Ranking Every Panera Bagel from Worst to First
Every so often, a perfect convergence of events happens for each of us — you find a twenty-dollar bill on the ground on your way home from a basketball game that your team won, you avoid a car accident while you’re scratching a lottery ticket behind the steering wheel, and it’s a winner.
For me, this phenomenon recently occurred in the form of checking my rarely-reviewed spam-collector email account on New Year’s Day, and finding a message from Panera Bread, whose rewards program I signed up for some years ago because I’m a corporate robot lacking autonomy. Panera wanted me to know that I’d been gifted a January’s worth of free bagels for my loyalty. I hadn’t been to Panera in the prior 2 or 3 years, but there happened to be a location about two blocks from my apartment, so I figured I’d revisit one of America’s premier bread and bread-related product establishments.
The interior didn’t really smell fresh, but it did smell like bread. We’ve had a cold and snowy winter in Chicago, making the floor look like a snowman had been mauled in the entry lobby, black nylon partitions for the line taking the place of neon caution tape. But the desk staff was friendly, and forced me to feign shock that I’d been rewarded with the honor of a free bread disk when they swiped my loyalty card. I also conveniently disregarded ordering the decidedly not free cream cheese spread. I took a chocolate chip bagel home, and ate it with butter that morning, and later in the month I bought a small tub of cream cheese to keep in the fridge.
The next day, I was walking by Panera again and decided to stop in. though I wasn’t really hungy. I stood in the same line, deciding among the various flavors — I had my old go-tos available to me, of course: Chocolate Chip, Cinnamon Crunch, or Asiago Cheese, from when Mom would order a dozen bagels for the family. But there was also a selection of more…exotic flavors, and in a moment of reckless abandon, I ordered a Cranberry Walnut bagel.
Again, I wasn’t hungry at the moment, so I took the bagel home and put it in the freezer. It was at that moment that I had an epiphany — I should try one of each kind of bagel with my newfound deep pockets, and create the definitive guide to which Panera bagels are the best and worst.
It wasn’t easy: I estimate that I ate more bagels in the month of January, 2018, than I did in the past 3 years. Not donuts (doughnuts?), which are just better bagels, mind you, and I rarely go out of my way to just grab a bagel.
Partway through my bagel tour, Panera caught on to me, heaping additional pressure on my efforts. They sent me an email taunting me, as if they were challenging both my willingness to complete my project, and my shame in going to the same Panera every day to claim my birthright. And so beyond the sheer bagel volume, I had to make frequent adjustments in time of day, apparel, and whether I wore glasses or not, so that I wouldn’t die of embarrassment in being called out on my daily bagel runs by an 18-year-old part-time baker.
There were some tough calls in this list, but I stand by my opinions.
11. Whole Grain (worst)
The only redeeming thing about the Whole Grain bagel is the notion that you’ll walk away with a healthier gullet than having eaten one of the other bagels, which are apparently part-grain. I don’t know if that means gluten-free, but it’s only safe to assume that it isn’t, since they’d inevitably plaster it all over their menus and advertising if it were. It looks burnt, and its chew is on par with premium brands of beef jerky — it’s somewhat easy to get down, but one can’t help but be disturbed when a bagel has the consistency of old meat.
It doesn’t taste any better than it looks, unfortunately, and that’s a low bar. If the grass you ate as a child was put into a ring form, baked, and served as “healthy,” you’d have an approximation of the Whole Grain bagel. Grass might be a whole grain, actually. Beyond the taste, which completely lacks any nuance, there are plenty of oats to get stuck between your teeth. If you order this one on-the-go, please bring floss. I don’t know which grains they are, but they’re apparently doing well enough that Panera can sell these seed traps without fear that your consumption will spoil the crop. 1/10 for the health factor, only SJWs would eat this.
10. Sesame
What if we took the only part of a cheeseburger that people don’t care about, and put it on a bagel, which is the type of bread least-conducive to sandwich-eating: the ingredients naturally slide out from between the halves, and the circle is just begging for contents to seep through. I may be old-fashioned, but I need full-circle coverage of mayonnaise, and you’re just not doing it for me, bagel as sandwich bread.
So that begs the question: who are you attempting to please with this type of bagel, Panera? Seeing as we’re inundated on a daily basis with instructions to eat things like kale, wheatgrass, and acai to be healthy, I would’ve noticed by now if sesame seeds were the key to the fountain of youth. Even if they were, putting them on a bagel is a bit like lipstick on a pig, you’re not masking the carbs and gluten. And they don’t taste like anything.
