Taste Test: Uncle Oinker's Bacon Mints

By Tasha Robinson | January 29, 2008 | 5:06pm

Aux Features The A.V. Club Blog

Due to popular demand and the fact that we love trying weird foods and candies, The A.V. Club will now regularly feature "Taste Tests." Feel free to suggest disgusting and/or delicious new edibles for future installments: E-mail us at [email protected].

Uncle Oinker's Bacon Mints

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At long last, the theory that you can improve anything by adding bacon has been disproven, courtesy of a mysterious, pig-faced individual known only as Uncle Oinker. The presumed ideal for Bacon Mints: Tasty, tiny, refreshing bacon-flavored confections in a convenient tin, suitable for freshening your breath and satisfying your bacony cravings. The reality: Aspirin-like poison pills that offer just enough of a hint of bacon to make you try them, even as you know you're going to regret it.

Taste: Imagine a tin full of sugary hard mints, squirted with liquid smoke and left to fester in the dark for weeks on end. The smell released when the tin is opened is pervasive and suffocating. It isn't minty at all; it resembles a blend of rotting bacon and hot plastic, like raw bacon draped across a traffic cone and left outside in Arizona-summer heat for a couple of days. The taste is sour and richly meaty, like jerky gone bad; there's definitely some mint in there, poking through the overwhelming semi-rotten-bacon taste at odd intervals, but mostly, it's artificial bacon, and a whole lot of it.

Office reactions:

• "I've got a cold, so I can't really taste anything at–Wait. EWWW. That shit is GROSS."

• "It gets more nauseating the longer you have it in your mouth."

• "They smell like Band-aids."

• "I can't even figure out what this tastes like. It tastes like having an aneurism. Seriously, they give me a pain in my head."

• "It tastes like a dog treat."

• "Something's wrong. I consider myself very attuned to bacon, but all I'm getting here is 'sweet.'"

• "There is no way I would want my breath to smell like these things."

• "Oh my God. That really does taste like bacon and mints. These things should not exist."

• "It's like bacon bits and Andes mints at the same time."

• "More like the greasy aftertaste of a bag of smoked almonds, with a festive sprig of mint."

• "It's not the most disgusting thing I've ever tasted. I guess."

• "After 15 seconds, it turns into medicine. It's kind of like bacon, and then it makes your mouth go numb. It turns into Novocaine."

• "You have what? Oh, I can't. There's no way. I would throw up all over you guys."

Once again, we had a Taste Test first: An inordinate number of people in the office took one look at the tin and flat-out refused to taste these. Normally, Onion staffers are pretty game about anything taste-testable, but this time around, we practically had to chase people down in order to get some reactions. Also, it's worth noting that while we still have a good 85 or so of the 100 mints in the tin left, not a single tester has come back for a second one.

Where to get them: The tin says they're manufactured in China exclusively for accoutrements.com (which also sells Uncle Oinker's strawberry-flavored gummy bacon, as well as bacon-flavored toothpicks and this gross-looking-yet-amusing faux-bacon wallet) but they're also available online via other novelties-and-sundries sites like mcphee.com and perpetualkid.com.