Here's How Long It Takes A Filet-O-Fish To Get From The Fryer To Your Bag

The biggest selling point of fast food is its convenience — the fast prep, quick satiety, and availability on the go. The experience is geared toward a speedy pace of life, a stark contrast to sitting down in a restaurant and eating a slow meal. As customers, we almost value the speed of service over the quality of the food when it comes to quick-serve restaurants. We want our order within a few minutes, balanced nutrition or not. If you're among the Filet-O-Fish apologists that enjoy McDonald's only fish sandwich, your order generally takes around six minutes to make from scratch.

The first step is frying the fish, which takes exactly three minutes and 15 seconds, per McDonald's. Then, according to a Reddit comment from a McDonald's employee, the bun gets steamed for 12 seconds, and all that's left to do is assemble the sandwich, just around the four-minute mark. The Filet-O-Fish is assembled directly in the box. The bun halves are placed in the two box compartments; the top bun gets a squirt of tartar sauce, the bottom bun gets the (infamous) half slice of cheese. The fish is then placed onto the tartar sauce and the box gets flipped shut — apparently, this is done to avoid any dents in the soft bun left by fingers, although the method does result in a sandwich that's commonly off-center. Taking these assembly steps into consideration, the whole process should ideally take about six minutes from start to finish.

Six minutes may be the desired order-to-window time for a freshly made Filet-O-Fish, but in real life, timings tend to vary. Sometimes, the fish will arrive much faster — McDonald's uses something called a Universal Holding Cabinet (UHC for short), which keeps a batch of cooked proteins at a consistent temperature for faster workflow. Breakfast items are kept at 174 degrees Fahrenheit, while the main menu items are at 199 degrees Fahrenheit. The fish patties are reportedly allowed to stay in the UHC for 30 minutes before they need to be discarded. So, if you get your sandwich in under six minutes, it's probably because the fish patty wasn't fried from scratch. To get a fresh Filet-O-Fish sandwich every time, you have to specifically request that the fish be fried to order.

Most of us usually don't complain when we get the order too fast, though. It's when minutes start passing by that we get antsy; in a quick-serve setting, a 15-minute wait can feel like forever. The first reason why your Filet-O-Fish might be late is simply that the employees are swamped. If the restaurant is crowded and there are long lines in the drive-thru, there's probably a rush of orders they're trying to get through. Another reason is order customizations. There are at least 10 delicious ways to customize McDonald's Filet-O-Fish, but do know that any deviation from the standard menu adds extra time to the clock.