Doughnuts are great. Bacon is great. Eggs are great. What do you get when you put them all together? The Dunkin Donuts Glazed Donut Breakfast Sandwich, pictured above and now forever burned into your mind. What’s seen cannot be unseen. That sandwich is a real thing being sold out of Dunkin Donuts across America.
But why? Flavorwise, the concept isn’t brain surgery: Put a bunch of salty, sweet, crispy, gooey things together and go nuts. Heck, I’d eat it, even if it has been described as tasting like “regret.” The question isn’t really what it tastes like, but whether all that sugar, fat, carbs, oil, god-knows-what is basically a heart attack in a glazed breakfast sandwich.
Dunkin Donuts isn’t the first company to release a terrifyingly bad-for-you menu item. KFC famously put out the Double Down — a bacon, grilled-cheese sandwich with two pieces of fried chicken in place of bread — or Denny’s Fried Cheese Melt — a grilled cheese sandwich made with melted American cheese and four deep fried Mozzarella sticks.
As improbable as it sounds, whole careers have been created around folks making the meatiest salt-and-fried bombs imaginable. Epic Meal Time started out as a couple friends trying to make (and then eat) ridiculous (re: epic) meals including the Fast Food Meatloaf, the Super Swine Submarine Sandwich, and the Turbanconepicentipede, which you really shouldn’t even look up. Their most recent videos get more than a million views on average.
The allure of these creations is a mix of horrid fascination and primal (usually male) feats of strength. Much like an eating competition, we’re curious to see if someone can actually stomach that much food (or that many calories) without exploding. The scary thing is that Dunkin Donuts’ Glazed Donut Breakfast Sandwich isn’t even the highest-calorie breakfast sandwich on the menu.
At 360 calories, the sandwich ranks behind every other sandwich on the menu except for two. The bacon egg and cheese on bagel, for example, is 460 calories, while the sausage egg and cheese on a croissant is a whopping 620 calories. Calorie counts don’t tell the whole story but the donut sandwich still beats Dunkin Donuts’ other options in saturated fat and sodium by half.
Why are we shocked by a donut sandwich but not by the day-to-day offerings? Let us know in the comments, does a donut for breakfast sound like a good idea?
