“MOAR!  GODDAMN IT I SAID MOAR!”

~AFFotD Food Critic, John Goodman

As we’ve mentioned time and time and time again, America loves Fried Food even more than we love Hulk Hogan, and don’t get us started about how much America loves the Hulkster.  The moment you choose to fry a food, you make it unhealthy and therefore delicious, and anytime someone says, “I don’t think you can deep fry that” they are automatically deported back to France and are placed in forced mime labor camps, where they must spend their days wearing white face makeup while they pretend to break and move boulders while trapped inside invisible boxes.  And they totally deserve their fate—when someone asks you if you would eat a deep fried sports car, the correct answer is, “Holy shit, where can I find that!” not “Uh, no, you…you realize that our bodies can’t consume metal, no matter what you do to it, right?”

And as summer approaches, so does State Fair season, which is that magical time of year where aspiring fry chefs look to get middle America as fat as possible without causing their hearts to explode, like some obesity version of Jenga (once things start wobbling you have to wait for it to settle before finishing the piece).  So in that fine American tradition, we are here to clue you in on even more fried foods created to take you that one step closer to just giving up and intravenously pumping melted butter into your arteries between meals.

America’s Most Insane Fried Foods:  Part 5

When Fried Foods were a relative novelty, people used to go up to chefs and ask them what they were thinking, why they chose to bread and deep fry that particular food.  While hundreds of years ago, a chef might have had to say, “I felt that frying the mozzarella would enhance its flavor, while leaving it in a semi-solid state that would melt in your mouth” or some such nonsense, chefs now can politely retort to such inquiries by saying, “DON’T QUESTION IT JUST PUT IT IN YOUR SLOP HOLE C’MERE LITTLE FATTIES OINK OINK OINK!”  And as you look for a grease filled napkin to wipe away your chubby little tears, you’ll be able to fill that gaping maw in your soul with the following delectable treats.

Deep-Fried Ice Cream

We don’t know much about science, but we do know that the reason why we don’t cook things that can melt is that the process of cooking them tends to, you know…melt them.  It’s not like anyone’s tried to deep fry a Popsicle…holy shit, wait, someone needs to get on that (or, correction, someone who isn’t a Chinese person writing in comically broken English, get on that!).  But this logical gap didn’t apply to ice cream, which not only has been fried, it’s not even a relatively new phenomenon.  Apparently, as soon as people started realizing that you could deep fry candy, they figured out that you could bread ice cream, quickly deep fry it, and be left with a hot-yet-cold sweet and fatty treat for your taste buds.

If you’re going to fry something, you might as well fry something that defies the very laws of physics.  We’re pretty sure that 90% of our research into cold fusion technology rests on the hope that we can someday learn how to deep fry a raindrop, assuming we can take that technology and use it on single solitary tears rolling down the cheek of an Indian watching someone pollute.

Of course, we’ve managed to find ways to improve on this technology (the frying cold, viscous desserts thing, not the tears of a shattered people one).

Deep-Fried Key Lime Pie

What do you get when you take a pie that has been scientifically proven to be far more American than apple pie, roll it up in a tortilla (because reasons) and fry the whole bastard until any pretense at nutrition is gone?  Apart from being a syringe away from Dexter Morgan’s version of euthanasia, you’ve got an American treat delicious enough that you’d consider stabbing your fork through the hand of whoever tries to take the plate away from you before you’re done.  As a general rule, if you’ve created a food that can inspire general bloodlust, you’re doing something right.

Of course, key lime pies aren’t the only addictive dessert available in their fried form, since it’s a matter of time before you’ll see shrieking pony tailed girls trying to sell you…

Deep-Fried Girl Scout Cookies

“Hold the fucking phone, AFFotD-“

We don’t have a phone, hypothetical-reader-being-used-for-humorous-convention.

“…Well, no, that’s just a phrase-“

We know, we were just being a dick.

“Right.  Anyway, is this even legal?  Girl Scout Cookies are pretty much the most addictive thing on the planet, right alongside heroin, pornography, and Law and Order SVU marathons.  What kind of cookies were deep fried for the 2012 Texas state fair?  Tagalongs?”

