Hormel Bacon & Pork Sausage

When I found these Hormel Bacon & Pork Sausages at Price/Rite for 99 cents, I had to try them out.  I could tell from the picture on the box that they probably wouldn't be very good - casingless sausage generally is pretty nasty stuff - but after all, I was only gambling a buck.

Since my expectations were pretty low, I wasn't too disappointed when I opened the box and found a block of bulk sausage meat that had been die cut to form "links."  Except they're not links, Hormel. If they're not packed in casing and linked together, they're not links.  Believe it or not, the picture here actually makes the sausage look better than it did in real life. They were lumpy and loosely formed, and the surface was white with congealed fat.

They were some ugly-looking meat sticks after frying. Several of them broke apart as they cooked because the meat was packed too loosely to hold together. And, of course, there was all that fat.

The flavor was...unique. Vaguely porky, a faint whiff of smokiness from the bacon, and an overwhelmingly cloying flavor of fake maple flavoring. I took a bite of one and that was all I could take. Luckily, the dogs thought the sausage was awesome and that 99-cent box of cheap meat gave me a day's worth of treats for Zim and Iris.

There is nothing worse than fake maple flavoring. I hate the way it tastes, but I hate the way it smells even more. It reeks like boiled-over automotive antifreeze, and it lingers forever. The stink of it hung in the house for days. Fortunately, feeding the "links" to the dogs made them fart, which covered the smell.