So…is it texture? I would hate to be so unenthusiastic about life that the prospect of seeds mixing with my essentially, bread, made me excited. 1.5/10, no redeeming qualities other than relieving hunger.
9. Plain
It was tough to decide, between the Sesame and Plain bagels, which was more lacking in merit, but the absence of pretension from the bland bandit wins out for this eater.
The only things to really complain about regarding this bagel have more to do with the nature of bagels as an inferior type of bread than anything specific to its features. Uncooked, bagels are chewy and generally tougher than the materials within, again making them a poor sandwich holster. Cooked — well — I challenge you to find the toaster that can evenly heat a bagel and avoid burning it.
All-in-all, the only satisfying way to consume the Plain bagel was to top each half, toasted, with peanut butter and jelly, which masked the flavor of the burnt portion that had faced downward in my toaster. So that’s how I had it. Normal toast would have been as satisfying, if not better, as the crsipness of the bagel frequently turned it upward, towards my nose. My mustache smelled like peanut butter all morning, 2/10.
8. Cinnamon Swirl & Raisin
Oatmeal raisin cookies were a staple of all our childhoods, in that reaching into a pile of cookies, thinking you’d gotten a chocolate chip one and taking a bite, only to realize that it was an oatmeal raisin cookie, could be worse than stepping barefoot on a Lego, and that kind of thing sticks with you.
The Cinnamon Swirl and Raisin bagel is a similar kind of Siren’s song, in that you might think you’re grabbing one of the (upcoming on this list) Chocolate Chip bagels your coworker included in the bagel box she brought into work this morning, only to get a closer look and have to contemplate whether the other people in the break room will judge you if you put it back. On the other hand, if you’re a big fan of bagels anyways, you might just be the kind of sick person who likes the oatmeal raisin cookies. Either way, you’re taking the guts of the oatmeal raisin cookie, and surrounding it with a starch that’s objectively inferior.
To be fair, this bagel has an actual flavor, which places it in a tier higher than the previous entries on this list, even if it’s an objectively lame flavor. Spreading some cream cheese on this bad boy might give you the illusion that you’re eating something healthy (even though you’re not) so for that, it gets a 3/10.
7. Cranberry & Walnut
Despite the relatively low ranking on this list, I was pleasantly surprised by this bagel. Walnuts are kind of good, in an 18th-century prarie holiday treat sort of way, and, well, cranberries are also there. The semi-sweet bagel tastes somewhat similar to our prior entry, and the added texture and crunch of the walnuts gives it a leg up. As I’ve stated before, though, if you’re going for something healthy, I question why you’re eating a bagel in the first place.
Outside of the texture, which, as you’ll see down the line, can be improved, I don’t know why someone not on a similar bagel romp-about would go for this one. It’s like the tacky mall jewelry of bagels: looks kind of nice, but leaves a weird smell when you wear it on your finger. This bagel wasn’t bad, but there wasn’t much good about it either, 4/10.
6. Blueberry
In a throwback to the Cinnamon Swirl & Raisin, imagine taking what’s good about a blueberry muffin and surrounding it with something worse. You’ve been a fan of the sweet and subtle sour punch that the blueberries drop into a muffin surrounded by flaky, soft, melt-in-your-mouth fluff. Now imagine that fluff sat out in the sun for 5 hours, and you’re getting close to what the blueberry bagel elicits. That said, I’m a huge blueberry guy, and the pungent sweetness mixes well with some mellow cream cheese, which is weird, because I’d never think of putting cream cheese on a blueberry muffin, but perhaps I should.
But let’s say you’re a cheery person who happens to walk into Panera Bread out of intrigue, and not because of some weird tour-de-bagel like this writer — and something with blueberries sounds good to you. Guess what, they have blueberry muffins! If the muffin sounds a bit too indulgent on face, I’m going to assert that they are probably within 100 calories of each other, without actually verifying that. Just believe me. Nonetheless, because this is a pretty nice option if for some weird reason you have to get a bagel, it deserves a 5.5/10.
5. French Toast
This bagel goes a long way towards giving its purchaser a simple, light cinnamon flavor, pairing it well with cream cheese, and in addition-by-subtraction brilliance, greatly improving on the Cinnamon Swirl & Raisin. Nothing pretentious here, it’s pretty conservative in terms of texture, taste, and messiness, made for people who want a little treat, if you can call a bagel that, but aren’t looking to go hog wild. For those reasons, it middles out for this bagel-connissuer, as I’m a man of extreme flavor, like my idol Guy Fieri. This bagel won’t take you to Flavor Town, but that’s okay, not everyone wants to go there — some people prefer to eat their bagel and move on with their lives, 6/10.