Nope.

“…Oh God, Thin Mints?  Deep frying Thin Mints seems like a shortcut to the ICU…”

Oh, no, it’s far worse than that.

“….Samoas!?”

Yes.

“Oh sweet sugary Jesus, so does that mean…”

We all have diabetes now, yes.

“Well…worth it, right?”

Yup.  100%.

Deep-Fried Twix and Deep-Fried Cinnamon Toast Crunch

Deep frying cereal is not something that should be taken lightly.  One small misstep and you go from “taking concentrated sugar orbs and frying them” to “deep-frying special K like some sort of fucking chump.”  Thankfully, food vendor “Chicken” Charlie Boghosian, the man responsible for the deep-fried Twinky and deep-fried Kook-Aid balls (heh, balls), knew that if you were going to deep fry breakfast cereal, you had better stick with the extremely sweet ones, like Cinnamon Toast Crunch or Twix (moment of silence for French Toast Crunch, which couldn’t be included in this wonderful day since they stopped producing it in 2006, the bastards).

Just look at those beauties up there.  Well, don’t stare too hard—if you look at them without blinking for 30 seconds, Wilfred Brimley loses a foot.  If you fed these to Paula Dean she would instantaneously dissolve into sweet tea.  Everyone who has ever tried eating this now no longer can give a reliable reading of their insulin levels, since all test results come back as saying, “Man, I fucking give up, just do whatever you want, I don’t even care anymore.”

But all of these fried treats lack one important, American quality.  That’s right…we want something that’s fried that can get us drunk.  Well look no further, because holy shit you guys…

Holy Shit It’s A Deep-Fried Frozen Margarita!

No, no, we’ll say it again.  Holy shit, it’s a deep-fried frozen margarita!  We could tell you that this is funnel cake batter mixed with margarita (yes, including tequila) that is fried, and then drenched in additional margarita before being topped with whipped cream in a salt-rimmed margarita glass.  We could tell you that this was served in the Texas state fair for anyone over the age of 21, because, again, it uses real tequila and can actively get you drunk.  We could tell you all that, but really, what’s important to keep in mind here…

Is HOLY SHIT IT’S A DEEP-FRIED FROZEN MARGARITA!

America, you make us so proud, sometimes.  We know we don’t say this enough, but…we love you America.  You fuckin’ get it, man.

Now if you’ll excuse us, we’ll be falling into a drunken food-and-diabetic coma after properly snarfing down all of these delicious, American dishes.

“…YOINK!”

~American Chefs

We’re all familiar with the term “Ethnic food.”  It’s an easy, catch-all phrase that we tend to interpret as “shouldn’t your drunk ass be reaching for something American like a hamburger instead?”  Chinese Food, Mexican Food, other foods that tend not to be open as late or taste as delicious when drunk so we’re not even going to bother to list them, yes all of these are foods of foreign nations that America has begrudgingly accepted with open, inebriated arms.

Of course, the popularity of Ethnic Food would make us a little upset at the lack of Americans preferring to eat steaks with an American Flag tastefully branded into it during the cooking process if it weren’t for one surprising fact.  Most of the best Ethnic Food isn’t Ethnic at all.  It was invented right here, in the USA.

That’s right.  If this list from Mental Floss is to be believed, any unhealthy food you can do, we can do better.  So what else can we do but go through each American invented “ethnic” dish and discuss how American it was for us to hijack their cuisine and put our MSG loving paws on it.

AFFotD Reviews The Five Ethnic Foods That Were Invented In America

The more we think about America taking Ethnic Foods and adding their own personal touch to their best dishes, the more it makes sense.  Sure, we can eat Mexican food, or we can take ingredients used in Mexican food and stuff it in a motherfucking Dorito.  It’s called assimilation, and if you can’t make your food unhealthy enough for us to appreciate it, you can get out.  That’s why we’re glad, but not at all surprised, to see  that the following foods have American origins.

