We Tried Every McDonald's Sausage Breakfast Menu Item To Determine Which Is Best

It's hard to imagine a time when breakfast wasn't being served at McDonald's, but it was a novelty when a few stores started cooking up ideas in 1970. A year later, an innovative egg sandwich started to take shape, and by 1975, the Egg McMuffin became the signature AM menu item at McDonald's nationwide. Sausage is a staple breakfast meat, and McDonald's has paired it with hot cakes since at least 1973. Over the next five decades, sausage became a star protein, serving as the centerpiece meat in various breaded sandwich creations that still remain popular to this day.

Today's browned, circular patty has a diameter of about 3.5 inches. It's made up of pork, water, salt, spices, dextrose, sugar, yeast extract, and natural flavors. It is utilized in over a handful of ways on the breakfast menu and it 's almost too hard to decide which sausage menu item to order. Some of us have our favorites, making it hard to deviate, or even willing to try something new.

On behalf of The Takeout, I tried every McDonald's sausage item on the breakfast menu. After the completion of this sausage fest, I was stuffed to the gills with various breadings, egg styles, and of course the salty pork protein. However, I was able to determine once and for all, which were the best, and perhaps which were the ones you don't need to bother to wake up for. The following items are simply listed below in alphabetical by item name.

If you're going to call your breakfast platter "big," then you better deliver on that promise in size. McDonald's definitely comes through on its end of the bargain, both in quantity, and value with its Big Breakfast, and especially with Hot Cakes addition. On a plastic tray lay a complete breakfast, with three fluffy stacked pancakes, each just under 5-inches in diameter, taking up half of the real estate. A pile of congealed, yet beautifully contoured and bright yellow eggs sit slightly atop a side of sausage, and an uncut biscuit. If that wasn't enough, or enough brown things to digest, a hash brown is also included on the side. I'm actually surprised that there isn't some sort of little dessert included, like a tiny muffin or danish.

Alas, this big offering is a wonderful menu item that includes sausage. It allows the diner to approach the sausage however they like. Eat the sausage as is, with a knife and fork, and truly appreciate its smoky and greasy goodness by its lonesome. How about borrowing some of that hotcake syrup and sweetening the deal by pouring some directly onto the meat? With the pancake, biscuit, and hash brown all available, they can be used as various kinds of ad hoc sausage sandwich constructions. It's almost like a deconstructed McGriddle, with plenty of bonus material to work with and gobble up. If you can't finish this Big Breakfast in one sitting, this one reheats just fine at home.

While a breakfast burrito seems like a menu item that hasn't been around all that long at McDonald's, its origins date back to a Houston location in 1985. Cuban immigrants Dominic and Nelly Quijano noticed that customers were requesting hot sauce for eggs at their McDonald's location, and hatched the idea for the breakfast burrito, utilizing ingredients already on hand in the kitchen. Four years later, their Burrito could be found in McDonald's locations all across America.

Today, the Sausage Burrito is bits of scrambled eggs, pork sausage, cheese, green chiles, and onion, all wrapped up in a soft flour tortilla. Like the Sausage Biscuit, this Burrito has long been slated as an affordable value item. Removing it from its wrapper, the Burrito itself is unremarkable in appearance. It looks simply like a plain tortilla wrapped up. While it's the one of the breakfast item with the longest length, it is both flimsy, and barely filled. As I took my first bite, the only standout was the fluffy chunks of eggs. It also allowed me to finally peek underneath the hood, and its landscape seemed to be filled with nothing but more bits of scrambled egg.

While I did enjoy the burrito for its tastiness, and airiness, I was a little dismayed at its lack of sausage. I only discovered morsels of diced sausage towards the very end, and when it finally joined in on the bite, it didn't exactly register. Still, whether it was loaded with sausage or not, there's no denying this is a snackable item worth ordering up in the morning.

Everyone loves a nice fluffy biscuit in the morning. After seeing 7-Eleven and Hardee's find success with employing them on their own breakfast menus, McDonald's gave it a shot, starting in 1980. To build up its breakfast portfolio, the chain started building country ham, and sausage sandwiches built around buns of biscuits, with a test run in Virginia. They proved to be winners that they found a permanent place on the menu within a couple of years. Today, the biscuit remains a ubiquitous staple, and currently holds the most variations to order at six, including one that houses a McChicken filet.

By price alone, the Sausage Biscuit is one of best values on the breakfast menu, selling just shy of $3. While it takes two dollars more to add a folded egg, it's worth upping the ante to get there, as the Sausage Egg Biscuit is an all around excellent sandwich. It's a winner because McDonald's biscuits hit all the right notes. They're crunchy, flaky, buttery, soft, smooth, and just all around delicious. In fact, as a society, I think we underrate McDonald's biscuits. Sure, the folks over at Popeyes and Bojangles aren't losing sleep over them, but they are on par, if not better than the ones slung over at KFC. The egg and sausage are elevated in their taste and flavor when sandwiched between the split biscuit. I almost forgot there wasn't even cheese that came with it, but ultimately it wasn't even missed. A+ work, McDonald's.

McDonald's rounded out a hole in its menu when introducing three breakfast bagel sandwiches back in 1999, including a Spanish Omelette outfitted with sausage. While many welcomed this addition, many purists, like Eli Zabar brustled at their inauthenticity. Zabar, of the famed deli-grocery store family told the New York Times, "It's like Wonder bread in a circle."

