Dr. Gourmet's Food Reviews

Red’s All Natural Chicken Apple Sausage Egg’wich

Chicken Apple Sausage Egg'wich and Turkey Sausage Egg'wich

I've said before that I'm not a fan of frozen breakfast foods - you're usually better off both financially and nutritionally by simply cooking something yourself. Yet people will eat breakfast foods for lunch or dinner (I've been known to myself), so when the foods meet our specifications, we'll review them.

Red's All Natural started out with burritos, branched out to frozen meals, and now has gone into the breakfast sandwich business. For $3.49 you can buy one (1) "Egg'wich", which is, according to the package, a "breadless sandwich." "Keto" is emblazoned on the package.

If you've been following Dr. Gourmet for a while, or if you've attended one of my Continuing Medical Education Culinary Medicine classes or seen me give a Grand Rounds, you probably are well aware that I am not a fan of fad diets. Not because the evidence doesn't support the claims made for these diets (true in many but not all cases), but because I am a primary care physician and I have patients.

I treat real people in my practice. I have treated everyone from the homeless schizophrenic on the corner to the CEOs of multinational corporations. If they want to improve their diet, and thereby their health, I have the resources to help them. What I don't do is tell them that there is some "perfect" diet that they must follow, because for the vast majority of my patients, the conversation will stop there and they'll never improve their diets at all. As my wife likes to say, "Perfect is the enemy of better."

So rather than going into whether people should be following a ketogenic diet or not, I'll review these breakfast sandwiches for what they are: breakfast sandwiches without bread.

The Chicken Apple Sausage Egg'wich has 200 calories, 390 milligrams of sodium, and 0 (ZERO) fiber. It's a piece of sausage and a piece of American cheese sandwiched between two rounds of scrambled egg.

These are cooked by wrapping them in a damp paper towel and microwaving for 50 seconds on a side, and I must say, it works well.

The Turkey Sausage Egg'wich also has 200 calories, a little more sodium at 410 milligrams, and the same amount of fiber (zero).

It's essentially the same as the Chicken Apple Sausage version in that it's two rounds of scrambled egg, American cheese, and a round of sausage.

In both cases, the eggs are tender and moist, with a true egg flavor. We cut both sandwiches in half and allowed one of the halves of each sandwich to cool to see if the egg would become rubbery, watery, or mushy, but it did none of these things. That's impressive.

The chicken apple sausage has a very light apple flavor in a quite savory, tender piece of sausage. The turkey sausage definitely tastes of turkey, although that's no bad thing. The turkey sausage round is noticeably smaller than the chicken apple sausage, as you can see, but in terms of flavor and texture, both are fine examples of non-pork breakfast sausage.

The problem that I have with these is that I miss the bread. Not only because bread or an English Muffin or even a biscuit might add some fiber, but because picking these up in the hand is a slippery, almost-but-not-quite greasy experience. This is not something that you can pick up and eat without leaving grease marks on everything you touch - or washing your hands afterward.

They're good - very good, even. But I can't in good conscience recommend a breakfast with no fiber whatsoever, and I certainly wouldn't recommend making these a regular part of your life. If you must have them, put them on an English Muffin or similar to give you a bit of fiber. At this price point - $3.49 each - I'd choose to make my own breakfast sandwich.

Posted: April 2, 2021