She's My Cherry Pie -- Cherry Pie

 

As the Lady and I were leaving ALDI last Sunday we made one final swoop back down the frozen foods into what I will graciously call the bakery section. Perched high above the three racks of L’Oven breads was a nearly empty box of single serve Baker’s Treat apple and cherry pies. A steal at $.49 each and I wasn’t the only one who thought so – apple was sold out. If there are two things I love it’s a bargain and pie. So into my shopping car…oh yeah we gave our shopping cart quarter to some family that looked like they needed it more than we did. Sometimes the Lady is a softie.

Side bar – for those of you unfamiliar with ALDI one of the many quirky things about it is you need a quarter, a case quarter, to get a shopping cart. You put a quarter into this manual contraption that chains all the carts together and it lets you pop out a cart. The quarter stays in the contraption until you return the cart to where you got it and then you can get your quarter back out. It’s a fairly ingenious way to get people to return the carts to the store. In fact, unlike Kroger, I’ve never seen a cart rolling around in the parking lot. 

But I digress…on with the review.

It’s pretty decent sized for $.49 and had some weight to it. It had a decent amount of filling, no cherries popping out like the box photo though. I ate the first half cold, right out of the box. It’s insanely sweet. Not a lot of cherry taste to it. The crust has a weird what I would describe as shortening texture to it. It was fairly bad. But as you can see the box says microwavable so I tossed the second half in the microwave for the recommended 20 seconds and – HOLY SH*TSTICKS THAT’S HOT. It literally burned my tongue. A reading with a probe thermometer revealed the internal temperature to be an ER visit inducing 170 degrees. I let it cool off and ate a couple more bites but I think my taste buds had been seared and it tasted pretty much the same only warm. I don’t eat these kinds of pies so I can’t say whether it’s the ALDI brand that’s bad or just these types – I suspect it’s the latter. If you like these kinds of pies you'll probably like this one - I don't.

So giving ALDI the benefit of the doubt I’m giving this a D+ on the A.L.D.I. scale. Disappointing. + for being $.49 and not giving me a headache.