4. Everything
I’ve stated it before: bagels aren’t good for making sandwiches, but the Everything bagel is the closest to breaking into that territory. Why? Because this bagel actually does a pretty good job of injecting intersting flavors into my turkey and cheese combination, namely the onion and garlic bits. Maybe it’s just the poppy seeds getting me high, but I kind of enjoy this bagel as sandwich bookends, and I can also see it working with roast beef or chicken salad in the middle. Sure, it still retains the fatal flaw of actively pushing out all of the sandwich igredients, and the bits baked onto the bagel get freakin’ everywhere, but I don’t mind a messy sandwich every now and again if it tastes good. And yes, there are sesame seeds on this bagel, but they fly under the radar compared to the other toppings. Pro-tip: put down a paper towel while you’re eating, and you can ensure easy cleaning for up to 8% of the residue! This might come in higher for me than the average bagel-eater, but because I so appreciate a tasty sandwich, I’m inclined to give the Everything bagel a 6.75/10.
3. Cinnamon Crunch
In what was no surprise to me, since I know I have good taste, my top three bagels were the same three I remembered from childhood. The Cinnamon Crunch is essentially French Toast on steroids. Where French Toast sprinkles in a bit of cinnamon to swirl among your bread, Cinnamon Crunch loads it into a t-shirt cannon and blasts you with it. Pockets of cinnamon and sugar bombs dot the interior of the bagel like a minefield, each one exploding in your mouth, and the lack of subtlety increases a rush to sate your sugar addiction. Then there’s the texture, as the entire outside of the bagel is shellacked in a cinnamon-sugar gloss, culminating in a top half that’s a landscape of cinnamon and sugar mountains and hills, baked on in abstract forms like the work of a modernist painter wishing to create visuals out of paint layers. So, as alluded to in describing the Cranberry Walnut, this bagel easily dominates the texture category. No two bites are the same.
The most impressive element of this bagel is that it can largely stand on its own merits, no accoutrements needed. But you’re eating a bagel anyhow, so why not spread on some butter like I did? The dairy fats bring out the richness. This is a bagel I would actually crave from time to time, 7/10.
2. Asiago Cheese
I thought I’d found the ultimate sandwich bagel in the Everything, but I’m always willing to be proven wrong. And with the Asiago Cheese bagel, I was. To be upfront, I’m not sure that I would enjoy this when consumed as a standalone bagel, just because I can’t envision butter or cream cheese as condiments that mesh well with the flavor. But with some of the leftover chicken salad that I had in my fridge? Exquisite flavor combo. I decided to also throw some spinach on, which highlighted the ultimate sandwich feature of this bagel in the style that Panera makes it: there’s usually no hole in the middle! Ingredients do get squished out from the sides a bit, but the interior integrity makes a world of difference.
There’s nothing sweet about this bagel, unlike most others on this list, and the cheese baked into the top gives it a genuinely great complement to a lot of sandwich meats. Call me be crazy, but I think this might even be good as an alternate burger bun. For overall sandwich-facilitating superiority, this gets a 7.5/10.
1. Chocolate Chip
Look, when God made the first cookie, which was obviously chocolate chip, she didn’t screw up. Nothing fancy about this one, Panera just realized that no one’s ever going to improve upon the best ingredient to pair with any type of dough, and didn’t attempt to reinvent the wheel. Chocolate chips embedded throughout the bagel melt just enough when this thing is toasted, and sliding a little butter or cream cheese onto the surface makes the ideal way to consume a bagel. Again, we’re being honest here — you can always just get a chocolate chip cookie at Panera, and you probably should — but if for some reason you’re deadset on bagels, or have some kind of deal-of-the-century appear in your inbox, this is the one. As good as it gets, and it’s on the verge of being pretty good.
I was on the verge of scoring this an 8, but after this entire experiment, I’m convinced that no bagel honestly deserves to be ranked that high. 7.9/10.
Conclusion
Bagels are an okay food, but largely not worth the effort of going to get one. The best approach to these dough circles is to hope that a coworker brings a box of them, and enjoy having free food in the office on a bi-monthly basis. Any more frequency, and you’re liable to be disappointed.
