The Worst Taco Bell Breakfast Item Didn't Inspire Our Appetite At All
On busy mornings, fast food breakfast is a blessing. Nowadays, most of your favorite spots are opening early, churning out hot coffee and egg sandwiches. Even Taco Bell has joined in on the to-go breakfast fad, and the chain serves some of the highest-protein fast food breakfasts. On theme with the rest of its Mexican-inspired menu, Taco Bell offers a slew of breakfast burritos and quesadillas for breakfast, plus egg-stuffed Crunchwraps and hash browns on the side.
We decided to taste and compile a ranking of 14 Taco Bell breakfast items. Those that earned our praise were fresh, heartily satisfying, and packed with flavor. And those that neared the bottom of our ranking felt less-than-fresh and left a lot to be desired in the flavor department. But the item that landed in dead last might surprise you: the hash brown. When we ordered it and noticed it looked similar to McDonald's hash browns (which are notoriously delicious), we had high hopes. Unfortunately, the taste did not live up to the image, and thus, it ended up at the very bottom of the list.
Why Taco Bell's hash brown was a crispy catastrophe
Hash browns aren't the easiest to get right. There's a fine line between being ideally crispy and overly crunchy and dry. Of course, an overly soggy hash brown isn't ideal, either. At Taco Bell, we found the hash browns to be suffering from the former: overly crispy to the point of near staleness. Despite potato being its main ingredient, we somehow found it lacking in potato flavor. The hash brown was dry and overly crisp in a too-well-done way, with each bite feeling akin to a flavorless potato chip.
To be fair, other reviews gush over how tasty these are, so there's a chance we just got a bad batch. We even ranked it pretty high up in a separate ranking of fast food hash browns. Plus, we absolutely loved the crunch of the hash brown in the breakfast Crunchwraps. If you want to try it on its own, you could always try ensuring freshness (and potentially less stale crunchiness) by asking for the hash brown to be made fresh.