I had never had a bagel from McDonald's before, but entered with my first contact with its modern, less "Spanish" Sausage Egg Cheese Bagel with an open mind/mouth. From the outward looks of this sandwich, it was mammoth, when compared to its McBrethren. The bagel itself isn't gigantic, and appears like a more enlarged version of the generic mini bagels made by Lender's. Since the folded egg, American cheese, and sausage patty are all standard elements, this one's strength or weakness would rest solely on that bagel. Sadly, Eli Zabar was mostly right, although to me it was more like a hamburger bun shaped into a bagel.

The bagel's exterior crust is mostly-bagel like, but its underbelly had the wrong kind of doughy softness. Also, the rule of thumb with bagels is that if they aren't all that good, they can always be salvaged by being toasted. Luckily, I was able to salvage my leftovers when I took the remaining and crisped it up in my toaster oven. Perhaps McDonald's can borrow mine?

While sweet and spicy is all the rage these days, the original dynamic duo of opposing tastes was sweet and savory. With McDonald's Big Breakfast, those elements coexisted, but only got into mixed company if the eater let the hotcakes syrup drip onto the sausage patty. In 2003, McDonald's decided to make a union of sweet and savory with the introduction of its line of McGriddles. Advertised as a "breakfast platter without the platter," these handheld sandwiches quickly proved to be a revelation.

On paper, the ingredients for the Sausage Egg & Cheese McGriddle aren't that dissimilar from other breakfast sandwiches: a stack consisting of a folded egg, a thin sausage patty, and a slice of American cheese, but here, two griddle cakes infused with maple, hold it all together. Like with the Egg McMuffin, the two cakes look like they can barely hold its inner-contents. Alas, this sandwich comes with a more attractive, and fun cover, complete with an embossed McDonald's golden brown "M" arches. Hot cakes are moist by nature, and the ones here are continually spongy wet to the touch. Beyond this minor tactile nuisance, this sandwich provides nothing but flavorful pleasures to any mouth that encounters it.

The maple flavoring of the cakes thankfully does not dominate this sandwich's taste, but instead has just the right amount of sweetness to compliment all the other things going on — the saltiness of the sausage, the fluffiness of the egg, and the mild cheesiness. It's like The Avengers super team of McDonald's breakfast offerings.

The Godfather of McDonald's breakfasts is and will always be the Egg McMuffin. The initial version that was drummed up in 1971 was a take on eggs Benedict, but failure with incorporating hollandaise sauce led to the addition of cheese and Canadian bacon to top the cracked eggs under a split muffin. The Egg McMuffin went nationwide by 1975, and the sausage variation of it came on the scene by 1982.

While we have to pay respect to the Egg McMuffin, it doesn't mean that we are always inclined to order this trailblazing item. By the looks of it, the Sausage & Egg McMuffin is complex in its stack. The stark white baked egg, sausage patty, and melty cheese that sticks below it, provide the bulk of this item, and the not as wide browned muffin that encapsulates it almost looks like it's not up to the task of keeping it all together.

A peek at the muffin's undersides reveal both a toasted look, with a sheen of butter. Alas, neither of those tastes seem to shine through in this sandwich that turns out to be rather bland. Like with the bagel, this sandwich was given new life when I heated it up at home. When the muffin was actually toasted, the newly minted crunch changed the dynamic. Sadly, it just doesn't come this way in stores, and thus not making this the most worthy of options.

While the McMuffin was a revolutionary addition to the world of fast food, today it feels a bit stale. So many other breakfast sandwich innovations have come along since, leaving the McMuffin as a bit of a hasbeen. The bagel one is perfect if you're looking to fill yourself up in the morning, but the sausage patty can't bail out the lack of taste the bagel itself has. I may have to try another protein option in the future, like the Steak one, which has many fans. The Sausage Burrito probably shouldn't lead with the word "Sausage," due to its lack of it, but it's still a solid item to order.

For those looking to have a more leisurely breakfast, or perhaps one to share with a friend or loved one, the Big Breakfast with Hotcakes is a surefire winner. There's so much to enjoy here, including the sausage patty, which here is free to show off its strengths all by itself. Also, if you're hankering for a breakfast sandwich, the elements are here to construct your own.

In the end, there is one item that stands above the rest — the Sausage Egg Biscuit. McDonald's biscuit is perhaps the best breading on its menu, day or night, and makes a wonderful set of bookends to the simple eating pleasures of a folded egg and sausage patty together.

On a freezing winter morning, I entered a Manhattan McDonald's with the goal of ordering, observing, and eating up every menu item that included sausage. As of January 2025, there are six menu items you can order that contain sausage. While there are many variations of each of these six menu items, such as adding or removing egg and/or cheese, I chose to order each item with as many standard ingredients included as possible. There is also an option to just order a side of sausage, but since a patty was included with the Big Breakfast option, it wasn't not considered for this taste test.

All items were ordered at the same time, using McDonald's app, and taste tested in the same location where I picked them up, at the counter. The items were tasted in no particular order. I ate half of each sandwich or platter, making notes of each, and then returned for further bites for a final comparison. I was the sole taste tester for this chew and review, and the criteria I used to determine which ones ranked higher than others were: taste, temperature, texture, size, ability to satisfy a hungry appetite, price, value, best use of McDonald's sausage, overall lovability, and the likelihood of ordering it again in the future.

Remember, breakfast is no longer served all day at McDonald's. If you're looking to enjoy any or all the above sausage menu items above, be sure to arrive before lunchtime.