Review: Wendy's - Breakfast Baconator

Wendy's Breakfast Baconator features the chain's brioche bun loaded with a sausage patty, six slices of bacon, a fried egg, two slices of American cheese, and a Swiss cheese sauce.

I got the sandwich by itself for $4.39.

The Breakfast Baconator is the only sandwich in the new breakfast line to use Wendy's preexisting brioche buns. These are the same buns as you'd find on their premium burgers, i.e. anything that's not a Jr. burger. The bun is lightly sweet with a dense enough crumb to avoid being completely squished down during eating.

Wendy's sausage patty is heavily seasoned with black pepper and has a strong, meaty flavor without ever tasting too fatty. It's aromatic and actually spicy with the amount of black pepper used, which is a nice welcome in terms of fast food sausage and gives it a different flavor profile. The texture is fine ground but dense.

True to its name, there is plenty of bacon to go around on the Breakfast Baconator. Wendy's has some of the best bacon in the fast food market, in my opinion, and it did not disappoint. The bacon was fairly thick and had a nice, hearty crisp to it. It was smoky and salty, as all good bacon should be.

That being said, I don't think it played well with all of the other sandwich components. Because both the bacon and sausage are such heavily seasoned meats, they competed with each other and neither one stood out in the sandwich. I found the sausage and bacon together to be kind of underwhelming yet simultaneously overwhelming for everything else.

The fried egg appears to be cooked fresh to order and features some of that browning and crisp texture. It was cooked all the way through and fairly thin. Between the sausage and all that bacon, however, I couldn't really taste it at all.

Having two slices of American cheese didn't really seem to do much for the Breakfast Baconator in terms of taste. American cheese is fairly mild and provided a creamy component to the sandwich. It felt like the cheese was mostly there to hold everything together.

The Swiss cheese sauce is the same as you'd find on Wendy's bacon or sausage croissant sandwiches (review of the Sausage, Egg, and Swiss Croissant here). Unfortunately, I could barely taste the Swiss cheese sauce in the Breakfast Baconator because of all the strong flavors and it mostly only added additional creaminess. I missed the Swiss flavor and light tang completely.

Taken together, Wendy's Breakfast Baconator is a lot. While I love both Wendy's bacon and their new sausage patty, the combination made it hard to enjoy just how good these two meats are on their own. They also completely overwhelmed the taste of everything else on the sandwich. I ended up splitting my Breakfast Baconator into separate halves and enjoyed it much more that way as a pseudo bacon and egg sandwich and a sausage sandwich.

I think that the Breakfast Baconator would have actually been much better with a burger patty instead of the sausage, as beef patties tend to have a more neutral seasoning that would allow the bacon to shine. And who doesn't love an egg on their burger? (Ed. note - They did do a breakfast burger during the early 2010s as part of one of a number of breakfast tests they've run--it was called the "Sunny Side Burger.")

Nutritional Info - Wendy's Breakfast Baconator
Calories - 730 (from Fat - 450)
Fat - 50g (Saturated Fat - 19g)
Sodium - 1750mg
Carbs - 36g (Sugar - 7g)
Protein - 34g

By Renee.