7 Best And 8 Worst McDonald's Breakfast Sandwiches

McDonald's is like a hotel for my soul. Let me explain. In my many years on this planet, the iconic drive-thru restaurant has always been there. It was there after a breakup; it was there when my spouse and I adopted our first child; it's been there when I was in a foreign country, homesick and hungry for something familiar. Bottom line, it's never let me down. I know that sounds histrionic because it's not perfect, but there's comfort in seeing that iconic logo in a sea of others. It never fails to make me feel comforted, especially for the first meal of the day. But it's a time crunch, as most McDonald's stop serving breakfast after 11 a.m. 

Needless to say, I was excited to do this review for McDonald's breakfast sandwiches. That vertical has an extensive menu selection, some classic, some newer. However, there are some misses within that lineup, in my opinion. I'll do my best to give you suggestions on what I think is the best and worst based on my visit to a branch in Sonoma, CA.

McDonald's line of bagel breakfast sandwiches is hit or miss. The good news is that the bagels they use are soft and feel a little more like dense hamburger buns than the sometimes tough texture a traditional bagel can have. Some bagel connoisseurs might scoff at that, but for me, it makes for a less messy car meal.

Sadly, even though the bagel is good, this egg and cheese option suffers from its bacon. Perhaps the cooks who prepared my sandwich cooked the bacon too long. It was crisp, but felt like it had been sunbathing under a heat lamp for hours. As I took my first bite, the bacon crumbled into gritty, sharp shards that almost felt like sand from Glass Beach.

I do really love the breakfast sauce condiment they add, but mine was unevenly placed, and it threw off the balance of a consistently well-lubricated bite. I liked this sandwich, but it's my opinion to skip it, opting for the steak version — which, to me, is a truly delicious experience.

It's my opinion that McDonald's should put its breakfast sauce on both sides of the bagel instead of just on top. The McDonald's I ordered this Egg & Cheese Bagel from just plopped a dollop of the breakfast sauce on top and on only one side. In other words, I got a few bites of sauce and the rest was dry and hard to swallow.

This isn't the best in its breakfast bagel sandwich line, but if you're in the mood to try something different, you might find it satisfying. My sandwich was, as the kids say these days, "mid." It was nothing special, and although I like the diversity of options the Golden Arches gives its customers, I think they should adhere to the motto from my generation: "go big, or go home."

Although this is a pretty sizable sandwich, it's also very bland. I bit into it and braced myself for a rush of flavor. I waited and waited. Still, nothing. The subsequent bites yielded the same result, leaving my taste buds bored and unimpressed. Skip this one and get one of the other bagel sandwiches instead.

I've been eating McDonald's breakfasts for years — too many to count — and I've never eaten one of its biscuits that I liked. The salt content overpowers the experience, and the texture is reminiscent of unsweetened cookie dough. The outside is cooked just fine, but when I bite into it, I get a mouthful of paste after a few chews. Figuratively, I could probably hang wallpaper with it.

Along with its overpowering saline-like flavor, McDonald's doesn't pad its breakfast biscuit sandwiches with any kind of dressing. This, combined with the flavorless eggs and, in my case, overcooked bacon, made it feel like eating wattle and daub; in other words, a thatch roof.

To be honest, McDonald's biscuits are not my favorite. They are a bit doughy and seem undercooked, in my opinion. With its overly salty taste and pliable texture, it reminds me of Play-Doh. When you mix that texture with the oiliness of a sausage patty, it can get gummy. And that was exactly my experience with this offering.

I opened the wrapper, and I'll admit, it looked exactly like it does on the menu. But I think the picture looks more appealing than the actual sandwich delivers. Once I took a bite, that familiar gummy consistency came through first, then the sausage patty flavors strong-armed their way into the finish.

There is no sauce or lubricant to help everything go down, so I was left with a large ball of dough and sausage rolling around in my mouth, and my mind refused to swallow it, probably because my reflexes didn't think it was safe to do so. To me, this felt like wet cement in my mouth, forming something similar to that large red ball just in front of the entrance of Target stores.

Of all the sandwich biscuit options at McDonald's, this is my favorite. To me, it just makes sense to load up a breakfast meal with as much protein as possible. The other options feel sparse, like quick bites ahead of the full meal. I'm not the biggest fan of McDonald's breakfast biscuits, but the egg and sausage in this item are forgiving enough to make a passable mouthfeel, triggering all my craving receptors in one go.

Still, it's the biscuit that's the problem in my opinion. I would say that the location I ordered my food from is the problem, but I've never had a good biscuit experience from any McDonald's I've been to, and I estimate I've been to over a hundred in my lifetime.

