It was just yesterday that we wrote about McDonald's Japan releasing chocolate covered-drizzled French fries on January 26th, 2016. So imagine our pleasant surprise when we walked into this office this morning to find an advance sample of the featured chocolate sauces on our desk, courtesy of the good people of McDonald's Japan. We couldn't just let it go to waste, so armed with the surprise sauce packet and an herby green tea to provide the illusion of health, we picked up some French fries (or fried potatoes, as the Japanese say) and dug in to the fast food side making waves on the internet.

Pandora's Box.

The name is sauce, Double Choco sauce.

These ingenious little sauce packets might require some explaining if you haven't seen them before. In Japan, dressings and sauces for fast food are often sold in these squeezable types of packets.

They look like this from the side, and you squeeze them to release the sauce in two streams.

Here's a gif of them being used in action (this time ketchup and mustard) on a hot dog, that is insanely satisfying to watch.

They provide a nice, pre-measured amount of sauce and limit the mess (or are supposed to), and are strangely fun to use. They usually wow foreign visitors and first-timers, and make going back to regular sauce packets a bit cumbersome. Anyway, we drizzled them, as you do, on the fries.

Two sauces: Cacao-flavored and white chocolate.

So here they are, in all their sloppily decadent glory.

To be honest, we were a little worried about how to eat them. There's just so much going on here, it's like the fast food version of a Guy Fieri bowling shirt. Being a wild American, I threw caution to the wind and took a hands-on-approach that my keyboard is currently regretting. While some topped fries, such as chili fries, can be a lot of fun to eat with your hands, sticky chocolate sauce has us thinking that these should be enjoyed with a fork, or even chop-sticks.

You might want a fork.

So the only question that matters: how do they taste? Quite good, actually. We admit that it took a few fries to reach that conclusion, and the sloppy appearance somewhat betrays Japan's usual preferences for culinary aesthetics (but hey, it's fast food), but we find that they fit right in with Japan's resume of odd flavor combinations (Pizza cheese potato chips, wasabi beef potato chips, salty watermelon Pepsi, melon Kit-Kats, etc.) that just somehow magically work. If you've ever dabbled in dark arts of dipping your French fry into a milkshake, then this will be a similar flavor to you. Our biggest gripe is that the sweetness overpowers the salt a bit more than we were hoping for, making this more of a dessert treat than a true side.

All in all, there are some welcome contrasts such as the creamy sauce and crispiness of the fries, and the salty-sweetness that reminds us of chocolate covered pretzels.

If you're not in Japan, or plan to visit someday but won't make it in time to try this limited release (it ends mid-February), don't lose hope. McDonald's Japan tends to bring back their more popular seasonal releases, and we could see these being one of those. And for 330 yen ($2.75USD), they are worth a shot.

You can actually buy chocolate-covered chips at convenience stores in Japan, but general reaction from our staff (Japanese and non-Japanese) seemed to be that there's something about the cool chocolate sauce drizzled over the piping-hot fries make these a surprisingly tasty match. We're just thankful for the modest Japanese portions. Ask for a fork and a side of tea!

Itadakimasu!