Heat Post To 160 Degrees Before Reading

I would consider myself a healthy eater. However, everything in moderation.

And so, today, I bring you a story. A story about setting goals, taking risks, overcoming the naysayers. A story, friends, about looking death in the face and saying, "Is that all you got?"

Well, maybe that's overstating things a tad. It's really a story about eating the World's Cheapest Hot Dogs. How cheap? How about 7.375 cents each! And where does one get such hot diggity dogs? Aldi's House of Cheap Stuff (Most Of Which Can Pass For Food)!

Here's the receipt showing the price of $0.59 (newly reduced from an outrageous $0.65) for 8. You can also see that you need to be "bananas" to buy them.


Below is the package. Notice that these are not beef franks (those babies will run you $1.99 for 8, but they are 2 oz. franks). I'm not sure if the brand is B*Bar or Babar. If you feed these to a child, don't tell them that they are Babar wieners or they won't eat them (also they won't cry when Child Protective Services take you away for feeding them this crap).

You'll note that these dogs are "made with chicken, pork & beef". That wording is between "made from chicken pork & beef" and "made by chicken, pork & beef". Based on the rules of advertising, that means that these dogs at least have chicken, pork and beef nearby when they are made. It's like the other day. I had a friend over and made dinner with her. No part of her was actually eaten. {rim shot}


Note that the label trumpets that these furters are "Fully Cooked" and yet the must be heated thoroughly to 160 degrees. Normally, you heat stuff to that temperature to kill anything that might be living but what could live on these things?

Moving on. Here's the ironically named "Nutrition Facts" label. For every wiener you shove down your hole you can look forward to a rush of nearly 400mg of salt and the energy punch of 10g of fat; perfect post-marathon food.

The first ingredient is "mechanically separated chicken" Did you ever get a double yolk egg? Well, if that egg had been fertilized there's a good chance that Siamese chickens would have hatched from it. Farmers hate this because when they slaughter one chicken the other runs around with a chicken with its head cut off; the craziest site you've ever seen. So the farmers use a high precision mechanical separator called an "ax" to fix what God has eff'ed up.


Next is "meat ingredients" not to be confused with "meat". "Meat" is always some identifiable part like lips, hooves or eye lashes. "Meat ingredients" can not be identified by the finest veterinarians.

Then we have water (another great post-marathon ingredient!) and some other stuff until we reach "potassium lactate". There can't be very much of that though because it is very expensive (do you know how hard it is to milk a potassium?)

A bit further we find good old ascorbic acid which gives these dogs more Vitamin C than a glass of orange juice.

A very small glass.

So ends the preliminaries. Now to answer the big question: "Can you survive if you eat them?"

Obviously yes...but do you want to? I decided to heat mine in a skillet. I had two. One with just mustard then the other with what I thought it needed to taste good.

The mustard one was not very exciting. Somewhat similar to a warm but uncooked soft pretzel. Mushy, salty, nothing to write home about.

To fix things, my second (salty) dog had (salty) mustard, (salty) ketchup and (salty) cheese. This one was much better because, frankly, I put way too much cheese on it.

Get it? Frankly?

Overall, I think these would be great for a cookout for people you don't particularly like, relatives who have over-stayed their welcome and kids' birthday parties before they develop a more refined palate and insist on the 24.875 cent franks.