I’ve been buying this product for decades. It’s always been consistent and pretty good. My first husband and I used to buy it in the early 70s at King Sooper in Denver even though, at 99 cents a package, it was waaaay outside our budget. (The KS 1.5 loaf of bread was 19 cents back then.) Now the same package of salami is almost $5.00, but I still buy it from time to time. It was a mainstay of my low-carbing days.
I bought a package last week and it was completely different and total crap. Very fatty and with a nasty smoky flavor. Turning to the interwebs, I find that many other people have noticed this change (not for the better).
Go to a good delicatessen, buy some hard salami from a good German butcher that they will slice for you, and pay whatever they ask. You will be happier that way.
Reviews on Walmart’s site are numerous and similarly brutal. Either there’s wide consensus, or the OP is rallying a sockpuppet army for a siege on the Oscar Mayer headquarters.
Now that we have that out of the way, maybe the discussion can continue.
Oh for fuck sake. Do you really think that people are unaware that alternate salami exists? The OP wants to complain about one of her favorite products being changed and was wondering if others noticed the same thing. She doesn’t want the “best” salami. She wants one specific kind that was one of her comfort foods.
I don’t really buy that stuff, but 4 years ago I bought such things often on the Appalachian Trail and IIRC it was decent. The other brands were not so much. I also often bought higher end ones. Getting a deli sliced order was not all that practical on trail, you want everything sealed until ready to eat as they last longer this way and offers the most choices of variety.
Just on a whim I bought some a few months ago, and I don’t think I will ever buy that stuff again, don’t know what mush that was, but it was not what I remembered.
That’s really it. I was going to do a whole thread on “products whose quality has tanked,” and open it to similar complaints, of which most of us have many. Then I decided to just limit it to one product made by one company.
I generally agree about Oscar Mayer products, EXCEPT for the hard salami, which has been really good these past 40 years.
BTW, we don’t have delis where I live, so I went to the deli counter at the fancy-schmancy grocery store and sampled two other brands of salami. At its best, O.M. was much better than either of these. It was dry and not slimy/fatty. Had a tangy taste, but not smoky. Neither of the samples had much taste and both were fatty.
I want to drive the Wienermobile!
P.S. Having a deja vu moment: I posted a salami threadin 2013. At that time I WAS looking for the best salami. Boar’s Head was suggested at that time, and that’s one of the not-great samples I had today. I believe the Columbus brand closely approximates O.M.
I was thinking of this thread when I was in the grocery store today. I saw the Oscar Meyer Hard Salami. Has it gotten smaller? My memories of it were that it was the same size as the bologna or cotto salami (so maybe 6 inches in diameter or so), but the packages I saw today were smaller, I’d guess about 4 inches in diameter, and $5.49 for 8 oz (!?) I was tempted to buy it to check with your memories, but I was only an occasional buyer of it, so I don’t think I would remember very well, unless it really took a 180 turn.
The hard salami was always smaller in diameter than the cotto or the bologna-- 4" sounds about right.
What I noticed when I picked up my latest (crappy) package was that the meat looked very fatty, not so much marbled through the meat, but along the edges of the slices. Like there was fat oozing down the inside of the package. It looked weird, but this product has always been consistently good, so I bought anyway. I couldn’t even finish one slice–yuck.
I think your problem is not limited to OM. As you discovered, a lot of the once good brands have gone downhill. I think the push towards restaurants using cheaper cuts of beef (flak steak or flat iron) has lowered the beef available for sausage making. Now producers have to use even cheaper cuts of meat and add fat to maintain the volume in the sausages.
