The Aldi Frozen Breakfast Option We Ranked Dead Last
A little-known thing about Aldi is that it's hard to go too wrong with any of its frozen breakfast foods. Among the options available at this discount grocery chain, none of them were particularly awful. But when we ranked 11 of Aldi's frozen breakfast options, one did, of course, place last.
The Breakfast Best Fully Cooked Maple Flavored Sausage Patties (say that ten times fast) aren't horrible. They have a pleasant, if a little greasy, texture that you would expect out of a sausage patty. But an unpleasant smell of artificial maple permeates the air when you first open the package, and only gets worse during and after cooking.
When eating, the flavor of these patties suffers from the noticeable artificiality of their maple flavor — though perhaps not as much as you might think, given the strength of the odor. It's possible that Aldi used artificial flavoring to reduce costs, or because real maple burns easily, but it's a key ingredient holding these patties back from greatness.
Comparing Aldi's frozen maple sausage -- and making the best of it
Our top Aldi frozen breakfast pick is a reminder of everything that last place did wrong. Pancakes and Sausage On-A-Stick, also from the Breakfast Best brand, are essentially a breakfast corn dog. Here, the pancake's sweetness is appropriately balanced by a mildly spicy and not-too-greasy sausage inside.
These frozen maple sausage patties also pale in comparison to their non-maple version, which scored better in our comparison. The Original patties keep the excellent texture, but lose the cloying artificial sweetness. One Reddit user lamented, "I wish they'd carry these again at my Aldi instead of the nasty maple ones."
Either the Original or Maple flavors can be a great choice for making your own McDonald's-style breakfast sandwich with Aldi ingredients. The Original flavor is ideal, but if you're going with Maple, you can cut the sweetness with a dash of vinegary hot sauce. Consider one of the best hot sauces on the market, like Frank's Red Hot, for a spicy maple sausage English muffin.