This ‘Aussie Taco’ Is Not a Taco. It’s a Disgrace

On Thursday, the Australian supermarket chain Coles ran an ad in the Aussie Daily Telegraph newspaper featuring a burly, beaming man (namely, Australian cricketer Merv Hughes) holding a hot dog in a diagonally folded piece of white bread. That’s kind of a weird sandwich, you might reason, but nope—something far more insidious is happening here.

Coles calls the sad creation cradled in Merv’s bear paw hands “the great Aussie taco.”

Not cool, and definitely not a taco. People were quick to call Coles out on this erroneous claim. In response to Leon Sjogren’s above tweet, which first brought widespread attention to this “taco” disaster, one commenter wrote, “Aussie taco? Get f**ked, mates.”

A hot dog in a piece of white bread is indeed a thing in Australia. News.com.au reports that across the country, people call this bread and sausage situation a “sausage sandwich” or a “sausage in bread,” and Sjogren referred to it as a “snag in bread.” Other commenters called it a “sausage in a blanket” or “sausage sanga.”

Sjogren told News.com.au that he thought the “taco” bit must have been a typo or a misprint, but then the terrible reality that Coles was trying to turn a “snag in bread” into the “great Aussie taco” dawned on him. “It won’t work,” Sjogren said. “Saying that, I wouldn’t mind trying a snag in a taco shell … that might work.”

But a quick search shows that some people have indeed called the bread-wrapped dog an “Aussie taco” before.

Nevertheless, it doesn’t excuse the poor nomenclature. Imagine if all the countries of the world showed up to some sort of international taco competition with their best takes on a taco, and Australia pulled out this garbage.

That said, for $3 AU, snag in bread is a decent deal—as long as you don’t call it a taco.