Avoid Ordering This Bland Panera Bread Sandwich No Matter How Hungry You Are

When hunger strikes, anything you eat to soothe your growling stomach tastes amazing. With one specific Panera Bread sandwich though, even hunger can't mask the disappointment that travels from tastebuds to gut. With its humble origins in St. Louis, Missouri, Panera Bread has expanded across the nation and is all about clean and freshly prepared food that changes the way we think about comfort food. While there are a few secrets worth knowing about Panera Bread, one widely accepted truth is that the chain offers an abundance of sandwiches for all types of sandwich and bread lovers. When Chowhound tried out and ranked the best and worst of Panera sandwiches, the Toasted Garden Caprese was the one that landed in last place.

Caprese flavors are loud, zesty, and very hard to put down. This is not the experience after your first bite of Panera's Toasted Garden Caprese. With ingredients like basil, melted mozzarella, vine-ripened tomatoes, arugula, garlic aioli, and a balsamic vinaigrette, it seems like a winning sandwich that lovers of classic Italian food would drool over. However, Panera Bread's Toasted Garden Caprese is the plainest sandwich on the menu and it's confusing given the reputation of Caprese sandwiches in all of their flavorful, chewy, and crispy goodness. The sandwich looks and tastes more like a salad hastily thrown on bread than an intricately, well-combined one. The rankings were based on a taste test and this sandwich just couldn't hold its own.

Unfortunately, the Toasted Garden Caprese at Panera Bread has a few problem areas that make it worth avoiding altogether. Not only does the flavor fall flat, but some find the sandwich to be disappointing just from the visuals alone. Those who value a sandwich that is easy on the eye will notice that the Toasted Garden Caprese doesn't resemble the image advertised. Whether the local store is out of ingredients or Panera Bread overestimated what the real sandwich will look like after wilted lettuce and splodgy melted cheese steals the show, the reviews mention how dissimilar the sandwich looks from the menu's depiction, and while the ingredient list looks promising, it's very hard to keep rooting for the catfish of the Panera Bread sandwich offerings.

Another thing this sandwich gets wrong is balancing the doughiness of the sandwich with the filling. While the bread can absolutely make or break a sandwich, and ciabatta bread is among the choicest of breads you could ask for in a sandwich, the proportion of bread to filling is way off, even for carb-loving sandwich eaters. Unlike The Turkey Bacon Bravo which came with a whole lot of filling, the scanty amount of insides in the Toasted Garden Caprese lost it some marks. The filling itself has also ruffled some feathers online with customers complaining that the quality of the ingredients like the tomatoes and lettuce (which isn't officially listed in the ingredients list but is sometimes added to some orders) are not up to scratch and don't do justice to the sandwich. If you want a full-flavored and impressive Panera Bread sandwich to chomp on, the Toasted Garden Caprese might not be the one for you.