BTS Meal and new Dream Doughnut Reviews
By Jerrison Oracion, Senior Columnist
Tim Hortons is known around the country for their signature doughnuts including the Boston Cream, the Honey Cruller, and their bite-sized Timbits. They have been experimenting with new doughnuts to create new instant classics with their Dream Doughnuts series. Some of their recent offerings included doughnut-related desserts, making them Canada’s favourite doughnut, according to their new Dream Doughnuts commercials.
Before renowned Canadian chef Tallis Voakes joined the Tim Hortons team, the doughnut place looked like Burger King. Since then, he revamped their menu and improved the quality of their sandwiches, bagels, and is always thinking up new artisan ideas such as the new Dream Doughnuts—while also offering more sustainable initiatives.
For their new Dream Doughnuts, Voakes decided to make French-inspired doughnuts filled with cream-like pastries, based on the famous culinary school Le Cordon Bleu in Ottawa where he studied. (He cooked a dish for Queen Elizabeth II when he lived in London!) There is the Strawberry Shortcake Doughnut which is dually filled with cream on one side and strawberry filling on the other side, and the Vanilla Cream Doughnut which is filled like a cream puff and drizzled with chocolate. The Vanilla Cream Doughnut had a lot of cream inside and the creaminess of it is dense like the Boston Cream Doughnut—except it does not taste like custard. The same thing for the Strawberry Shortcake Doughnut; the strawberry cream had an artisan taste.
I was asked to do a review of the BTS Meal, which was something everyone was hyped up for this past month. The greatest K-pop group of all time, BTS—who currently has the number one song worldwide and the fastest music video to get to 10-million views with “Butter,”—collaborated with McDonald’s as part of their offerings of meals designed by famous musicians beginning with the Travis Scott Meal. The meal involves one of my favourites: Chicken McNuggets.
The commercial for the BTS Meal made Chicken McNuggets look appealing and I was sold on getting the meal after watching K-pop music videos (which always have product placement). The meal consists of the 10-piece Chicken McNuggets Meal and includes fries and a drink. The only difference is that it includes two sauces designed by the members and inspired by sauces in McDonald’s in South Korea. There is Sweet Chili Sauce and Cajun Sauce which shows that the members like spicy food and they have good taste. There is special packaging for the meal, including the bag, where a lot of BTS fans were selling them on the internet and there is also text and the group’s name in Korean throughout the packaging. Both sauces were flavourful where the Sweet Chili Sauce is smokey and spicy and the Cajun Sauce tasted like a Creamy Chipotle Sauce.
They do taste like “Dynamite” and are smooth as “Butter.” While the BTS Meal is no longer available, it was worth the hype. McDonald’s will probably offer more designed meals by musicians that are under the group’s record label Hybe which recently merged with Scott Braun’s record label and includes Ariana Grande, Taylor Swift, and Canadian singer Justin Bieber.
