It's Meat in a Tube, Vienna Style

If I had to pick one style of food that is the most popular in all of Vienna I'd have to say that it would be grinding up meat and stuffing it into a tube.  Just about every restaurant offers some kind of sausage or wiener.  You don't even have to go into a restaurant to get your "link on" either, there are vendors at just about every corner with selections of tubed meat just waiting to be taste tested.

Most traditional of all tubed meats is the sausage.  It comes in many varieties from the Brautwurst to the Wiener (just an added note Vienna in German is Wien).  In most cases you don't often find these sausages inbetween two buns.  Instead you'll often recieve your sausage whole or chopped up with a slice of  bread and some sauces on a plate.  It's a pretty good way to enjoy the stuff meat tube, but it makes it hard to eat on the go.  Fortunately even the hot dog stands have tables set up so you can eat there comfortably.

The sauces,  for  the most part are fairly simple.   Most common is mustard, and most often this mustard is a spicy mustard that isn't really that hot, but it's a lot stronger than the cheap yellow stuff from grocery stores.  The second most popular sauce is ketchup, although I'm convinced it's just offered to tourists that might be afraid of the mustard.  Most of the time the mustard comes from a tap or pump while the ketchup is offered in sealed packages.  This tells me that it's really not the prefered way to eat your meat tube.

The worst (or wurst if you want to be funny) way I found tube meats available was in a vending machine in a train station.  While I am a big fan of vending machines, and I would even eat a hot dog from a vending machine, in this case I wouldn't even touch it.  This is mostly because it was in one of those corkscrew vending machines next to chocolate bars and chips.  It had no refrigeration and in fact had direct sunlight shinning on it.  While I could have been brave and attempted this treat, I'm concerned it might have had adverse affects on the rest of  my vacation.

As I mentioned yesterday, if you want to combine your love of candy and a meat tubes it's not a problem.  These very realistic wieners are actually made of marzipan, and as far as I know contain no meat at all, that's gotta be pretty good for all of you vegetarians out there.

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