Wednesday June 23, 2004

Bad Taste In My Mouth

My wife and I have breakfast almost every morning at Panera Bread. We order the same thing every time: chocolate chip muffie (muffin top) and a medium iced tea for her, a nine grain bagel with peanut butter and a medium coffee for me. $4.48 every time. We don't even have to say anything; they know us so well, we get spotted in line, somebody's running for the peanut butter.

I get the nine grain bagel, not because I particularly like roughage, but because it's (ostensibly) better for me than some of their other varieties. And if you've ever had some of their other varieties, you'll understand why. Check out the ingredients of the cinnamon crunch bagel: "Cinnamon and vanilla chips flavor this dough and a generous mixture of cinnamon and sugar on top creates a sweet, crunchy shell." Kind of like breakfast and dessert all in one. Or one of their new flavors, passion fruit: "Our base bagel dough flavored with brown sugar, vanilla and passion fruit chips." Tastes like a marshmallow. (I love marshmallows. :)

Of course, you pay the price for this much fun at breakfast. The cinnamon crunch bagel weighs in with 78 grams of total carbs, just 3 grams of fiber. (Plus 30 grams of sugar, thanks to the "sweet, crunchy shell" -- that's about two teaspoons.) The problem is, even their nine-grain bagel packs a carbohydrate punch: 58 grams, and still just 3 grams of fiber. So imagine my delight when they introduced, last week, a new "lower-carb plain bagel". Look at the stats on this thing: total carbs are down to 25 grams, and this mother packs a whopping 12 grams of fiber. It could give Drano a run for its money in terms of cleaning out the old pipes.

The problem is... it tastes bad. It goes beyond not tasting like anything: it's actually bad. Scotch lovers will be familiar with the term "mouth feel". (Maybe you wine drinkers use it too.) This is a bagel with mouth feel. Bad mouth feel. First you feel air, and lots of it. You pick the thing up, it doesn't feel like you're holding a bagel... on earth. It's more like holding a bagel on the moon. Then you take a bite, and -- even slathered in peanut butter -- you taste... something. Something bad. Something like wallboard, shredded into little tiny pieces, glued together (with lots of air mixed in) and made up to look like a bagel. But it's really not. No bagel could taste like this. And it lingers. An hour later, I'm still tasting it, and it makes me shudder.

When I ordered it this morning for the second time (can you imagine all this psychic damage after only two tries?), the lady behind the counter asked if I wanted it toasted. "Sure," I said. "And if there's anything else you can do to it..."

She smiled.

I must not be the only one.

(2004-06-23 06:41:01.0) Permalink