by Bottom Line: The new Ghost Pepper Bread from Subway will not set your mouth on fire, but it does add a nice kick to their fresh-made sandwiches.
Subway has a new bread and it delivers a bit of a bite. Well, it’s sort of new. This is their Ghost Pepper Bread, and it basically appears to be an amped-up version of their jalapeño cheese roll, which has apparently been dropped from the menu for now. Here is the description from the press release:
Ghost Pepper Bread is freshly prepared every day in restaurants nationwide by carefully coating Artisan Italian bread dough in ghost pepper, habanero, and paprika-seasoned panko breadcrumbs, before it is topped with Monterey cheddar cheese and jalapeño slices and then baked to crispy perfection.
This started showing up in the stores at the beginning of the month, and I paid a visit to my local Subway to try it out. Instead of going with their Spicy Nacho Steak or Fiery Meatball sandwiches, which are designed to feature the new bread, I went with one of my standard selections that I call the Spicy Turkey. For that, I get the sliced turkey, pepper jack cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, onions, spinach, jalapeños, sweet peppers, and mustard.
This Spicy Turkey is something that I have been ordering for a while, which is relatively healthy and delivers a nice kick. The turkey is a mild meat, but you get a little bit of heat from the pepper jack along with a nice burn from the jalapeños, which are hotter than you might expect from a national chain. This sandwich was near perfection when they had the spicy brown mustard, but that went away during the COVID crunch. Still, the yellow mustard complements the other hot ingredients, and I would put this sandwich near Medium on my scale when I usually get it with Italian or wheat bread.
But this is all about the new roll, and that did deliver an extra kick. I tried a few bites of the bread on its own, and I did not detect too much burn, maybe around Mild on my scale. However, as I ate through the sandwich, I noticed some decent heat. As it turns out, I ordered this same sandwich the week before, but they were out of the Ghost Pepper Bread, so they gave me just the regular Italian. I definitely noticed a difference on the sammy with the new bread, and I would put it above Medium. This won’t set your mouth on fire, but it does bring some burn.
I don’t know the exact calories of the sandwich that I ordered, but the website shows 310 for the six-inch turkey with no sauce added. The mustard only adds 10 calories, and the veggies I added are all pretty low in calories as well, so we will just call it 325 cals (I saved the second half of the footlong for the next day), which is not bad at all for fast food. You can even get a bag of chips with that and not feel like you have to spend some time at the gym afterward. But if you get that Spicy Nacho Steak sandwich (500 cals) or the Fiery Meatball (670 cals), you will want to go easy on the sides (don’t be looking at the footlong pretzel) and plan some time on the treadmill.
The Ghost Pepper Bread is on loan from Limited-Time-Only-Ville, and my guess is that the jalapeño cheese bread will return once the new one is gone. So if this sounds interesting to you, I would try it sooner rather than later. It definitely kicks up the sandwich, and maybe if sales are good enough, Subway will add it to the permanent menu. And currently they are running a deal for a $6.99 footlong through the app or on the website if you enter the code 699FL.
