Upgrade Your Cracker Barrel Breakfast With This Simple Ordering Tip

An apple a day really provides health benefits like hydration, but the biggest perk you'll enjoy from requesting a side of Cracker Barrel's apple butter with your breakfast entree is an ear-to-ear smile. Breakfast at the Barrel already has a lot going for it: several meals are available all day long, the pancakes are fluffy, the eggs are served how you like them, and the maple syrup is all-natural. For our money, however, a 50-cent cup of apple butter is the underrated secret to upgrading your breakfast. It's a negligibly cheap order that improves your dining experience by orders of magnitude.

Cracker Barrel's apple butter, which is also sold in 28-ounce jars on its website, isn't "butter" at all in the traditional sense but a warming apple spread that's actually closer to a spiced jam. Apple butter's number one strength is its versatility, as it will add a whole new dimension of flavor to your pancakes, corn muffins, toast, or your biscuits — those same fluffy specimens that Cracker Barrel changed back after public backlash. According to anecdotal reports, apple butter used to be free upon request, but there is now a modest upcharge. That angered some social media denizens, but we feel that the juice is worth the squeeze ... or, rather, that the apple butter is worth the coins. Sweet, spiced, and delightfully nuanced by turns, this condiment can give your whole plate a facelift.

On Instagram, one Cracker Barrel lover gushed about her breakfast: "Apple butter on biscuits is a MUST!!" Meanwhile, on a Reddit thread, a poster who was possessed of a big jar of Cracker Barrel apple butter was inspired to put it to good use by dozens of glowing comments. "Mix with maple syrup and butter and put on pancakes!" as one reply encouraged the OP. The overall versatility of apple butter was a common theme, with the spread finding its way into deli meat pinwheels, a coating for pork chops, and a topper on toast.

To get a sense of how you could possibly unlock the magic of Cracker Barrel's apple butter any time you'd like (apart from buying a jar of the chain's bespoke spread), take a look at the heaps of copycat recipes peppering the internet. Common themes are a large amount of apples cooked down, along with cozy spices like cinnamon, cloves, allspice, and nutmeg. Some preparations use apple cider vinegar in lieu of water to lend some tang to the finished product; others sub white sugar for brown. Modern appliances like a slow cooker or Instant Pot make the process painless. We may have just become huge apple butter fans thanks to Cracker Barrel, and you can bet we'll be ordering it when we sit down for a homestyle brekkie! We know the restaurant has discontinued some popular menu items, but we hope the widespread love for apple butter will keep it available — even with an upcharge — for the foreseeable future.