Tragically, the McDonald’s steak, egg and cheese bagel was ripped away from us. In the summer of ’99, just months before Will Smith released his seminal album, “Willennium”, McDonald’s brought the world a steak, egg and cheese bagel in a lineup of three whole-based breakfast sandwiches. Today, Trevor and I set out to recreate the infamous bagel, steak-adjacent beef disc in their revolutionary breakfast sauce that looked like a highlighter-flavored mayonnaise. Because, tragically, McDonald’s phased out all their bagels during the Covid-19 pandemic, along with their all-day breakfast to cut costs. People were so rightfully enraged that the demand for the steak, egg and cheese bagel sandwich garnered 24,000 signatures on change.org, and there was even a Twitter account fully dedicated to the dish. The plot thickened in March 2023 when they flipped the script and announced that the steak, egg and cheese bagel was making a comeback in some very lucky states. But I’ll believe it when I see it in my own backyard, Ronald McLiar, because we’re gonna bring it back. It’s time for Pa Pa ast Food! ast Food! I could’ve kept going. You really let me down there. Trevor, you will notice a distinct lack of bagels in front of you. Yes, yeah, that’s crazy. Because McDonald’s ain’t got no more damn bagels because they had, like, a 15-year run, and then in, like, 2014, they gradually started phasing them out, Trevor. They gradually started chipping away at your rights as an American to get a fast food bagel sandwich for, like, $2.50. It’s effed up, man. It’s effed up. And so, right now from McDonald’s, they still got the foldy egg, which is one of my favorite eggs in all of the fast food industry. This is better than Taco Bell’s powdered egg, I believe. It’s better than McDonald’s old egg. Definitely better than Jack in the Box who are like, “We crack our eggs fresh,” and it’s like, hmm, maybe you shouldn’t. And then we got the cheese from McDonald’s. That means we are on the hook for the special onions they had, which was like, a normal onion but goo. So it was an onion but goo. Okay, okay. And then we gotta make the bagel. Bagel, yeah. Which very much tasted, I remember eating these like so, so, so vividly. I was so excited, Trevor. We were hurdling towards Y2K. Here’s the thing, the computers, they couldn’t understand the number zero, and so the entire world was gonna collapse. And we all thought that. We all bought gallons of water, and I was just there eating preformed steak on a sugary sweet bagel from McDonald’s with onion goo. That’s awesome. So we gotta make a very sugary, very processed type of bagel that certainly has nothing to do with a classic Jewish bagel. And then we gotta make their steak, which the ingredients in their steak are beef, salt, water, and then natural flavor. So we gotta figure out what all that means. Yeah. Uh-huh. It was like a hamburger but tough. And then we get to, man, party like it’s 1999. What were you doin’ in 1999? Being born, mostly. And then I had the chicken pox. Like, right after being born? I had chickenpox my first Christmas ’cause I wasn’t old enough to get the chickenpox vaccine, and then I got ’em. So you see pictures of me as a baby on my first Christmas, I just got little chickenpox all over me, and I was kind of a chunker. So, pretty funny pictures. You’re like a sickly Romanov child, huh? Trevor, you ready to bring this back from the past? Back from the past! I think more like Jon Taffer. We haven’t done one of these in a while. All right, like this. Okay. Trevor, are you ready to bring this back from the past? Back from the past! He’s redder. We gotta like… Okay. Yeah, just kinda preload it. Okay, ready? All right. Trevor, are you ready to bring this back from the past? Back from the past! That felt good, that felt right. You okay? Don’t pass out, don’t pass out on me. Don’t pass out! Am I red? Trevor, breathe, breathe, breathe, breathe. Get air inside. Get air inside! He needs air. Someone give him mouth to mouth. I love breakfast! Trevor, before we could even talk about the McDonald’s breakfast bagels, we have to talk about the Mandela effect because I do not remember a breakfast sauce being on there. I kind of stopped eating these probably like, mid-2000s, right? Okay. When I graduated, you know, Taco Bell was coming out with breakfast. There were new, exciting things, but I got away from it, which is why I have so much guilt, which is why I want to recreate this. But there was a breakfast sauce that I don’t remember at all. Can we pause for a second? You have guilt related to this sandwich? So much, because I left it. I abandoned it like Moses in the reeds. I just dropped it off and kind of let it leave my life. And then now that it’s officially gone, they officially discontinued it when they pared menus back during the pandemic. And they’ve slowly started bringing it