BREAKFAST. It’s the most important meal of the day because it jump-starts the day and equips you with energy and stamina to last throughout the day. Unfortunately, a lot of people skip it because of lack of time—to prepare breakfast and to actually sit down and eat. Complicating the situation further is the traffic situation, as it eats up even more of everyone’s time. All the more people are not able to have a good breakfast.
To drum up awareness on how important breakfast is and to treat everyone to a proper breakfast, McDonald’s has declared Monday, March 14, 2016, as the 4th National Breakfast Day. It’s perfect, because Monday also happens to be the start of the working week (or school week?), and getting rid of Monday blues will somehow help everyone get over the hump and start not just the day but the week right.
Giving everyone a reason to welcome the beginning of the week with bright smiles, more than 400 participating McDonald’s breakfast restaurants nationwide will be giving away free McMuffins to customers from 6:00 to 7:00 a.m. on March 14. Customers will be getting their free McMuffin on a first-come, first-serve basis via dine-in, take-out or drive-thru. Expect a long queue everywhere, so come early.
“With the 4th National Breakfast Day, we want to remind Filipinos that at McDonald’s, they can have a great start for the day. It is our commitment to provide customers with a beautiful morning experience through our delicious and quality breakfast offers,” explains Kenneth Yang, McDonald’s Philippines president and chief executive officer.
McDonald’s thus highlights three of its breakfast items, the Egg McMuffin, Sausage McMuffin and the new Cheesy Eggdesal. Made of freshly cracked Grade A egg, lean Canadian bacon and American cheese between perfectly toasted English muffins, the Egg McMuffin is an iconic McDonald’s breakfast treat all over the world. The Sausage McMuffin is another variation, with a juicy and savory all-beef sausage with American cheese filling sandwiched between warm, perfectly toasted English muffins.
As part of the countdown to the 4th National Breakfast Day, McDonald’s took a few members of media on a breakfast kitchen tour of the McDonald’s branch at The Forum along 7th Ave., Bonifacio Global City, in Taguig. Wearing hairnets and removing all jewelry and bling-blings as a safety precaution, members of media entered the “authorized personnel only” kitchen and witnessed how these three breakfast items are usually prepared.
First order of the breakfast kitchen tour: Wash and sanitize before anything else.
Then it was off to the kitchen proper to watch the McDonald’s staff on duty prepare eggs—sunny side up for the Egg McMuffin and Sausage McMuffin, and folded for the Cheesy Eggdesal. The egg for the McMuffin is cooked in ring molds for a standard round shape, and the yolk is pricked to achieve a gelled and evenly cooked texture and the internal temperature of the egg is checked to make sure it achieves the minimum food safety temperature requirement. The eggs for the Cheesy Eggdesal, on the other hand, are scrambled and then cooked in rectangular ring molds with the American cheese slices, then folded in thirds.
The Egg McMuffin is composed of freshly toasted English muffins that have been brushed with butter, then layered with cheese, egg and round, lightly cooked Canadian bacon, and finally covered with the other half of the English muffin.
The Sausage McMuffin is a variation, with juicy and savory all-beef sausage and American style cheese in between warm, perfectly toasted and buttered English muffins.
For the Cheesy Eggdesal, the folded egg with cheese is sandwiched between toasted and buttered halves of soft, tasty pandesal bun. The bun is a fully baked soft roll that’s uniformly cream in color, is uniformly rounded, symmetrically round, and covered with breadcrumbs.
For food safety, when the eggs are cooked, even if they have been prepared following world food safety standards, they are kept for only 20 minutes. Anything that isn’t used within that period is thrown away.
At McDonald’s, almost all of the steps involved in the preparation of each product, including the breakfast items, are automated so there’s the least manual handling (mostly kept to the assembly of the products), and the staff follows exact science (exact length of cooking time prescribed for each component) to achieve high-quality products and ensure food safety for customers.
Besides these precautions, McDonald’s also sources its ingredients only from reputable suppliers who are able to meet its quality requirements and strictly follows storage standards that it has set for itself. It has dry, chilled and frozen storage areas, and the optimum shelf life of the ingredients is faithfully observed.
Just recently, three new variants of the Cheesy Eggdesal have been launched—Cheesy Eggdesal with Ham, Cheesy Eggdesal with Tomato and Onion, and Cheesy Eggdesal with Sausage.
Other breakfast items of McDonald’s include Pancakes, whose batter is dispensed into round shapes by an automated dispenser and cooked for a prescribed time to ensure uniformity of pancakes when cooked.
With all these delicious breakfast items being available in McDonald’s branches every morning, take the time and make an effort to have a proper breakfast daily to kick-start your day. Let the 4th National Breakfast Day on Monday, March 14, 2016, get you off to a good start.
