Dunkin Donuts Big n Toasty

Photo by Dunkin' Donuts

Even though Dunkin' Donuts shops are all over the place (there are four of them in my hometown alone, for example) it might be a little hard for you to find their new Big N' Toasty breakfast sandwich. When I walked into the Dunkies around the corner from my house this morning at 7:00 to order one, the pleasant young lady behind the counter said, "You're just in time - we're just about sold out, and our delivery hasn't gotten here yet."  Apparently, Big N' Toasties are hugely popular, with many DD locations running out of them long before the morning rush is over. Looking at DD's promotional photo, it's easy to see why the sandwich is making such a splash - the A La Carte blog at CTnow.com remarked that with it's big golden slices of Texas Toast and stylized arrangement of bacon and cheese, the Big N' Toasty looked more like an offering from the Sonic menu than something available at Dunkies (home of the flavorless and remarkably unsatisfying egg-white flatbread sandwiches.)

That the actual sandwich doesn't quite live up to the gorgeously styled publicity shots isn't a big surprise - the meme of "fast food not looking like the ads" has been done to death and it's not even blogworthy anymore - but for all the petty differences, this is actually a fairly hearty but not at all overwhelming breakfast. Two small eggs over hard, four short strips of decent bacon, a slice of standard-issue Fast Food Orange Cheese and, of course, two thick slices of Texas Toast. If I were to have a quibble at all, it would be about the size of the "four strips" of bacon, which are really more like two strips cut in half.

Seriously, the promos and the media hype around the Big N' Toasty made me anticipate a sandwich so big that I thought I might be better off sharing it with someone. But the actual sandwich isn't anywhere near the massive OMG BREAKFAST FEAST I was led to expect. Rather, it was much more an appropriately-sized brekkie which is approximately the same size as one I'd be likely to eat on a weekend morning (egg, toast, couple strips of bacon.)  The difference here is that the toast is somewhat thicker and the eggs somewhat smaller than what I'd make at home.

No, really, the eggs are small. Look how thin they are, stacked on one another in this cross section.  Even the yolks are thin.  You know what?  With their perfectly-circlular eggs featuring perfectly-centered yolks and perfectly uniform thickness, it would not surprise me one bit if Dunkie's isn't using real cracked-from-the-shell eggs at all, but a factory-extruded egg product, pre-cooked in cylinders and then cut into uniform slices for reheating at point of sale. No shit, that is an actual food service item.  Why has no one else noticed this?? And as long as I'm asking rhetorical questions:  How is Dunkin' Donuts managing to fit 580 calories into this sandwich?

So, bottom line:  Weird eggs notwithstanding, a decent breakfast at a fair price, and it held me over well until lunch. Dunkin' Donuts might be onto something here.