back, but we’re hoping this can sort of goose McDonald’s into the next realm to actually bring it back nationwide. But I don’t remember this breakfast sauce at all. We looked up the ingredients, and we looked up a press release from 1999. It did exist, but I got full-on Mandela effected by this. Okay. And the Mandela effect is? Of course the phenomenon into whence we, as a people, large portions of the population believe something that didn’t happen, and people say, “Oh my God, they came from a different universe and landed in this one. And in that universe, that thing happened, but now they’ve phased into this universe, and the things, the realities, the multiverses are, they’re splitting together. They’re going together and there’s… You wanna tell ’em about it? But people thought it was ’cause Mandela died in prison, I guess, and that was the thing, but I didn’t realize that. I thought the Mandela effect was about another Mandela effect that is Mandela effecting about Mandela. And that’s the quote, “Our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate. It’s that we’re powerful beyond measure. It’s our light not our darkness that frightens us,” and people think that’s Nelson Mandela, but it’s actually Marianne Williamson, famous failed presidential candidate. Do you think that this is all gonna get cut? And it’s also in “Coach Carter”! Point is, we’re making a breakfast sauce, and Trevor’s gonna start making the bagel. All of the allergen information is available, so we know exactly what went into this. The bagel, it’s just a real delicious chemically, dough conditionery filled bagel. That’s what gets it so light and fluffy and sugary. Yeah. So yeah. What do we got here? Yeah, so we’ve got wheat gluten. So wheat gluten is, these are all kind of just chemicals, extracts and things from bread that just give it texture. So this is tapioca starch. This is gonna make it spongy. This wheat gluten is gonna, get this, encourage gluten development. Gluten’s a protein that binds breads. And then we’ve got dough conditioner, which is just like, yeah, make dough nice and fluffy. I don’t know, it’s all very like, you just put chemicals in it, and then you don’t have to work as hard to make your dough good. The breakfast sauce, we looked up the ingredients, it was basically a cheddar, lemon, and smoke flavored mayonnaise. Delicious! Which honestly, like, why not? And so we’re just gonna run roughshod on this right now. Oh God. I dropped some cheddar cheese powder in there. Heck yeah, brother. You’re just goin’ for it. Past Food is back, baby. Past Food is back, baby. We’re dumpin’, and we’re jivin’, we’re talkin’ about the Mandela effect. What are the, what the hell happened? What were the Berenstain Bears actually called? All I know is they were Jewish. They were Jewish icons, and that’s why I loved the Berenstain Bears growing up. All I know is they had long toes. What? Like, the bears, the illustrations. Anybody else remember? They had, like, weirdly long appendages, fingers, and toes. They had prehensile toes, the Berenstain Bears? Are you Mandela effecting me right now? No, it was just like, I remember reading those books as a kid and being like, why are their claws so, I feel like bears, like, they don’t actually look like that. We’ve added cheddar cheese powder, granulated garlic, black pepper. We’re gonna put some MSG in there. They didn’t have MSG, but they had autolyzed yeast extract in there, which to me, that’s a same way to get glutamates in there. A little bit of buttermilk powder just to add more dairy flavor. Like, I don’t know what’s going on with this, but this is gonna be a flavor bomb, and I’m pretty excited. A couple drops of lemon juice in there. There we go. Okay, all right. A little bit of liquid smoke, you know, get a huff of that. Woo! Make you feel somethin’ in the morning. That’s what we’re talkin’ about. That smells like the Wood Ranch, baby. No, wait, is today Wood Ranch Friday? Today’s Wood Ranch Friday! A lot of people are like, “How far in advance does GMM film?” We’ll die before we tell you about that, but we’ll tell you that whenever we do film on a Friday, it’s Wood Ranch Fridays, baby, and that’s the best day of the week. All the hottest kids in my high school worked at the Wood Ranch. That is, until the Sonic opened up. And then they found out that the hot kids that could roller skate, they went to the Sonic. The ones that couldn’t, they stayed at the Wood Ranch. But that’s not the Mormons. They worked at the Golden Spoon Frozen Yogurt. If anyone was curious about Trabuco Hills High School class of 2010’s employment situation, that’s where we were at. So much lore we’re unlocking today. Yeah, the goth kids, the skaters, they worked at Tillys. Tillys is like a PacSun but worse. Tillys is like knockoff Zumiez. Yeah, correct, correct, correct. And Zumiez already sucked. Is it good? What’d you do to it? I think we’re gonna need more mayonnaise. Hold on. That’s all the mayonnaise you get. I need more mayonnaise. No more mayonnaise! That tastes like the sauce inside of a quesarito. It does. Are you crunching through powders right now? Yeah. I think we just gotta let it sit and sort of marinate, right? Yeah, sure. Yeah, let the powders kinda soften. It all just sort of consolidates into a lovely flavor goo. Yeah, well, I’m really excited for where we get to blend up a bunch of steak into a goo and then form that into patties. