High protein breakfast burritos for the freezer

Four freezer burritos at roughly 38 g protein each, made in one pan in half an hour. Wrap them, freeze them, and reheat one on the way out of the door.

··Andreas Stratigis·Certified nutritionist
A breakfast burrito cut in half showing a scrambled egg and vegetable filling, served with rice and salsa
Photo by Gaby Aziz on Unsplash
Prep
10 min
Cook
20 min
Total
30 min
Makes
4

Adjust this recipe

Servings
4

Ingredients

  • 8 eggs
  • 8 egg whites, or 65 g from a carton
  • 4 large flour tortillas, about 64 g each
  • 240 g black beans, drained and rinsed
  • 100 g mature cheddar, grated
  • 120 g sour cream Out of sour cream?
  • 120 g spinach, roughly chopped
  • 120 g salsa
  • 4 tsp olive oil

Method

  1. Warm the oil in a non-stick pan over a medium-low heat. Add the spinach and cook for a minute until it collapses, then tip it onto a plate so it does not water down the eggs.
  2. Beat the eggs and egg whites together with a pinch of salt. Pour them into the same pan off the heat, then return it to a low flame.
  3. Stir slowly and constantly. Take the pan off the heat while the eggs still look slightly underdone, because they carry on cooking in the residual warmth. Dry scrambled eggs are the main way this goes wrong.
  4. Fold the beans, spinach and cheese through the warm eggs so the cheese melts into them.
  5. Warm each tortilla for a few seconds in a dry pan. A cold tortilla splits when you roll it.
  6. Spoon the egg mixture down the middle of each tortilla, leaving a clear border. Add the salsa and sour cream on top of the eggs rather than against the wrap, which keeps the tortilla from going soggy.
  7. Fold the two short sides in first, then roll from the edge nearest you, keeping it tight.
  8. Eat straight away, or cool completely and wrap each one in foil to freeze. Reheat from frozen in a 180C oven for 25 minutes, or unwrap and microwave for about 3 minutes, turning once.

Breakfast meal prep fails for one of two reasons: it goes soggy by Wednesday, or it is so dull you stop eating it by Tuesday. Burritos survive both, because the wrap keeps everything separate and the filling reheats without turning to rubber.

Four of these take about half an hour and one pan. Each one lands at roughly 38 g of protein, which is most of the way to a sensible morning target without a shake.

The two things that go wrong

Overcooked eggs. They keep cooking in the pan after you take it off the heat, and again when you reheat the burrito. Pull them while they still look slightly wet. Eggs that were perfect in the pan are dry by the time you eat one from the freezer.

A soggy wrap. Wet ingredients against the tortilla will soak through it in the freezer. Keep the salsa and sour cream on top of the eggs, in the middle of the parcel, so the wrap only ever touches the drier filling.

Freezing and reheating

Cool them completely before wrapping. Warm burritos in foil steam themselves and you get the soggy wrap you were trying to avoid.

Wrapped in foil they keep for two to three months, which is the FoodSafety.gov figure for baked egg dishes, and it is about quality rather than safety. From frozen, 25 minutes in a 180C oven gives the best texture because the wrap crisps. The microwave takes about 3 minutes and is fine on a weekday, though the tortilla goes softer. Turn it halfway or the middle stays cold.

Other breakfasts to batch alongside these

If you want more than one breakfast in the freezer, the high protein breakfast meal prep guide compares these burritos with six other make-ahead breakfasts on estimated protein per serving, and shows what each one needs to reach 30, 40 or 50 g.

Making it higher protein

The two swaps above the ingredients do most of the work. A high-protein wrap in place of the flour tortilla and Greek yogurt in place of the sour cream together add around 8 g of protein, most of it from the wrap, and take off about 55 calories per burrito, without changing how it tastes much.

Both are estimates from typical ingredient values rather than measurements, and they move with the brands you buy.

Corrected on 26 September 2026. This page said 620 calories and 37 g of protein a burrito, without saying how big a tortilla it assumed. The recipe now gives the tortilla’s weight, about 64 g, and a burrito recomputed from it and current USDA values is about 662 calories and 38 g of protein.

Where next

This recipe is one of the dishes in High protein breakfast meal prep, and what each one actually gets you, High protein meal prep: one Sunday, five days, about 100 g of protein a day and How to hit your protein goal without tracking every meal.

Worth cooking next:

Cooking it as part of a week? ReciPop plans seven days of meals around the time you have, the appliances you own and how many you are feeding, then turns them into one grocery list sorted by aisle. How the weekly plan works