As with all the biscuit sandwiches at McDonald's, there is no sauce, no cohesive condiment that helps assist in swallowing. I loved the egg and sausage combination; those flavors are great together, but the villain in this item is, for me, the biscuit. It has the texture of marzipan but is made of salt and flour.

Talk about dry and doughy. The McDonald's Egg Cheese Biscuit should come with a choking hazard warning, in my opinion. My experience with McDonald's biscuits isn't the best, and this bone-dry early morning treat might be great for people who don't eat meat, but for me it's a pointless option that did nothing but create a block of clay in my mouth, something like what goes into making adobe bricks.

As I unwrapped this sandwich, I must admit it was visually pleasing. The biscuit looked like the kind my grandmother would make from scratch, and I thought it wouldn't be so bad. But the best thing to come out of this experience was thinking about my grandmother, because eating these unbelievably desiccated briquettes left me wanting to risk burning my mouth on hot coffee so I didn't choke.

You think the cheese would help? No. The cheese had hardened into a bright orange mortar, literally glued to the top of the egg. It's my opinion that you go to McDonald's to treat yourself to something fun and experience what the ingenious folks in the Golden Arches test kitchen come up with. My advice is to skip the Egg Cheese Biscuit and opt for the slightly better Egg & Cheese bagel instead.

This McGriddle has it all: sweetness, savoriness, melted cheese, and the satisfaction of having a full breakfast in the palm of your hand. This best-selling McDonald's breakfast is the ultimate in decadence at the top of the morning.

I believe the sausage option to be the best on the menu. I've never been so excited to bite into a sandwich at 9 a.m. The smell alone was enough to trigger a dopamine hit; the sweet but subtle maple syrup aroma grabbed hold of my nose and never let go. That, blended with the herb-heavy sausage patty, screamed: "Take a bite already!" Without hesitation, I did, and boy was it a delicious experience.

The griddle cakes, as McDonald's calls them, are soft without being doughy. They make the perfect bookends to the contents between them: eggs, which aren't too salty, a sausage patty that counterbalances the sweet, and American cheese, which I don't think is flavorful enough to make a difference. All of it is magical, as if someone asked a genie to create the perfect breakfast sandwich and this is what they conjured up. It's rich enough to satisfy your sweet tooth but hearty enough to make it feel less like a dessert and more like a well-rounded meal.

The Egg McMuffin is one of those fast food items that I feel have a provenance in culinary pop culture. Generations have enjoyed this familiar breakfast sandwich either as early morning comfort food or as a remedy for a raucous all-nighter.

I still love it. It's basic, it isn't messy, and the nostalgia factor feels like an ingredient in the recipe. Unwrapping it has become a ritual for me. Unfolding every corner of the wax paper reveals the treasure held within: a crispy English muffin with an egg in between and a circular piece of Canadian bacon sticking out of the side. It's almost anthropomorphic, reminiscent of the squinting-face-with-tongue emoji.

The flavor is the epitome of timelessness — warm and slightly salty, with all textures represented perfectly in every bite. If you're lucky, the egg will have the consistency of a soft-boiled egg, the yolk cooked but still a little runny; just enough to help everything go down in a perfect bite.

Here's an interesting but boring take on this McMuffin: I don't think it's a particularly necessary menu item, especially since it's only a sausage patty and American cheese sandwiched between a split English muffin. Still, it is a classic. 

In my life, I have found people either enjoy the taste of McDonald's breakfast sausage, or they hate it. I like it. It's rosemary-forward with a brackish finish. But it needs more than just cheese and an English muffin to bloom its potential. In this sandwich, it does all the heavy lifting by itself and falls under its own weight. My experience, even though I knew there was cheese and an English muffin, felt like I was eating a microwaved pork sausage patty made with rosemary essential oils placed between bread.

Thankfully, McDonald's has another option for this sandwich that contains an egg. Even that little adjustment gives this meal a considerable boost, taking it from prosaic to palatable.

The Sausage McMuffin with Egg and cheese is a McDonald's breakfast item that I think should be your default sandwich in this line of products. It feels like a well-rounded meal filled with a lot of protein that might give you a boost after the rooster crows.

Whereas the iconic original Egg McMuffin has Canadian bacon as a meat protein, this one has sausage, which creates an oily texture I found delicious. I unwrapped the sandwich and, after peeling it from the wax paper (the melted cheese acts as an adhesive) took my first bite. It's familiar. 

The crunchy toasted muffin gave way to a hard fried egg, which then led into the oily sausage patty. But the juices from the patty act like a buttery rosemary glaze, which is needed to help everything go down easily. I didn't taste the cheese, but to be honest, McDonald's American cheese doesn't really have a strong taste to me. This was a great morning bite that gave me enough energy to think about planning the rest of my day.

