El Monterey claims they are America’s #1 burrito brand (the source of this information is Neilson brand ratings from November of 2016). After making such a claim, it’s a little strange that they decided to omit the word burrito from the title of the El Monterey Egg, Potato, Bacon & Cheese Sauce Breakfast Wraps. Perhaps they’re gunning for the coveted title of America’s #1 breakfast wrap as well?
Anyway, despite the fancy title, these are really just breakfast burritos, which isn’t a bad thing at all. In fact, we love breakfast burritos, so we’re actually pretty excited about checking these out.
Now, El Monterey recommends that you heat these from frozen, but we prefer to let our burritos thaw overnight in the fridge. That means when it’s time to cook these, we can pop them into the microwave for less than a minute without worrying that there will be ice in the center. We did thaw our burritos before sampling them, but if you want to see the official cooking instructions, you can check out our package scans at the bottom of this review.
As you can see in our photo below, these aren’t jam-packed with filling, and what’s there ends up just a touch on the watery side. Still, the flavor isn’t half bad.
The majority of the filling is cheese sauce with scattered pieces of scrambled egg. These end up a bit runny — the scrambled egg content produces moisture when it cooks, which waters down the already-runny cheese sauce. It’s certainly not the ideal consistency, and these could do well by adding some beans, but it’s also not terrible for a cheap breakfast burrito.
These are made a bit heartier with the addition of potato chunks, though we found the portion size to be pretty inconsistent. Some of our burritos had a decent amount of potatoes, while others made us wonder if there were any potatoes in these at all.
These also contain chunks of red bell peppers, though the quantity of peppers is as inconsistent as the potato portion.
Finally, you’ve got the beloved bacon. It’s definitely the first thing you’ll smell when you cook up a pair of these, but we had difficulty actually locating it when we peeled apart our burritos. The bacon here mostly adds a smoky flavor to the overall profile, and it’s mostly ground small enough that it gets stuck in your teeth. If you are lucky, you might actually find a decent-sized brown chunk of the stuff, which has a chewy, gristly texture, but most of the bacon we found was ground pretty small.
Far too often, the makers of frozen burritos consider a single burrito to be a serving, knowing full well that it almost always takes two of these to fill you up. El Monterey has already considered this, and the package counts two burritos as a serving instead of just one.
A double-burrito serving contains 410 calories (110 from fat) and 770 mg of sodium. Those calories are maybe a tad high, but that count isn’t outrageous and the sodium level is about average for a frozen meal. That puts this slightly out of the range of a diet-friendly breakfast, but these certainly contain fewer calories than competing burritos, such as the Red’s Canadian Bacon, Egg & Three Cheese Burrito or the Sweet Earth Baja Breakfast Burrito (each of which contains 340 calories per one burrito).
The El Monterey Egg, Potato, Bacon & Cheese Sauce Breakfast Wraps make for a halfway decent breakfast if you’re in a rush. They’re a little bit generic, but at least you can eat two at a time without feeling too guilty about it (unlike so many of their competitors).
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for these El Monterey breakfast burritos, check out our package scans below.
