We take a lot of family road trips. Despite an often significant amount of our minivan’s aft section being dedicated to coolers and food bins, there are times when we just need to grab a quick bite. As you can imagine, it’s a challenge finding fast food that’s nutritious and palatable.

Subway seems to be an undiscovered treasure web it comes to breakfast. There’s never a line in the morning and it’s cheap. Sure, we’re not talking about free range eggs or organic meats here, but when you’re on the road, compromises are made.

Fortunately, Subway’s Sunrise Melt breakfast sandwich isn’t much of a compromise. It’s their highest protein breakfast sandwich and it’s only $3.75*. You get your choice of bread, but the scrambled egg is shaped like a tortilla, which holds all the meat and cheese quite nicely on its own, as demonstrated above, so you can ditch the carb heavy grains. Oh, and you can load the b’fast sammies up with all their vegetables just like the regular subs.

The monstrosity you see above is a 6″ Sunrise Melt with double egg and meat (ham, turkey & bacon) and it cost $4.75. I think the kid working there may have mis-rung that one, but it’s still likely to be under six bucks. And I was full for hours. Hit “more” for it’s nutrition by the numbers…

Here’s about how it breaks down:**

Sunrise Melt w/o Bread

• 48g Protein
• 30g Fat
• 13g Sat Fat
• 16g Carbs
• 6g Sugar

Halve the numbers if you don’t plan on doubling the meat & egg.

One caution. Without bread, all but one of their b’fast sandwiches are over 700mg sodium. With bread, they top 1000mg. So drink plenty of water and limit sodium the rest of the day. Breakfast BMT, Sunrise Melt and SEC are highest – 400mg to 600mg more than the others. With the meat & egg doubled, mine probably topped 2600mg even without the bread.

* prices probably vary by store.
** roughly calculated from Subway’s nutritional chart accounting for the removal of bread. Download it here (PDF). Veggies added will affect nutritional content, but only for the better.