And so we shouldn’t even be slightly surprised by the last riff on the format, which is a whole value of breakfast ingredients coated not only in a tortilla, but also a mummy-style envelope of … wait … the asiago cheese with crusty bagel dough. Einstein Bros. Bagels, the geniuses of this innovation, have dubbed the concoction the “Bagelrito”.
There are many reasons you might initially suspect that you will not like Bagelrito. His name, reminiscent of delusional Cronuts, may sound cute. And let’s put that aside: bagel purists – those scolders who consider all flavors except plain poppy seeds and perhaps pumpernickel as abominations – will never, never accept it.
[We tried Pizza Hut’s mozzarella popper crust pizza and contemplated how we ended up here]
More alarmingly, when you first encounter this pastry crust unit, your initial reaction could be one of sheer intimidation. Mine certainly was. Because it’s GREAT. As in, it weighs three-quarters of a pound and is about the size of a brick. We are talking about 930 calories in weight.
But like the muscular guy with a heart of gold (in the film version, he will be played by Jason Momoa), it’s what’s inside that makes this breakfast dish something that you will welcome. morning, even if you want serious food. The stuffing is an amalgam of hash browns, two eggs, bacon, turkey sausage, salsa, green peppers and three kinds of cheese.
When I finally worked the pellet to dig, the big surprise was the pleasant warmth that the peppers and salsa bring – we’re talking about a real fire here, which is not something you often find in fast food. The bacon was not crispy, but it was smoked and the combination evoked a fleshy and tasty western omelet. Another remarkable feature was its compact shape, which allows eating without utensils – Einstein’s slogan, “big, bold and easy to hold” is not a lie.
The only problem I had with him – apart from the fact that it was four times larger than what I needed – was that the outside of the bagel, which seemed to have merged with the tortilla film on the outside. inside was pretty hard. (Come to think of it, this layering could mean that the Bagelrito falls into the category of turducken-style concoction rather than real mash-up, but I digress.) The texture could have been particularly tough because i bought my Bagelrito late in the day, and probably the whole thing had been sitting in a warming drawer behind the counter for a while. A fresher specimen could have been more tender.
So instead of seeing the Bagelrito as just another eye-catching puzzle, maybe we should be looking beyond its nickname and towering dimensions. If you really think about it, there is even a certain beauty in this chimera. Symbolically, it represents the fusion of disparate food cultures into a delicious whole. The bagel, if associated with urban New York deli meats, meets the burrito breakfast, the child of southwestern cuisine. And it apparently draws fans – the company tested it in Denver, where it sold in its infancy.
In other words, when it comes to bastard burritos, they are not all bad apples.
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