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Pink slime. Yeah. This would’ve been the era of pink slime. We’ll talk about pink slime in a sec. We’re gonna let the, I know you’re pining for that. Josh, how experienced are you with fingerin’ holes? Mildly. Okay, cool. Great, there we are. Really get it in there. Create sort of what I would call, a little bit of a puckered, you know. I like to pick it up, and I like to thumb it. All the way through. I like to thumb it, yeah. Kinda hit ’em with one of these. And then I’ll do a little bit of a stretch action. You like that one? A little gentle. Yeah, no, that’s good. Hit ’em with that. That’s good. This is how I do a bagel. See, there’s a little hole. Yeah, I like to stretch it out a little bit. You wanna relax it, you know. Yeah, yeah. Get a nice little words of affirmation. Yeah! Why is there a hole? In a bagel? Yeah. I don’t know. You can have a bialy and there’s no hole. This is gonna go through a bit of a second proof, and the hole’s gonna close up again, right? Yeah, well, not all bagels have holes, you know? Keep it stretched, yeah. Well, bialies don’t have holes. I don’t know what that means. You don’t know what a bialy is? This guy’s never had a bialy. He’s not from Brooklyn. Bialy, it’s a bagel without a hole, and I think it’s maybe Hungarian in nature, but it’s great, and it’s just more convenient. ‘Cause then you don’t get the cream cheese explosion through the hole. You know what I mean? Why do they have holes? That’s what I’m sayin’! Lincoln never had a bagel for, like, the first 25 years of his life. Can you believe that? Lincoln? Charles Lincoln Neal. Oh, I thought you were talking about Abraham. Ol’ Abe. Honest Abe. McDonald’s introduced the breakfast bagels back in 1864. So you specifically requested that we have the sauce out here for the fingering of the holes. Is there any reason? I thought we might wanna get a little bit, make it a little slidier. Get a little… Also, they sell lube at Target. What? They sell a lot more than that. Go to Target. There’s, like, the feminine hygiene section, and then next to it, just a lot of sex toys. Like, I don’t know what to tell you. I’m not being dirty. If you can go to a place that has the Joanna Gaines ceramics collection and then lube, it’s not on me. Stop talking about it! It’s not on me. It’s on society, and we should demystify it. Do an out. Please, do an out. We made bagels and sauce, and next, we’ll make other things. So Timo Cruz had left the team, right? But then his cousin died, and so he comes back, and he goes, “Coach, what do I gotta do to play?” And then Samuel Jackson as Coach Carter, of course, he says, “Mr. Cruz, what is your biggest fear?” And then he recites Marianne Williamson’s poem beautifully, but most people thought that Nelson Mandela had said that. Was it worth it? What? Well, he got back on the team, yeah. Yeah, no, Timo Cruz got back on the team, and then of course he- So we have steak right here. There are many ingredients inside McDonald’s breakfast steak patty. I’d say more ingredients inside of a steak than normally, because of course, the only ingredient would typically be steak. Yes. However, for them, it is beef, water, salt, soybean oil, and sodium phosphate. So we’re gonna blend all that up, and then the salt is actually gonna rebind this together. There is no meat glue. Okay. So I don’t believe there is pink slime in this. This would’ve been the era of the pink slime where you’d take a whole cow carcass after all the beef had been cut off, and then you just spun it in a centrifuge, and then all the meat would go wa-hoo. And it would spin off and splat against the wall. And fast food companies would scrape up that beef, and then they would use it in their burgers, which, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. If anything, you’re just getting more meat off the cow. I just blacked out. Can I tell them about this? Yeah, please. Cool. So, check this out. This is, like, my favorite product that I genuinely love this so much. It’s a really great product. This is Smatula, okay? And we also have the Spoom and the Slotted Spoom, okay? Three amazing… We have kitchen utensils, and they’re a really cool color, and they’re epic. I’m gonna use ’em to cook onions here in a second. That’s why I have onions and