Now here’s a blast from the past! Back in my bachelor (read: poor) days, I used to get these quite frequently. They were cheap, pretty decent, and convenient to just grab and go. Now, I have a wife and five-year-old son, and he was the inspiration for revisiting these so many years later. He never wants to eat anything. While these certainly aren’t the healthiest options on Aldi shelves, eating something is generally better than eating nothing, so I figured I’d give them a shot.

In the meantime, I decided to grab a couple extra for myself. Were these as delicious as I remembered? Or was it just the fog of poverty making them taste better than they actually were? I wasn’t sure which way the answer would go, but I was rather eager to find out.

First things first: The price of these have more than tripled in the intervening years, jumping up to around $.79. That’s to be expected, though, as the cost of everything in general seem to be increasing at furious rates. But while that isn’t a dealbreaker in and of itself, it does present an interesting conundrum: Would these taste worthy of the increased price tag? I mean, when something costs a quarter, expectations are much lower than something that costs three times as much. And, while inflation or whatever is inevitable, taste is still the ultimate test of a product’s worthiness.

Each pie is contained inside a cardboard box, with no additional packaging. For those unfamiliar with this kind of “pie”, congrats on being rich! It’s like a Hot Pocket, only with a glazed exterior and apple filling instead of meat and cheese. I was actually surprised that they seem to be the same size I remember. They don’t necessarily appear all that large visually, but there’s a lot of pie here.

After taking a bite, I was also surprised at how good these things are. They taste kind of like an apple fritter from a supermarket bakery, only in a more portable form. The apple filling is combined with cinnamon to form that deadly combination of deliciousness found in most real pies. I figured the contents would be pretty good, but I was most nervous about the pastry itself. I mean, mass-produced pastries can be quite hit-or-miss, and are capable of ruining anything contained within. I have to say that’s not the case here: The pastry is semi-hard, requiring a bit of force to break into. But the glaze makes it sweet and compliments the apples quite well. Needless to say it will be too much sweetness for some

I did forget about one drawback that even affected me back then: These are actually too big. Even though I like the taste, it’s a very one-note flavor that gets old about three-quarters of the way through. So much so, that I always have to force down the last one or two bites (or, in desperate situations, throw them away). 

Even in spite of that, these are worth the money, and a good product to have on hand in case someone is desperate for a snack.

Overall: 7/10. These are pretty delicious “pies” for the price, featuring glazed pockets of pastry surrounding apple pie filling. The innards are your typical combination of apples and cinnamon, but it’s the outer layer that impresses the most. The glazed pastry is perfectly sweet and complements the middle well. Overall, it’s reminiscent of an apple fritter, with quality that equals supermarket bakeries. The main drawback: Its flavor is one-note, leading to burnout by the three-quarters mark for me. Still, it’s a good snack for the price and worth picking up.