The Chick-Fil-A Breakfast Menu Item You're Better Off Making At Home

Ordering breakfast from a fast food chain may be a hurried affair, but that doesn't mean customers should make do with poor quality menu items. Seeing as most breakfast sammies are a simple assembly job, the core ingredients stuffed inside an airy English muffin or a buttery, flaky biscuit should be faultless to warrant the extra spend. Otherwise, you may as well prepare it yourself. That said, many eateries fail at the job and flunk out at making even the most basic components of a cooked breakfast. For instance, the breakfast item from Chick-fil-A that you're better off making at home is bacon.

One of the four Chick-fil-A menu items we'd recommend you skip. The chicken chain's bacon had a weird texture. First off, it was super hard but not crispy, which made it challenging to munch on. And secondly, the texture was so overcooked that it reminded us of the consistency of Laffy Taffy. The flavor itself was bland and lacked the smoky and umami character of cooked bacon, which was strange because we had earlier enjoyed it in the bacon, egg, and cheese muffin. The bottom line? You'd be better off frying a few rashers of bacon in the comfort of your own home than spend money on Chick-fil-A's offering. That way, you can cook your protein to your liking and take advantage of all the delicious ways to use up leftover bacon grease, too (we recommend adding it to biscuits or a traditional batch of cornbread).

On a Reddit thread discussing which brand of bacon Chick-fil-A uses, one unhappy commenter said the bacon is "revolting and taste[s] like hotdogs," while others said it tastes like plastic or is too fatty. Meanwhile, another Redditor offered some behind-the-scenes insight and revealed that the chain uses Hormel precooked bacon. This variety of the pork product can be eaten straight from the packet or heated through at speed for hot breakfast sandwiches. 

A follow-up commenter explained that bacon rashers at Chick-fil-A are cooked for up to ten minutes in the oven, but added that some branches use a grill instead, which may account for changes in taste and texture across the restaurants. However, this doesn't explain why we found the meat in the bacon, egg, and cheese muffin to be tastier than the standalone bacon, as we ordered everything from the same location in Vineland, New Jersey, which presumably cooks its products in the same way.

The other breakfast items we'd skip at Chick-fil-A include the hash scramble bowl with grilled chicken, the egg white grill, and the hash brown scramble burrito. Go for the chicken biscuit with a side of crispy hash browns instead.