspired labour of love.

The construction of the McRib is simpler than many of McDonald’s burgers. Take a bun, specially shaped to hold the elongated slab of fake rib, add gherkins and chunkily chopped onions, and then place a bbq-sauce-covered McRib on top. The saucing of the McRib is particularly easy, as they store the cooked slabs in heated draws full of the sauce, giving them a bit of a swirl around in the goo before ladling them onto the bun. Impressively, and potentially due to this simplicity of contruction, the finished McRib actually looks like its publicity photos, something that rarely happens in the world of burgers.

Most importantly, what does it taste like? In short: pretty awful. McDonald’s know how to produce a pork patty, as my devotion to their Sausage and Egg McMuffins will attest, and they also are pretty good at making BBQ sauce, if you like a sauce that tastes like boiled-down Coke and Worcester sauce, but the combining of the two hasn’t worked. The McRib itself tastes like a blander version of the sausage section of a McMuffin, cutting out the insane levels of salt that they use in their breakfast menu, and is inoffensive; the bun is 97% air, and is merely included to ensure you don’t have to grab a saucy meat lump; the onions are a welcome change of texture, and aren’t as intrusive as you might think; the gherkins are pointless, drowned out by the thing that kills the sandwich: the BBQ sauce. While a tub of room temperature McDonald’s BBQ sauce is a fine thing to dip your chips or nuggets in, when heated and used to keep lumps of fake rib warm for extended lengths of time, a transformation occurs: it gets bitter. The combined McRib is sweet to start, with the thick and cloying flavour that you expect and a touch of onion, but it rapidly descends into a world of burnt sugar acridness. This is not the bright orange fake rib of my schooldays, this is a murky brown monstrosity that has shattered my youthful hopes and dreams.

I will say that the second McRib that I ate (as a single sandwich would not a fair review make) was much better, purchased in a busier McDonald’s and almost certainly not poached in bbq sauce for quite as long, but it was still awful. And as someone who habitually berates those who claim that McDonald’s food is bad, that is an uncommon thing for me to say. Finally a burger that, for me, lives up to the anti-McDonald’s hype.