Carolina Cajun Crunch cross-examination

Read Time: 15 minutes

Good day, fellow breakfast sandwich fans.

This is not the first time I’ve written about a sandwich that uses potatoes as the bread. I’ve even shared the most potato sandwich of all time on this blog. I’ve used store-bought or homemade hash browns or tater tots multiple times to add crunch to a sandwich. But this is the first time I’ve done it this week, and because of that, I decided to share how I made my version of Bojangles’ Carolina Crunch sandwich.

What is this sandwich?

This is a breakfast sandwich with no bread that a Southern-based fast-food franchise called Bojangles released in August of 2026 (just a couple of months before this writing). The sandwich ingredients are Bounded not by buns, but by crispy, circular hash brown patties. The rest of the sandwich is pretty solidly in the American breakfast sandwich category with a folded egg, bacon, and American cheese. I’ll let Bojangles’ marketing team give you all the specific details from their press release.

Bojangles shared this promo on Instagram as a crossover piece of marketing with Heinz Ketchup.

Crunchy and delicious, the Carolina Crunch stacks crispy Applewood-smoked bacon, fluffy eggs and melty American cheese, all served in between two extra-large Bo-Tato Rounds® seasoned with Bo’s Famous Seasoning. Inspired by one of Bojangles’ most beloved breakfast fixin’s, the sandwich turns the fan-favorite Bo-Round into the star of an all-new menu item.

Bojangle’s press release from August 3, 2026

So this sandwich seems pretty simple, and it also seems right up my alley as a true breakfast-sandwich-Stan, so I decided to create a version in my own kitchen.

Why Carolina Crunch?

Why is this sandwich named Carolina Crunch? The crunch part is easy. The fried hash browns that replace the biscuit as the bread in the sandwich are supposed to be crispy and give the sandwich a crunch. The Carolina part of the name is most likely just because Bojangles was founded in 1977 in North Carolina and is still headquartered in that state today.

Disclosure: The closest Bojangles to my house is 134ish miles away in a regularly named place called Normal, Illinois. I did not drive the 2+ hours to give this Carolina Crunch a try, so I had to rely on online sources for any reviews or feedback in creating my version of this sandwich. I do have a plethora of experience eating Bojangles, though, and in 2022 I recreated the best combo meal on their menu, the Cajun filet biscuit combo with seasoned fries and a sweet tea.

The best combo meal: I recreated Bojangles Cajun filet biscuit combo, Cajun fried chicken, buttermilk biscuit, seasoned fries, sweet tea, and all.

Because I didn’t get a chance to taste this sandwich, I turned to a very detail-oriented guy I found on the internet.

Joe is Hungry reviewed the Carolina Crunch sandwiches when they were released. If you’re not familiar, Joe is Hungry is a somewhat intense fast food reviewer who posts his reviews to YouTube. His style is very helpful for someone like myself who might want to try to recreate the item he is reviewing.

Through his fairly honed and standardized reviewing process, he buys at least 5 of the items he’s reviewing and will disassemble some of them to get a full breakdown of what you as the consumer should expect. His reviews dive so in depth that he probes the internal temperature of each item and timestamps those temperatures so the viewer will know how long that temperature was recorded after he received the food. He also weighs each of the items that he reviews and shows how the food he received looks in comparison to the marketing that the franchise produces.

I digitally painted my rendition of the Carolina Cajun Crunch sandwich to use for marketing purposes.

If you want to skip the video, I’ve summarized Joe’s review below. Click/tap the black text to see the spoiler.

Spoiler: Joe is Hungry says the Carolina Crunch is a “novelty item without the best flavor combination.” He says Bojangles should stick to biscuits because the Carolina Crunch is a bit fragile (because the hash browns fall apart) and he thinks it’s too salty. He ranks the Carolina Crunch as 5.3 out of 10.

Joe’s review score for the Carolina Crunch isn’t great, but there’s still some pretty good news. We can fix those issues that Joe brings up in our homemade version. Or at least we can control them by making a crispier/crunchy hash brown and also controlling the salt level in our sandwich components.

Because Bojangles considers their chicken, French fries, and Bo-Rounds to be seasoned well with Cajun spices, I decided to lean into that with my version of their Carolina Crunch to create my version, which I’m calling the Carolina Cajun Crunch.

Here are all the Carolina Cajun Crunch components on one cooling rack.

Bojangles fans are embracing the Carolina Crunch sandwich with their whole bodies.

Let’s get one thing straight: this isn’t a healthy sandwich that your cardiologist would want you to eat every day, but other than the large portion of potato, it’s sort of like a typical American diner breakfast. My version of the Carolina Cajun Crunch uses 1 large egg, 2 slices of bacon (that I Cajun-ified), and a single slice of cheese.

Now that we know what sandwich we’re making, let’s get into the individual components.

