This Costco Bakery Find Is A Game-Changer For Breakfast Sandwiches

Toasted bagels, English muffins, biscuits, and croissants are often the go-to breads for breakfast sandwiches, often loaded up with fluffy eggs, sausage, bacon, and gooey cheese. And while all those breads are undoubtedly tasty, they've been done again and again. For a more unique, more flavorful sandwich ingredient, pick up one of Costco's best breakfast pastries: Kirkland Signature pretzel bagels.

Pretzels differ from other breads like bagels due to the lye bath they experience before baking. They are dipped in an alkaline solution made with boiling water and baking soda, giving them all of their signature qualities from color to texture to flavor. As a result, Costco's pretzel bagels have a lot to offer that a regular bagel doesn't. For one, they're more flavorful than a plain bagel, offering a toasty, savory, and slightly malty flavor that pairs nicely with salty, savory fillings, like bacon or eggs. Since the pretzel taste is fairly distinct, it can add flavor to your breakfast sandwich instead of simply being a plain bread vessel to carry fillings. Then there's the matter of texture. As opposed to the denseness of a typical bagel, the pretzel bagels are fluffier, resulting in soft sandwich bread that won't be as hard to chew through.

You can easily swap Kirkland Signature pretzel bagels for other breads in breakfast sandwich recipes, like a sausage, egg, and cheese croissant or even a breakfast-style Cuban sandwich. Or you can sinply invent your own. The bagels, which come in bags of eight for $5, do come whole, so you'll have to cut them in half yourself in order to pile them high with fillings.

Fans of the bagels, who apparently buy sleeves at a time, enjoy filling them with classic ingredients, like cheese, egg, and bacon, as well as more unique creations. "Turkey, Havarti, bacon, and a half an avocado smashed on the pretzel bagel was divine," one person wrote on Reddit. Another did a simple ham and Swiss with mustard. In fact, mustard was a popular recommendation. While not the first condiment that may come to mind when thinking about breakfast, it goes famously well with pretzels and pairs well with popular breakfast sandwich ingredients.

If you do grab a bag of the pretzel bagels, it's highly recommended you freeze them soon after buying. The downside of the bagels being fresh is they go bad quickly — and you do not want these to go to waste. So make yourself a sandwich or two using the fresh pretzel bagels before slicing them in half and freezing for future use.