Power Ranking Thursday - Breakfast Food

Took a week off last week with what was a hellish work-week and traveling back home for the weekend -- but we are BACK this week with another edition of Power Ranking Thursday! And what better topic to get us back to our bread and butter of PRT's -- Food. Specifically, Breakfast Foods.

Guidelines for today's rankings are pretty simple -- we're going with breakfast foods that I'd consider to be entrees. No a la carte's on today's list -- the individual breakfast players like eggs, bacon, sausage, etc. And we're not doing entrees that are specific to specific breakfast establishments -- for instance, an All-Star Special from Waffle House (because that'd be the easiest #1 in PRT history). These are just the generic meals/entrees you could find on a diner menu, or that you'd make yourself for breakfast as a standalone meal.

Honorable Mentions

Fruit Cup/Yogurt

Smoothies

Oatmeal

Kicking things off with a precedent-setter: this list isn't about health. Fruit, yogurt, smoothies -- great options for a standard Tuesday morning to start your day healthy. We aren't counting calories on PRT, today is about treating ourselves. So in that spirit, get fucking bent fruit, yogurt, smoothies and oatmeal.

Avocado Toast

Green mush on bread? All yours Soy Boy, I'll pass. (I do like avocados/guac, this is just a stupid and over-priced trend).

Bagel with Cream Cheese/Lox

Love a good bagel and cream cheese -- and especially love a breakfast sandwich ON a bagel, but on it’s own, not enough to be Top 10. I've never had a bagel with lox, but feel like you have to be a twisted fuck to start your day with salmon.

Muffins

Doughnuts

Birds of a feather that definitely have their place -- and that place is on a child's plate or a youth pastors' white foldout table in the basement of your grade school's church before telling you and your classmates Jesus had Swag.

Black Coffee

A perfectly reasonable breakfast for a true man's man (aka my breakfast 75% of days).

Omelets

Omelets are hit-or-miss to me -- an Omelet without lots of toppings/fillings just doesn't cut for me. (Ideal omelet: Sausage, Bacon, bell peppers, onion, cheese and a really good hot sauce).

Breakfast Tacos

Potential hot take, I don't know what the consensus on Bfast Tacos is -- but I think they're gimmicky. Are they good? Yes. Vastly overrated and 2nd fiddle to burritos? 100%.

Pancakes

Confirmed hot take -- I think pancakes are majorly overrated. I'll eat them, don't get me wrong, I'm no communist. But they are the clear-cut last place in my book of the "Bready Breakfast Trio:" i.e. pancakes, French Toast, and Waffles. (workshopping a better name to describe those 3 in their own category).

The Top 10

#10 Cereal

An all-time staple of breakfast in the United States kicks off our list -- ol' reliable, Cereal. It feels a bit disingenuous to go with cereal in the Top 10, because growing up I was not Cereal Killer. I was extremely picky and would raw dog a bowl of Froot Loops before I'd pour some milk into it. But as I've grown, I've realized the simple pleasure that is breakfast cereal -- like the cinnamon mixing in to the milk after a bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. It's also a versatile breakfast food that can be enjoyed at all hours of the day -- just as good at 8 am as it is at 8 pm.

#9 Bacon, Egg, and Cheese Sandwich

Think I'm in the minority when it comes to breakfast sandwiches, but let's just get it out of the way early -- Sausage >>> Bacon every day of the week, twice on Sunday. There's nothing wrong with Bacon -- ask my girlfriend and she'll gleefully make fun of the fact that I order BLT's from restaurants at every opportunity. But when it comes to a breakfast sammy, I'm always going sausage. And the main driver in that decision is, the typical breakfast spot doesn't put nearly enough bacon on it. They'll give you 2 measly slices and expect you not to throw hot coffee in the server's face. The nerve of some people. But I will say, if you're making these at home and load on enough bacon to kill a sumo wrestler -- a BEC is an elite breakfast item.

#8 Eggs Benedict

Time to get fancy on you bitches for a moment. There's something about a nice poached egg with some hollandaise sauce that just speaks to this Bean. The downside of this entree is I couldn't have less of an idea on how to make a hollandaise sauce or poached egg -- nor the drive to do so. The standard is over an English Muffin with ham (not saying Canadian Bacon), but switching up the components takes it up a notch. In Charleston I had an Eggs Benedict that was over a crab cake and it knocked my dick straight off. Or you can do the poor man's benedict -- an over-easy egg over an English muffin (which has become my standard post-gym breakfast with turkey bacon or sausage).

#7 French Toast

As previously mentioned in my pancake rant, the standard trio of Breakfast Breads are the pancake, the waffle, and French Toast. And for me, it's a neck-and-neck race between FT and waffles. There's something about French Toast that tricks you into thinking it's much healthier than the other two because it's dipped in Eggs, which makes it more appealing. But then you go to a diner where they mix those eggs with heavy cream and cinnamon sugar, then top it with powdered sugar and syrup, and you're right back to square one. But I do love French Toast, and think it's the most acceptable of the three to order as an adult. But when it comes to taste, it's 2nd place to...

