Pillsbury, Oh Boy! Pillsbury Toaster Scrambles with Bacon (Ep 81)

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The Doughboy's off to school, and so are the Bros. This week: Pillsbury Toaster Scrambles pastries with bacon, reviewed just in time for back-to-school breakfasts.

The story: Charles Pillsbury bought a one-third stake in a Minneapolis flour mill in 1869 (dethroning last week's record-holder for oldest company). From the XXXX trademark to the Doughboy's 1965 debut to a surprising stint owning Burger King, the Bros dig into the doughy history that brought Pillsbury to General Mills.

Plus: A new Pop-Tart flavor. How to pronounce biopic. El Niño (Darren regrets calling himself a fan). Little House versus The Waltons. Rosina frozen meatballs. Campbell’s in the freezer aisle. And the Doughboy has a name.

In the closing segment: Two Ice Cold Truths and a Lie. The Bros each tell tales from school, and the other guesses the lie. Music lessons, famous graduation speakers, drag performances, and split pants all make an appearance.

WATCH THIS EPISODE

FROST BITES

XXX: From Flour Power to Full Frontal. Max guessed that the XXX on high quality flour led to the letters on high-proof moonshine jugs during Prohibition, which somehow devolved into adult media. Turns out, XXX was never a standard label for moonshine at all. (Historians blame Looney Tunes for that myth.) Meanwhile, the porn connection has a separate, well-documented paper trail: when the MPAA introduced the X rating in 1968, they didn’t trademark the letter. 1970s adult filmmakers immediately slapped XXX on marquees for maximum shock value. The MPAA killed the X rating entirely in 1990 and replaced it with NC-17. The first film to get the new rating was Henry & June, and yeah, Darren was there.

The PFU: Poppin' Fresh Universe. In March 1965, a Pillsbury ad writer popped open a can of dough and envisioned a tiny dough man springing out. (He was a creative, and this was the 60s.) Poppin' Fresh debuted that November, and by the 1970s, Pillsbury had spawned a whole dough family: wife Poppie, Granmommer, Granpopper, Uncle Rollie, kids Popper and Bun-Bun, Flapjack the dog, and Biscuit the cat. Why haven't we seen the rest of the family in decades? That’s on a knead-to-know basis.

Boy, was he wrong. Resident linguist Darren told us that El Niño means chico. He was kind of right, but the real origin of El Niño is much more interesting. 17th-century Peruvian and Ecuadorian fishermen named the unusually warm Pacific current El Niño de Navidad (the Christmas Child) because it reliably showed up right around December 25. It’s a direct reference to baby Jesus, not just a generic "little boy." Bonus points: La Niña was coined much later simply because meteorologists needed a cooling counterpart and couldn't resist the gender-flipped symmetry.

From Puddle to Powerhouse. The mighty Mississippi River starts out as a downright embarrassing 20-to-30-foot trickle at Lake Itasca, Minnesota. It spreads to 600 feet in Minneapolis, hits a half-mile wide by New Orleans, and ultimately empties into the Gulf of Mexico. But its widest single point isn't anywhere near a bustling port city. It balloons into an absurd 11 miles wide at Lake Winnibigoshish in northern Minnesota. At 11 miles across, calling it a “river” feels less like good geography and more like the Bros were in charge of naming that day.

Garbage Food or Garbage Apps? Pillsbury Toaster Scrambles scored an abysmal 1/10 on Instacart and a tragic 4/100 on Yuka. Instacart partnered with Tufts University to rate food using 54 separate scientific metrics across 9 categories. Yuka, on the other hand, uses a blunt French algorithm that weighs basic nutrition (60%), additives (30%), and organic status (10%). Nutritionists actually push back on Yuka because it aggressively tanks a product's score over harmless micro-gram additives. One app is a credentialed academic algorithm; the other is a dramatic French food snob screaming in horror at your frozen petit-déjeuner. Either way though, this breakfast was pretty horrid.

YOUR COLD CUTS

Do you remember your favorite school day breakfast? Chances are it didn’t include frozen eggs.

Pronunciation. Are you team BI-o-pic or bi-OP-ic? PREF-er-a-bly or pre-FER-a-bly?

And tell us your most embarrassing school moment. We swear to Poppin’ Fresh that we won’t read it on mic. Cross our hot cross buns.

Hit us up on the Let's Chill page and let us know!

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