Why does the idea of bacon buttermilk pancake English muffins seem so weird to me?

Twenty years ago, that would have been a perfectly reasonable line of thought. But these days, food companies have collectively lost their minds, so this should just be another yawner. I guess it’s the idea of Thomas’ going off the deep end. English muffins don’t usually enter the realm of “weird”. Plus, they went with not one but TWO weird flavors for a muffin. Just cramming a full breakfast of flavors into something that is already a breakfast food. It’s just bizarre.

Another thing that’s bizarre: the proclamation that this product will only exist for six weeks. Six weeks from when? I don’t know. That seems like an incredibly arbitrary thing to print on a package. Who is keeping track of these six weeks? Wouldn’t it be easier just to say “only available until X day”?

Six weeks. Six weeks! That’s about half a semester of college. So you could eat some English muffins at the start of school, crave some of these nooks and crannies while studying for your midterms, and not be able to get that sweet savory breakfast treat. Hell, I’ve been learning Spanish on Duolingo for over six weeks and that stupid owl just told me I’ve learned 1% of it. These English muffins are available for less time than learning 1% of a foreign language.

I usually like to take a whiff of whatever I’m about to review before I eat it, but this time I had no choice: as soon as I opened the plastic sleeve, I was assaulted with a smell that was something like if artificial maple flavoring and styrofoam had a baby. It was unlike anything my nose had ever experienced, and it was highly disheartening for the culinary experience that was to come.

Sorry, I’m bad at cutting English muffins. It’s a genetic flaw.

What is going on here? I figured the little pink blobs were supposed to be bacon, but what are these coral-colored splotches? Is that the maple? The pancake? It’s certainly unlike any pancake I’ve ever seen.

Up close, the “bacon” pieces look like the haggard teeth of a witch who lives deep in the forest and tries to lure children to her cabin with weird breakfast pastries.

There’s no good preface to this, so let’s just get going.

It starts out by tasting pretty much like a regular English muffin, then a strange sweetness creeps in. It tastes almost like someone used something sweet to try to cover the faint taste of slightly rotten meat.

What the fuck is happening here? I couldn’t taste any pancake flavor, just a little bit of that weird, sweet maple. There was also some savory, but like I said, it tasted nothing like bacon – just like slightly off meat. And the taste lingered long after the muffin was gone.

Toasting and buttering helped, but that fake sweetness remained, along with that weird, slightly off taste that just stays and stays. An English muffin isn’t that big, but I couldn’t finish it. Also, yes, that’s not a shadow. I burned one side. It’s a genetic flaw.

I’m still trying to figure out the bacon situation. It wasn’t the flavor of meat, more the ghost of bad meat…like that time I must have gotten some raw steak juice in my reusable shopping bag and after a few days everything I put in there smelled really rank. Except I can’t run these English muffins through the washing machine.

Boy, I just make Thomas’ Bacon Buttermilk Pancake English Muffins sound like shit, don’t I? Well, they sure tasted like shit to me. Just a complete failure on the bacon and the pancake part. Sort of tasted like maple syrup, if you want to offend Canadians or whatever people from Vermont call themselves. Any savory aspect of it just tasted tainted.

But, in all fairness, a friend of mine tried them and she said they were “okay”. Not a rousing endorsement, but far from the experience I had. So maybe your mileage will vary? If you can find them within the mysterious six-week window, that is.

Thomas’ Bacon Buttermilk Pancake English Muffins

• Score: 0.5 out of 5 “someone I know thought they were okay”s
• Price: $3.49
• Size: 6 English muffins
• Purchased at: Fry’s Foods
• Nutritional Quirk: Contains actual maple syrup. I am gobsmacked. Contains no trace of bacon. I am not gobsmacked.