This sandwich sounds like it should be good on paper, but I didn't find it to be particularly enjoyable. Let me explain why.

McDonald's sausage, in my opinion, is good on some things and horrible on others. For instance, when used on the McGriddles, it offsets the sweetness of the maple flavoring infused in the buns. But as a standalone, or incorporated into an already savory sandwich, it intensifies the rosemary flavoring, overpowering all the other ingredients until all you get is that flavor.

The Sausage, Egg & Cheese Bagel sandwich suffers from that fate. I couldn't taste anything but the sausage, even though I enjoyed the softness of the bagel and the slightly firm texture of the fluffy egg. In the end, it was all sausage and no nuance.

Unlike what I think are doughy and dry biscuit sandwich options offered in the morning at McDonald's, the McGriddles are satisfying to both the palate and persistent waking hunger. I have always loved the McDonald's pancake breakfast platter. It became a special Sunday treat in our family, and our kids looked forward to it when the mood struck us. The McGriddle sandwich takes that platter idea and combines it all into a handheld option.

The first thing I notice is the smell: a sweet maple scent that breaks through the rosemary aroma of the sausage. It smells like what a Bath & Body Works candle tries to mimic in some of its seasonal lines. The second sensory experience for me was the texture of what McDonald's calls its griddle cakes. To me, they are just like pancakes used as the "buns." They are so soft and pillowy. The sausage is planted in the middle of the two cakes, making it look like a plushy burger.

Sweet and savory, each bite gives you that distinctive flavor of maple and the savory heftiness of breakfast sausage. This isn't the best of the McGriddles line, but it's a great addition.

One of the best breakfast menu items at McDonald's, in my opinion, is the McGriddles. No other sandwich feels like a full meal, and if the phrase "rise and shine" were a food, this line of breakfast sandwiches might be it.

Any sandwich from this line is worth a try. But based on my experience, this one might be the worst of the lot, and that's only because the bacon was so overly cooked it literally shattered into hard, sharp pieces, some lodging into my gum line and getting stuck there.

I'm putting this in the "worst" category only because the bacon strips were so splintery. It wasn't burnt; I think it was just old. As for the rest of the sandwich, the griddle cakes were soft, sweet, and buttery. The eggs were cooked nicely, and the melted cheese neither added anything nor took anything away from my experience.

I love these little McDonald's Mexican-inspired breakfast burritos. They aren't as good as the McDonald's Steak, Egg & Cheese Bagel, but if you want a contained hand-held meal on your morning drive, these delicious treats are a yummy starter.

This is a simple little guy but packed with flavor and is probably better than the ones you buy in bulk in the frozen food aisle at your grocery store. I took mine out of the bag and immediately admired how well it was wrapped. It made me wonder how important it is in the McDonald's employee handbook to wrap food items like a professional gift wrapper.

Aesthetics aside, I bit into this little burrito and was blasted with pork sausage, cheese, green chilies, and onions. It felt like a flavorful dimensional transcendence, or when something looks small on the outside but exceeds its physical limitations on the inside. There's so much flavor packed into this itty bitty thing that buying just one might with a side of hash browns and a beverage might be enough to satisfy an early morning angry stomach.

This is my favorite breakfast sandwich on the McDonald's menu. In fact, I hate when I take the last bite because I wish I could eat it all over again. But be warned, it's messy. If you're not careful, it's going to get everywhere.

First, it's made with a "juicy steak patty," which McDonald's doesn't really define, but I can confirm it's not texturally like a hamburger patty; it's less dense but still holds its shape. Then you've got a fluffy egg, melted American cheese, breakfast sauce, and grilled onions. To top it all, the buns are a soft bagel split in two and toasted in butter. It feels sinful.

My first bite was messy; everything oozed out the sides, but I didn't care. The steak gives a kind of Salisbury steak vibe but is more delicious than that. The egg, cheese, and grilled onions were an orchestra of savoriness that defines fast food synergy only McDonald's can produce. If you haven't tried this sandwich yet, treat yourself one morning and add a little bit of fast food breakfast bagel harmony as your first order of business.

I am a McDonald's fan. It reminds me of every phase of my life. It's given me a few core memories and, I hate to admit it, a few extra notches on my belt line. But the scales have always tipped in its favor. That being said, I haven't eaten from its breakfast menu as much as I would have liked, so getting this assignment was extra special.

For this article, I didn't order from my home restaurant; I was visiting a friend in Sonoma, CA, and got everything from there. Needless to say, your restaurant might yield different results from what I experienced, and prices and availability may vary depending on location.

I ranked all items on taste, originality, texture, and the ability to satiate my morning hunger. I only ate from the breakfast sandwich menu with no sides, and used water as a palate cleanser.