Panera Bread now lets you order a breakfast sandwich served on a cinnamon roll. It’s called a CinnaScramble, and it’s an egg-and-cheese on insanity.
It’s spiraled bread heresy that tears down the glutenous fabric of reality that surrounds breakfast. It’s a marketing trap designed to fool casual customers who don’t visit very often into thinking “Oh, that’s different and weird. I want to try it.”
Only a complete sucker would buy one.
So I bought one, planning on having some fun with a novel breakfast item.
However, like all fun ideas, this fell apart shortly (literally) after I came face-to-pastry with reality.
It turns out that a cinnamon roll is a terrible vessel for a breakfast sandwich.
I ate it so you don’t have to: The Panera Bread CinnaScramble | Review
Breakfast is weird. There are these bizarre, arbitrary lines that separate acceptable foods from nonsense.
A chocolate chip muffin? That’s a perfectly acceptable breakfast. A chocolate cupcake? That’s maniac behavior.
Cake for breakfast? What are you, a child? Oh, you’re pouring cake batter onto a griddle, frying it and covering it in sugar syrup? Why that’s a classic American breakfast right there.
It also works with sandwiches. A ham-and-cheese sandwich is clearly a lunch item. But if you add scrambled egg to it, the police will come and find you if they hear you eat one after 11 a.m.
An egg-and-cheese sandwich is acceptable on lots of things: bread, croissants, English muffins. But bagels begin to tread into weird territory.
If you go into Panera and order a breakfast sandwich on a plain bagel, that’s fine. Asiago cheese? That works, too. A French toast bagel or cinnamon crunch bagel? That’s weird. But you can still get away with it.
But what about a cinnamon roll, which has basically the same ingredients?
That’s straight to breakfast jail, right next to the people who pour the milk into the bowl before the cereal.
What does it taste like?
The CinnaScramble tastes like an egg-and-cheese breakfast sandwich on cinnamon toast.
It’s kind of good, in the way that it’s fun to get some maple syrup mixed in with your eggs when eating a full breakfast.
The mix of flavors is a bit jarring. The egg-and-cheese combo simply exists on a different wavelength than the cinnamon roll. It’s like listening to a death metal album and the “Hamilton” soundtrack at the same time.
Sure, the combination is novel. But you’re going to have a better time if you consume them separately.
So is it any good?
Not really. The cinnamon roll is pretty light, flaky and tasty. That first bite you take is pretty fun.
But that first bite also messes with the structural integrity of the roll. Once you start eating it, the roll quickly unravels and breaks down into flaky pastry shards.
All you’re left with is errant bits of cinnamon shrapnel and the knowledge that you probably should have just gotten a bagel.
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“I ate it so you don’t have to” is a regular food column about off-beat eats, both good and bad. I picked the name years ago and now we’re sort of stuck with it.
You can send any praise/food suggestions to nomalley@masslive.com. Please send all criticisms and breakfast sandwich opinions to cmckenna@masslive.com. You can check out the rest of the series here.