#6 Waffles

...Motherfuckin' waffles. Whether it's from eating the frozen Eggo waffles growing up, or the thrill of making a waffle at the hotel Continental breakfast when you're out of town, or the 2 am trips to Waffle House after High School Football games -- waffles hold a special place in my heart. As a syrup-stan, they're the perfect vehicle for the liquid gold. When the butter melts and the syrup mixes in and settles into the perforation of the waffle -- I rewrote that sentence 4 times and that was far and away the least sexual way I could describe it. And coming back to Waffle House, leveling up to the chocolate chip waffle... Good Lord. It'll raise your cholesterol like a Sydney Sweeney Dr. Squatch commercial raises your Green Bean -- but it's otherworldly good.

#5 Breakfast Hash

Kicking off the top 5 with, in my opinion, one of the most under-rated options in the breakfast game. I think it' due to marketing -- "breakfast hash" doesn't sound as exciting or appetizing as some others on this list -- but it hits harder than Prime Mike Tyson. A bed of crispy hashbrowns (I'm team shredded hashbrowns -- it plays with home fries/diced potatoes too, but shredded is the way to go), some ground sausage and/or chopped bacon, some diced peppers and onions, fried eggs (over-easy or over medium if you know ball), and some melted cheese. I will eat and have eaten this any time of day, and I will continue to do so.

#4 Cinnamon Rolls

As I was jotting down options to consider for this list, I got all the way through the honorable mentions before I was reminded of the glory of the cinnamon roll. Much to omelets chagrin, I had to do some reshuffling of the Top 10 for one of the most nostalgic and delicious breakfast foods in the game. Growing up, going to your friends house for a sleepover, staying up until 4 am playing hide-and-go-seek in the dark until you got yelled at for making too much noise, and waking up the next day to cinnamon rolls was peak childhood. Whether you're popping them out of a Pillsbury tube, picking some up from a bakery, or ordering one to share at brunch (Prasino's RIPS), you can never go wrong.

#3 Sausage, Egg, and Cheese Sandwich

And now, the follow-up to my bacon rant -- the sausage egg and cheese. This has been my go-to choice for as long as I can remember. At the McDonald's drive-thru hungover as fuck on a Sunday? Sausage egg and cheese McGriddle, please. Stopping at Starbucks for a coffee? Sure I'll get a sausage egg and cheese. The sausage patty is the ideal breakfast sandwich meat -- I'll never change my mind. You get some sausage with every bite and the ratio is never off. The only question in my mind is: what's the ideal bread to bun up your sausage (pause)? To me, you can't go wrong with a bagel. Throw in some cream cheese as well? Talk about a hangover cure. But there's no wrong answer -- English muffin, croissant, biscuit -- do your thing. But to give a point to the bacon egg and cheese, if you're working with toast, bacon is the better choice.

#2 Biscuits and Gravy

The top 2 on today's PRT can really flip-flop on any given day for me. But on this day, the runner-up spot goes to an absolute classic -- Biscuits and Gravy. It may just be the Midwest in me that makes me so partial to B&G, but it's never not hit the spot for me. As long as you follow the 2 core rules: 1.) sausage gravy every single time, and 2.) lots of pepper. If I went over to someone's house for brunch, and they tried to serve a non-sausage gravy, I would never associate with that person again. The crumbled sausage is the perfect pairing, and loading that bitch up with black pepper makes for the perfect breakfast. Easy to make at home, great at a diner, and leveled up at a nice breakfast spot -- if biscuits and gravy is on the menu, I'm ordering it damn near every time.

#1 Breakfast Burritos

But on today's list, I'm giving the top spot to the more complete, the more versatile vehicle, and the ideal breakfast for this Bean -- the breakfast burrito. I came into the brekky burrito game late, I didn't start experimenting with it until college when I got bored of eating the same thing every day. How hard can it be to to wrap up delicious breakfast items in a tortilla? Well, if you have my level of intelligence, there's a learning curve. But once I mastered it, it became my go-to culinary creation. Fluffy scrambled eggs, some sausage or bacon (in the burrito game, either are great choices, or both if you're feeling nuts), crispy hashbrowns (tater tots I've found are the best way to do it), some cheese and jalepenos. It's perfection. You gotta heat up the wrap first to make it more pliable, and the absolute key is griddling that bitch to golden brown perfection on both sides. Get some nice sauce or salsa on the side for dipping, and you have yourself the best breakfast possible. I also got one at The Shack in St. Louis one time that was smothered in queso, and the first bite genuinely got me aroused. I'm a fat fuck, I need to stop writing about food. I'm gonna go make some crunchwraps for dinner and write a grocery list of all breakfast foods now. Thanks for going on this journey with me, folks.

Hope you enjoyed today's edition of PRT -- leave a like if you made it this far and comment below or on the Instagram post what your favorite breakfast food is!