General Tso’s Chicken

In the 20^th century, an influx of Chinese immigrants to America created a sudden demand for Chinese cuisine.  Of course, those who wanted to make assloads of money knew they had to make food that Americans would appreciate as well.  Since Hunan cuisine was a little too spicy for the tastes of Americans at the time, it was decided that the best way to get our fat asses eating some Chinese prepared chicken would be to deep fry the chicken and add sugar to it.  Because why limit your needless caloric additions to a dish with simple deep frying when you can make it give you cavities as well?

And really, is there anything more American than looking at an entire regions food and thinking, “Well, that’s all well and good, but we could introduce more fat and sugar into the mix”?

Nachos

This one makes so much sense it’s almost surprising people don’t automatically assume that this was an American based tradition.  While Tortillas are Mexican, the idea to cut them up and fry them so they can support massive amounts of meat, cheese, and jalapenos is so blatantly American Tostitos probably considered calling themselves “Uncle Sam’s Clogged Aortic Valve.”  Tortilla chips were first created when El Zarape Tortilla Factory decided to find a way to make people pay for their misshapen and unsellable tortillas.  From that point, it was only a matter of time when someone said, “What if I smother this in chili and cheese and other unhealthy but delicious ingredients?”  The only proof that this was invented in a border town instead of the heart of America is that no one decided to just chop up bacon, hot dogs, and hamburgers, and scatter it on top of these.

UM WAIT HOLY SHIT WE NEED TO DO THAT RIGHT NOW!

Cashew Chicken

This is pretty much the same as General Tso’s Chicken, only it was invented in Springfield, Missouri.  A Chinese chef noticed that, surprise, Midwesterners liked their chicken fried, so he fried some chickens, put some nuts on top of it, and decided to give a hearty middle finger to people with nut allergies.  But this is old hat.  Moving on.

Spaghetti with Meatballs and Garlic Bread

Apparently, Italy has meatballs, and they have red sauce, and they have spaghetti, but no one in Italy ever decided to make giant meatballs, douse them in red sauce, and stick it on top of pasta.  And you know what?  We’re okay with that.  We’ll gladly take credit for this, spaghetti and meatballs are delicious.

But what we’re proudest of is garlic bread, which apparently isn’t even close to a thing in Italy, which we’re more than happy with.  America just looked at bread, said, “it’s too bready, what if we stuck a clove of garlic and a stick of butter on top of this fucker and bake it,” and it was so.

Fortune Cookies

Surprisingly enough, we couldn’t be any more neutral about this being an American product.  Because while fortune cookies are alright, no one really cares that much about the taste of them.  The only time we truly love getting fortune cookies is when the person writing them has a poor grasp of English or spell checking, and they say things like “You long find time happy” or “All your present plants will succeed.”  In fact, this is the only item on the list that would be better if it were invented somewhere else, just because we like making fun of people who don’t know how to rite English that god.

But hey, we’ll take it.

“Can’t you just buy 600 McDoubles and a follow up quadruple bi-pass instead?”

~AFFotD Food Critic, John Goodman

Americans love hamburgers.  It’s less costly and far more portable than steak, and it’s one of the most convenient ways to cram red meat into your colon that’ll never go away.  They’re also delicious and unhealthy and we said that already.  Of course, the reason why we eat a hamburger instead of ordering a steak is that it’s typically much cheaper to get a nice quality burger as opposed to a delicious un-ground-up chunk of animal meat.   

However, as much as America loves economic gluttony, we also love rubbing our excess wealth in the faces of everyone less fortunate than us.  Similarly to why Ron Jeremy chose a profession where he could allow as many people as possible to see his penis, many of America’s elite like to order food that reminds you that no matter how hard you studied for that Philosophy degree from one of the nation’s top universities, none of it did anything to help you earn that 15% tip they’re about to leave you that should be able to cover this month’s rent.

Sure, you can spend two dollars to stuff a McChicken inside of a McDouble, but why not show off your American know-how by ordering a hamburger that’ll cost as much as the inevitable doctor’s appointment you’d have to book after your encounter with the McGangbang?  That’s why we’re here to present you with a not-particularly-exhaustive-because-we’re-honestly-super-hungover-right-now list of…

America’s Most Expensive Hamburgers

Why is America the greatest country on Earth while Japan is always, goddamn it, doing it wrong?  Because Japan is a country where you can spend one hundred dollars on a bowl of soup, while America prefers to give you a hunk of meat with, like, gold and shit sprinkled on it.  Don’t question the logic, it doesn’t even have to taste good, all that matters is if it’ll make the orphan you paid to watch you eat it cry.

