Our Favorite McDonald's Burger Is Worth The Messy Dining Experience

In our experience, not all McDonald's burgers are built the same. One of our most ambitious taste testers even ranked every single burger on the McDonald's menu, and learned that some burgers are just plain disappointing, while others shot to the top. Our favorite burger was surprisingly not the Big Mac, which landed in the bottom half of the rankings due to its unbalanced ratio of bread to small beef patties, with the Big Mac sauce (which surprisingly doesn't contain ketchup) doing all the heavy lifting.

Our favorite McDonald's burger ended up being a larger offering on its menu, dressed to the nines with toppings and condiments, and that would be the Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese Deluxe. This burger features not one but two quarter-pound patties, two slices of American cheese, and mayo, ketchup, lettuce, tomatoes, slivered onions, and pickles, all on a shiny sesame seed bun. Though the second patty added an element of chaos to the experience, our taste tester particularly liked the overall effect of the sandwich. As they noted, "The extra beef patty added some sliding to the burger that just isn't there with the single patty version. The ingredients slid around a lot, and though it is messier, I loved the mix here."

Out of the top six burgers our taste tester enjoyed the most, five of them involved the quarter-pound patties from McDonald's. These, notably, have been made with fresh beef rather than frozen since 2018. The smaller patty burgers, like cheeseburgers, McDoubles, and the Big Mac all still use frozen patties. We have previously found that the fresh beef does make a difference in terms of the patty's flavor, which is clearly essential to a good burger.

Couple that with the sheer volume of meat in the Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese Deluxe, along with its fresh toppings, and you've got a recipe for success. So the next time you're extremely hungry, are willing to hazard a potentially messy burger, and find yourself at McDonald's, the Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese Deluxe is easily the one we recommend the most. And if your appetite is just a touch smaller, the runner up was the single patty version, which is still a hit in our eyes. It'll just weigh you down less with the beef — but in the case of McDonald's burgers, we've concluded that more is indeed more.