The Oktoberfest Dog is the specialty offering at Award Wieners for Halloween Time at the Disneyland Resort.
This spooky wiener is described on the menu in the Disneyland app as a “Kielbasa Sausage topped with Caramelized Onions, Sauerkraut, Oktoberfest Beer Cheese, and Green Onions.”
The dog comes on the standard Award Wieners toasted roll, which is much better than your standard-fare hot dog roll like you’d get at Angry Dogs. It also comes with “Filmstrip Fries” which are quite possibly the best fried potato variety offered in any Disney park.
The roll that accompanied my wiener was a bit mangled from the get-go, and the beer cheese topping didn’t help, so please excuse the mess that is the cut-open photo.
I’m going to go about this review in two parts. First, the toppings, and second, the wiener itself. The reason for this will be apparent when I get to the second part. The caramelized onions seemed to be mixed or smothered by the sauerkraut, so the two are not easily distinguishable. I love caramelized onions, and I wish there were more, but I like sauerkraut too and this wasn’t overloaded and overpowering as it sometimes can be. The beer cheese sauce blended perfectly with the onions and sauerkraut and make a perfect Oktoberfest-style topping for a sausage. The green onions added some color but their flavor was hidden. This was a great combination for a seasonally-appropriate offering from Award Wieners.
The sausage link itself was another story. Mine was the absolute spiciest kielbasa I have ever eaten. Way spicier than the Angry Dog and the Hot Link from Corn Dog Castle. I’ll admit I’m not as big a fan of spicy foods as Tom Corless, but I certainly can tolerate and quite enjoy the heat of the Duck Wings at Carthay Circle, for example. But this kielbasa was an order of magnitude higher on the Scoville scale. Which would have been fine, had I known ahead of time what I was getting myself into. But the menu makes no mention at all of a super-spicy kielbasa link hidden under the cheese and sauerkraut. You can see from the cut-open photo the red peppers inside the link itself. Whether this Halloween Time treat was designed to utilize a super-spicy kielbasa, I’m not sure. Maybe I got one by mistake (although this definitely wasn’t the sausage from the Spicy City Dog also available at Award Wieners). In any case, I’d recommend you inquire first before ordering – if you are a hot pepper fan and want the spicy link, or if you’re heat-averse, it would be good to know in advance just what you’re getting when you order the Oktoberfest dog.
Overall this is a decent dish at its price point. It’s totally in line with the other dogs at Award Wieners, and a much better bang for your buck than the Spicy Pepper Jack Not-Really-A-Dog Corn Dog at Corn Dog Castle. Not to mention a lot spicier, too. Maybe I needed the Oktoberfest Lager with it.