The bread

Whoa. How’d this section get in here? There’s no bread in this sandwich. Keep scrolling.

Crispy hash browns the easy way

The official easiest way to create the “bread” for a Carolina Crunch sandwich would be to buy the premade hash browns and cook them as they are, straight out of the package. These aren’t round, though, and they’re a bit thinner in appearance than Bojangles extra-large Bo-Rounds seem to be, so I do create a secondary option that I enjoyed more just below. But if you’re just looking for a super quick and quirky breakfast sandwich with no bread, this is what you should do.

You can sauté these hash brown patties in just a touch of oil for the absolute easiest way to cook them, but this method (and any oven method mentioned on the packaging) will not give the patty very much in the way of crunch.

You can substitute a store-bought hash brown for a piece of bread in a sandwich if you’re brave.

The best way to cook these patties in order to achieve maximum crunch is by pan-frying. Sautéing in just a small amount of oil will not bring them to full crunchitude, and deep frying is overkill for this situation in my opinion. Since these hash brown patties are flat, we need to keep them sitting on the bottom of the pan to retain their flat structure. Deep frying will ensure that even the thin sides of the hash brown patties are fully crunchy, but in my opinion it requires too much oil for this situation.

AIR FRYER NOTE: This is where someone on social media or elsewhere will speak up and ask, “What about the air fryer?” I don’t own an air fryer. I have a toaster oven and a regular oven with convection settings, and those do not crisp things up nearly as much as frying in hot oil. I would assume that the small volume of space inside of an air fryer does a bit better at crisping up than a convection oven or sautéing. But I’m going to guess that to get maximum CRUNCH you’ll need to fry in oil. Your mileage may vary, though. Try it and let me know.

So, pan-frying these hash brown patties is the best way to create the crunch that the name of these sandwiches implies, which means we’ll need a pan that can hold up to 1/2 inch or 3/4 inch of hot oil. I used a 10-inch cast iron skillet for most of the pan-frying, but you could use a larger Dutch oven, with just a bit of oil in the bottom that will come up to at least half the height of what we’re frying.

There are several different brands of these that I’ve tried over the years, and they all pretty much work out the same way.

The potato pieces in here are fully cooked in oil, shaped into flat ovals, and frozen solid.

The ingredients list for all of these brands of store-bought hash browns are almost the same. Potatoes, oil, salt, some sort of starch, and typically one preservative to retain color.

Frying in a shallow amount of oil is the best way to cook hash brown patties.

Two metal spatulas are helpful to make sure you can flip these patties without breaking them or splashing too much hot oil.

Season with a touch of salt or, in this case, a homemade Cajun seasoning blend.

You could use tongs to flip these hash brown patties, but I’ve found two spatulas are the best tools for the job. The trick is to make sure you can flip them safely without splashing up too much burning hot oil and also not breaking the hash browns. If you’re just eating them on the side of your scrambled eggs, it really shouldn’t matter if you break the potato patties, but since we’re using them as bread, we want them to stay in one piece.

After the hash brown patties are fully cooked, move them to an upside-down inverted cooling rack laying on top of paper towels and season them immediately.

An upside-down cooling rack on top of paper towels allows the oil from fried food to be absorbed without letting the food get soggy.

The cooling rack keeps the crispy hash brown patties from lying in their own puddle of oil, and the paper towels should wick any oil away that’s touching the metal spokes of the rack. This cooling rack and paper towel combo keeps the patties crisp, and it’s actually a great plan for any fried item.

We now have some crispy store-bought oval hash brown patties, but what if we wanted to step it a bit further and create round, slightly thicker hash browns that would be more similar to an extra-large Bojangles Bo-Round?

Crispy hash browns the slightly harder way

If you go online and follow other recipes that you might find for making McDonald’s-style hash browns patties, you’ll likely start from raw potatoes. Those recipes typically will have you shred a bunch of raw russet potatoes and then rinse and drain them before cooking until tender. Most recipes have you place the rinsed, shredded potatoes in a neutral oil and bring everything up to temperature or until the shreds are tender and almost fully cooked. Then the potatoes are cooled, shaped into ovals, and frozen until firm.

But you can skip all of the above steps by reforming the frozen hash brown patties that I’ve already shown you how to use. If you look at the ingredient list for almost any of the brands of frozen hash brown patties, you’ll see that the ingredients are: potatoes, oil, salt, sugar (or dextrose), some sort of corn or potato starch, and then they all will have one color/preservative. In most cases, the preservative will list what it actually does, which is typically helping to retain the potato’s original color. If you’re ok with this preservative, you can totally use the frozen hash browns to create new shapes and sizes of hash browns.

Since I like to live on the edge, experiment with new things, and also save a few steps, I decided to make the majority of my Carolina Cajun Crunch sandwiches with store-bought fried hash brown patties that I’ve formed into new shapes.

