Pop quiz: Which Panera cookie has more calories—a Triple Chocolate with Walnuts or an Oatmeal Raisin with Berries?
Surprise! It’s the Oatmeal Raisin. At 340 calories, it just edges out the Chocolate with Walnuts (320).
Surprise Number 2: Two Oatmeal Raisins can’t match a single Panera Kitchen Sink Cookie (800 calories). Nor can a Double Fudge Brownie (520), a Bear Claw (540), a Cinnamon Roll (670), or a Pecan Roll (720).
It’s not easy to stuff 800 calories into a cookie, even one that measures—by our ruler—5½ inches across. (Note to headquarters: Saying on your website that it’s “big enough to share” doesn’t let you off the hook.)
Adding two kinds of chocolate helps, as do the caramel pieces…and the embedded pretzel bits…and the load of white flour…and the butter.
Voila! Each Kitchen Sink packs 27 grams of saturated fat—nearly 1½ days’ worth—and 13½ teaspoons of sugar (most of it added).
Surprise #3: The sodium hits a cool 760 milligrams, thanks, in part, to the “flake salt” that Panera thoughtfully adds. A third of a day’s worth of sodium from a cookie? Really?
If you need something sweet to go with your coffee, try a Petite Chocolate Chipper.
It’s got 100 calories, 3 grams of sat fat, and 2 teaspoons of sugar. In a restaurant, that’s about as “petite” as it gets.
Up next: Chili’s Skillet Chocolate Chip Cookie
Panera isn’t alone in hawking giant cookies in the midst of an obesity epidemic. See also: Chili’s Skillet Chocolate Chip Cookie.
“Oven-baked chocolate chip cookie topped with vanilla ice cream & drizzled with hot fudge,” says the menu. Gosh. What will the folks at headquarters think of next?
The flattened-pot-pie-size “cookie” is bad enough. But why stop there? Chili’s adds a “drizzle” of hot fudge and a mound of (cold) ice cream. Eat it quick before the ice cream melts!
What with all that excitement, who’s going to think about calories? By the time your skillet is empty, all 1,420 of them will be long gone. Some come from the nearly 28 teaspoons of sugars. Others come from the load of white flour or the 38 grams (2 days’ worth) of saturated fat. Yum.
“Classic desserts big enough to share, but too good to actually do it,” says Chili’s website. Um, seriously?
Photos: Leah Ettman/CSPI, Lindsay Moyer/CSPI
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