Taco Bell’s Breakfast Menu: Make a Run from the Border

Dear reader, I have desecrated my tongue.

Our morning was kind of strange on Saturday. We had planned to go out to breakfast with my mom, but her truck wasn’t starting, so it wasn’t clear when we’d be eating breakfast. Since we’d been planning on going out, I didn’t really have any good breakfast options in the house. And then Arne held a picture in front of my nose of a silly – and yet oddly appealing – photo of a little waffle wrapped around eggs and bacon. And then a burrito stuffed with sausage and a whole patty-style hash brown.Breakfast at Taco Bell. Why not?

I’m here to tell you why not. Though actually, I suspect you know perfectly well why not. And honestly, we knew why not as well. We approach our nearby TacoBell/KFC as a sort of theme park of truly awful food, and like to visit when “Yum! Brands” comes up with something spectacular, like KFC’s infamous “Double Down” (which actually wasn’t too bad, and the furor over the health implications seemed silly to me – I mean, is two fried boneless chicken breasts with cheese and bacon that much worse than a meal of three pieces of fried chicken and French fries, which they’ve sold for years?).

We arrived at 9:45 to a perfectly empty restaurant and placed our order: one A.M. Sausage Crunch Wrap and one Bacon Waffle Taco. And, of course, since it was breakfast, one plastic bottle of terrible orange juice. We slid into a bright-red leatherette booth and waited a few minutes. Though we’d answered “dine in” when asked, our food arrived cradled in a plastic bag, ready for us to flee – presumably so we could avoid having anyone see us there. “Oh, wait,” said the counter boy. “Would you like syrup?” Sure. I took the little plastic syrup box. “And breakfast sauce?” I hesitated, then received the two little packets he handed me.

The contents of the bag, a box and a paper pouch, smelled fairly inviting, and looked tasty enough. Arne went first. The little waffle taco was dwarfed in his fingers. He poured the provided syrup on and took a bite. And then the strangest expression slid onto his face. Disgust? Confusion? Both. Mixed, I think, with a sort of delighted hilarity.

“You are the Unfussy Epicure,” he said in mock-serious tones. “And in the vein of the argument that you can’t understand joy without sadness, maybe you also can’t understand deliciousness without… not-deliciousness.”

Perhaps that was meant as encouragement. No matter what came next, this was professional enrichment of a sort. I slipped my Crunch Wrap from its wax-paper pouch as Arne took another bite of his taco and his face tried to decide what expression to assume. The wrap looked very… processed, with its petal-like tortilla origami and just a little cheese poking out. I braced myself and took a bite.

I suspect my face also went through an interesting variety of expressions as I processed what was going on in my mouth, Arne watching expectantly. I swallowed and said hesitantly, “It doesn’t… taste.”

Arne waited patiently for me to finish my thought. “No, I mean it,” I said. “It doesn’t taste like anything. Maybe they forgot the flavor pack.” Arne laughed, but I don’t know, maybe they did forget the flavor pack. Would you be surprised to learn that they process all the flavor out and then put it back, like I hear they do with “never frozen, not-from-concentrate” orange juice? Because I sure wouldn’t.

I took a bite of the hash brown alone. It tasted like a fast-food hash brown, which I kind of like, even if the flavor is mostly that of hot oil. I confess to a craving for McDonald’s for breakfast every now and then; I always order a hash brown with my sausage biscuit. But it’s a mild flavor, never meant to stand up to a swaddling of flavor-free tortilla and egg. Then I tasted the sausage. I am sad to say, dear reader, that Taco Bell’s sausage tastes like nothing so much as… nothing.

I think it was at this point that I burst out laughing. The laughter got a little hysterical, but I didn’t mind, because there was no one there to see me. The counter staff had vanished, and not a soul had entered or exited the franchise. Eventually, I sobered. “Seriously, they must have forgotten the flavor pack.”

Desperate, I tore open a packet of “breakfast sauce.” What the heck, it’s not like it could hurt. On my next bite I understood: They created a special “breakfast sauce” so as not to interfere with the perfect flavorlessness of the Crunch Wrap.

I gently freed the hash brown from its bland prison. Crunchy. Which was all I was promised, after all. It wasn’t a very satisfying breakfast, but it stayed with me… that is, when we got home, Arne and I both realized we still had a sort of oil slick on our tongues. “Yum! Brands,” indeed.