To do the shaping, I used 1.5 thawed hash brown patties that I packed into a 4-inch biscuit cutter to ensure that I had a pretty standard-sized circular tater tot round.

My recipe calls for 3 thawed hash brown patties, with one broken in half.

Stuff one and a half thawed potato patties into a round 4-inch biscuit cutter until they’re packed down tightly.

Do the same with the other 1.5 patties and freeze them until they’re firm. At least 1 hour.

To make up for the thinness, I use 1.5 hash browns per extra-large Bo-Round. This ensures that they are thick enough and sturdy enough to hold a breakfast sandwich easily. Be careful not to break them up too much, and once you have the potato patties inside the rough biscuit cutter, press down very well for about 30 seconds to make sure they’re compact.

Once shaped, place the potato patties on a sheet pan or plate and move the newly shaped patties into the freezer to freeze until just before cooking. If you want to make a bunch of these, you can. Once they are fully frozen, you can move them into a zip-top bag for storage. You’re going to fry them directly from frozen, so once they’re all frozen, you can get them fried in less than 10 minutes or so.

Here’s an animated GIF of how you can turn 1.5 store-bought hash brown patties into an extra-large, crispy Bo-Round.

Carefully lay the still-frozen, circular hash brown patties into 350-ish-degree oil.

Fry for about 3 minutes per side for really crispy Bo-Rounds with a potato center that’s soft and tender.

The potatoes are fully cooked in these store-bought patties, so you’re just shooting for color and exterior texture.

For more flavor, I added my homemade Bojangles-style Cajun seasoning blend on top while the potatoes are still hot.

These are a bit thicker than the store-bought versions because they use just a bit more potato in each patty.

Sure, your sandwich might contain 3 hash brown patties, but who is counting?

The patties are fried for about 3 minutes per side, which should make them very crispy. Remove them to a cooling rack and season with more Cajun spice or just salt if you’re boring.

Allowing the hash brown patties to cool will not only allow some of the oil to remove itself from the situation, but they will firm up and crisp up even more after a couple of minutes of rest time. Cook your eggs and warm up the bacon, and things should be ready to go once all of that is done.

Crispy and crunchy on the outside, but still soft and tender in the middle. Just like you!

Crispy hash browns the hardest way

I did not use this technique or recipe this time, but if you really wanted to, you can make your own hash browns from scratch. This recipe is more along the lines of the recipes that you’ll see recreating McDonald’s-style hash browns scattered across the internet.

It works well, but honestly the end result isn’t that much better or worse than using store-bought hash browns. Use this recipe if you want, and instead of shaping into squares as I did in the photo, just use a circular biscuit cutter, cookie cutter, or even a jar lid to make sure you retain a circle shape.

I made these hash brown patties a couple of years back when I recreated Chicago’s Allez Cafe’s breakfast sandwich.

Going the extra step and making your crunchy hash browns from scratch can be satisfying, so you get an extra star for effort on this one.

Which hash brown technique is better?

In my opinion, as long as you’re not afraid of disodium dihydrogen pyrophosphate, you can skip some steps and just form the store-bought hash brown patties into any shape you want. Then freeze them and fry in 3/4 inch deep oil until super crispy.

You can make your own hash browns from scratch, but I’m just fine saving a few minutes in prep and cleanup by using the store-bought versions.

Bojangles Cajun seasoning copycat

This spice blend is one of my most Google-searched and clicked recipes on Bounded by Buns. It’s a very easy way to create your own version of Cajun seasoning that’s pretty similar to the seasoning that Bojangles uses on their fries and Bo-Rounds. It does require 9 ingredients, but some of them should already be in your pantry.

Even if you’ve never visited Bojangles, you’ve likely already tasted a similar spice blend because Cajun mixes are readily available at every grocery store. You could just use one of those if you have a favorite because it’s going to be close to what Bojangles is using. Bojangles’ version is very mild in spice level, though, so what you buy at the store might end up having more of a kick.

Here are all of the components in my Cajun spice blend.

Once blended, this can be stored in a jar on the counter for a long time. Just shake it to remove any potential clumps before using.

Typically I use kosher salt, but regular iodized table salt has a bit of a smaller size, which works better in spice blends.

There are a lot of Cajun or Creole seasoning blends out there. One in particular that is pretty popular is called Tony Chachere’s Original Creole seasoning. I also keep some Chachere’s on hand for seasoning French fries or meat occasionally. The difference between blends like Chachere’s and the seasoning that Bojangles uses is that Chachere’s has a much lower amount of any sort of sugar or sweetener in the mix. This Bojangles-style seasoning is salty, but there’s also a lot of sweetness from the brown sugar. Feel free to use something like Chachere’s, though if you don’t want to make your own blend. It works just fine on potatoes, in my experience.

Brown sugar Cajun-spiced bacon