clarified butter. You can see their performance. Yeah, I’m gonna show you in action. See how they perform. But yeah, no, seriously, go check it out. It’s a great Smatula. Go check it out, mythical.com. McDonald’s cuttin’ costs, you know, they’re all about it. Definitely. You know where they’re cuttin’ costs? Milk fat solids. Yeah, correct. They’re like, “We’re not gonna give the people no milk fat solids. We’re goin’ clarified butter.” And I’m pretty sure that’s all that’s in the onions. They just cook the onions in clarified butter. Mandela effect! I remember a goo. Do you like these? I cut them yesterday. That’s actually a really nice proper cut on the onion, root to stem, nicely trimmed at the edges. That’s really good work, Trevor. I’m proud of you. Let’s go! That’s right, the baker can use a knife. All right, this is probably enough steak. We’ll save this for the dogs. For the dogs? We’re using London broil. It’s a very lean cut. We’re gonna try and emulsify some water in there, and we’re gonna really blend it up. And then the salt is actually gonna elongate the proteins. We’re gonna add a lot of salt in there. It’s weird, anytime a fast food restaurant has, like, a steak sandwich, it always just kind of ends up tasting like chewy burger, you know what I mean? Look at that performance right there. Look at the way the Smatula circles around the pan. It’s heat resistant. Trevor’s been frying the Smatula directly on the pan in butter for about 30 seconds, and it’s not melting. It’s paraben free. What’s a paraben? I’m adding some soybean oil to the beef before I blend it. And then there’s some spices in the beef. They say natural flavors, but there’s also spices on top of the beef. So I’m just gonna put in the normal spices in here. Okay. I put in some pepper. And you’re just goin’ for it? I’m kind of just goin’ for it. There’s garlic powder on the outside, so we gotta save the garlic powder for the outside as well. Okay. Yeah, yeah. You wanted a really garlic… In 2001, Trevor. Yeah, talk to me. All the seasons in 2001. Yeah. Winter, fall, summer, spring. People loved garlic in their steak breakfast sandwiches. That’s what we were doing. That’s what we were doing? In 2001? The Clinton administration was over. George Bush was in, System of a Down, you know, just came out with “Toxicity”, the album. That was a good time, and we loved our freedoms. I forget- But some people didn’t. Oh, fudge! The beef… So let’s check on our beef goo. It’s kind of created a bit of a mountain effect. A bit of, like, a tower of beef here. Well, if you shape that into a funny shape, that would be hilarious, dude. What kind of funny shape are you thinking? I don’t know, one of the classic ones, boobs, butts, penis. All right, I’m gonna cook a beef patty, see where we’re at. Gonna just matte this down. Yeah. You got any better jokes? I feel like our jokes have been kind of bad. No, does anybody else? Can somebody, like, ChatGPT some jokes? Why don’t scientists trust atoms? I think America’s really going through an anti-scientific discourse right now. I think we can no longer trust in institutions, and I think the Covid pandemic probably showed us that more than anything, that people are really working with multiple sets of facts. What did the pirate say on his 80th birthday? Aye matey! So the beef patty’s cooking right now. So we’re just gonna let that go for about three minutes on each side. And then we’re gonna turn it over, we’re gonna freeze it, and we’re gonna build that bagel. Nicole has a question. Oh, I was just gonna say a joke in the style of Mythical Chef Josh from ChatGPT. No way. Yeah. Oh no, oh no. Why did the dragon take up cooking? I don’t know. Because it wanted to turn its enemies into flambeed foes and have a fire breathing feast. I really hate alliteration. It look like the funny shape. Oh, like boobs? Yeah. It looks like boobs. All right, we got the bagel. We got all of our stuff. We’re just gonna go ahead and assemble here. This is the top of the bagel. Top, yeah. Okay, here, switch on three. One, two. So I’m gonna do a squidgle. Okay. Wow. Is that how they were doin’ it in 1999? In 1999, the squidgle was a very important part of fast food architecture. So we have the squidgle here. Now, we take the cheese. This is American. Yeah. The cheese or what we’re doin’ right now? It’s 1999 freedom fries. France wouldn’t go along with it all. Point it that way. And now the onions. It’s funny how perfectly oblong that is. And we made it perfectly oblong. Like, I think we just did a good job. Yeah. This is probably gonna taste excellent, right? I know you wouldn’t eat a bagel traditionally and think, “You know what this needs on it? A steak.” But McDonald’s did, dang it, and it was the swinging ’90s. You know, “Friends”, the cast of “Friends” are making $1 million an episode. And then this egg is way too small. Shrinkflation is what this is called. I think it’s called, we made bagel too big. We have another egg. Should we just get the other egg and kinda put it on there? I feel like we should. We can. Yeah, I know it’s not anatomically correct per se. We could do what makes you happy. Yeah, grab me the other- Hold on. But pause, it’s a folded egg, dude. So what if we do this? I hate that, I hate that. Too much. No, grab the other egg. Trevor, it would mean a lot to me if you grabbed the other egg. We have another egg, but it’s just loose. It’s just loose out here. We didn’t put it in a fridge or keep it hot. No, it’s not in the drawers. The egg certainly isn’t in the drawers. Well, maybe it’s in these drawers. No, we have, what is this? What are these? We got string. This thing caught on fire once. I don’t know why we still have it. Wait, hold on, Josh. I have drawers. I think I see it. I think I see it, hold on. Oh my God, it was behind your ear the whole time. Oh God, oh God! What is that? Oh God! No, no. I think if we cut it, and then we can sort of just, like, abut it. We would get fired if we worked at McDonald’s. Then we take our- No! Cheese! I’m so sorry we yelled. And then we, like, kind of stagger the cheese. Yeah. And, like, point it. And then we take a squidgle, the squidgle. You have a cold egg on there. Yeah, we did it! Why is nobody clapping? Check this out, we could cut Cut to packaging. to the packaging. One more “Bar Rescue” just for safety. Cut to the packaging! Cut to the packaging! Trevor, the year is 1999. You and I are on our way to work at a brand-new company called Amazon that sells books online. We’re doing data entry, and we don’t know how the computers are gonna understand the zero at the end of the year 2000, but what we do know is we can stop at McDonald’s on the way and we can get ourselves a steak, egg and cheese bagel. And that’s 15 minutes of happiness before the crushing insecurity of computers maybe understanding the number zero. We goin’ serrated knife right onto the wood table, huh? Correct, but I tried to stop it short. Let’s see a little cross section here. Wowy zowy! Look at that steak! You see the yellow of the breakfast sauce? Yeah, I sure do. I see the yellow of the breakfast sauce, the egg, and the cheese. We got two egg in there. That’s big. Ah, look at the butt end. Yeah, that’s nice. I might go right for the butt. That’s nice. I got the front end. I’m gonna eat it. Cheers. Are you goin’ in? Yep. Hell yeah, brother! Are you lovin’ it, or are you lovin’ it? I’m not. Why? What’s tasting sweet? Yeah, hold on. I’ll say something, the steak is awful. When you’re going to McDonald’s, you don’t need to get a bagel, if we’re being honest. Again, I have a lot of fond memories about this. ‘Cause to me, it was, like, very fancy, and I was a child. And I was like, “I want to get steak and eggs because I’m a big, hungry boy.” As a child, I was so concerned about whether the computers could understand zero or not, you know what I mean? I’m not getting the onion as much as I want to. Yeah, if we’re being honest, most of this is pretty bad. This sucks! But it’s only because McDonald’s has, like, the best breakfast in the game and they always have. Yeah, no. McDonald’s freakin’ Sausage McMuffin is the greatest food on the planet. Yeah. I agree with that. I’m still happy we made it. I think your bagel turned out incredible. It tastes like chemicals. Thank you. You know, it’s weirdly sweet. Yeah, thank you. Ultimately though, you don’t think they should bring this back from the past? I don’t think so. I don’t think they need to. They’re trying to. They’ve already brought it back from the past in, like, Indiana and select test markets in Michigan. Oh boy. So if y’all are out there in Michigan, tell us how the revamped sandwich is, and if we just did a bad job. ‘Cause, yeah, this is not… There’s no way we did a bad job. We’re perfect. We’re the greatest chefs alive. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is McDonald’s fault. This is Ray Kroc’s fault. Well, thanks so much for stoppin’ by Mythical Kitchen. We got new episodes out every week. Make sure you are liking, commenting, subscribing, doin’ all that jazz. Trevor, where can the people find you on Tuesday afternoons at 4:30 PM? Oh God. Well, in the city of Paris, Texas, there’s an Arby’s and out in the back alley, there’s one of the chefs there, one of the cooks at the Arby’s. I’ll smoke a cigarette with him 4:30 Tuesday. So come hang out with us there by the dumpster. You’ve been smokin’ cigs with Chef Carl at the Arby’s in the alley every Tuesday at 4:30? I go Wednesdays on 4:30. Really? Well, we gotta link up sometime. We gotta link up, man. Well, I don’t know, I kinda like my Wednesdays with Chef Carl. We’ll see you all next time. Cook up your next fire meal with the Mythical Kitchen utensil set, available now at mythical.com.