And that’s the great thing about orphans.  They always cry.

Now, we’ve previously touched on the novelty of giant burgers, which will set you a pretty penny, but it takes a special kind of advantageous chef to manage to convince consumers that a small piece of meat is somehow worth hundreds of dollars.  Which is why we are here to salute, and empty our wallets for, these delicious (probably, we can’t really afford to try them) burgers.

The Richard Nouveau:  $175

Ever since the whole Occupy movement hit the streets, there’s been a dialogue about the 1% versus the 99%, with a specific focus on the greed inherent in Wall Street.  Some members of the upper crust saw this situation and attempted to look at it with an open, rational mind, and others, like those at the (now closed) Wall Street Burger Shoppe, decided to raise their middle finger to poor people and sell a burger for more money than most desk workers make in a day.

For those would rather spend the average month’s utilities bills to have a bowel movement that isn’t as smooth as you’d expect given how much you paid for the meal, the Richard Nouveau is made from 10 ounces of Kobe beef (Well, “Kobe Beef” as it’s actually impossible, legally impossible, to have Kobe Beef in America), 25 grams of black truffles, a seared slab of foie gras, aged Gruyere, and of course, the whole thing is sprinkled in gold flakes, proving once and for all that the forty-niners struggled for nothing, since all they had to do was wait 160 years and camp out in a rich dude’s toilet if they wanted to strike it rich.

Here’s the important thing to keep in mind with that picture up there.  Look how much of that gold isn’t on the burger.  There are gold flakes in the mayo, flakes on the plate, on the lettuce…after you’ve eaten this burger and wiped your mouth with pictures of starving Africans, you’re left with a very important question—what do you do with the leftover gold?  It has literally no flavor or nutritional benefit, but the man who spends $175 on a hamburger (with just a normal poppy seed bun, we might add.  Seriously?  Can’t even put that shit on a pretzel roll?) doesn’t strike us as the kind of man who would sweep loose flakes of gold into his pockets to get his 25 cents from Cash-4-Gold.  So do you just eat the gold for the hell of it?  And also, will the voices of everyone you’ve wronged to get where you are in life ever stop screaming at you every time you close your eyes?  If we had to guess, we’d say the answers would be yes, and then no.  They’ll never stop.

Never.

Le Burger Extravagant:  $295

If you’ve managed to create a burger that costs as much as a monthly lease payment on a car without going the “put some gold on it, bitches!” route, you either have an outstanding combination of decadent ingredients, or you’ve realized that there are douchebags in New York who will literally order anything so long as it’s referred to as “The most expensive burger in the world” and has a menu that discusses the ingredients with more nuanced detail than someone suffering from OCD trapped in a room filled with Magic Eyes.

Serendipity 3 is a café that supposedly appeared in the 2001 romantic comedy, a fact that our staffers didn’t remember because we were too busy staring into Kate Beckinsale and John Cusack’s soft, gentle eyes.  They’re known for making a $1,000 sundae, a $69 hot dog (heh), and for making their own table salt that is derived from the dried tears of the homeless.

The latest step of their plan for humans to just evolve to the point that they only can subside on hundred dollar bills is Le Burger Extravagant, which of course if French for “Fuck you, we’re not translating any goddamn French on this site, this is America, assholes.”  At nearly three hundred bucks, this Wagyu beef burger is infused with 10-herb white truffle butter, with toppings including shaved black truffles, hand-formed cheddar cheese that has been cave-aged for 18 months (remember when we said “the more nuanced your description of an ingredient, the more you can trick people into thinking it’s worth a fuckton?), a fried quail egg, and Salish Alderwood smoked Pacific sea salt (see previous parenthetical).  This is all placed on a white truffle-buttered Campagna roll, which has a dab of crème fraiche with Kaluga caviar on the top, all of which is speared with a solid gold toothpick incrusted with diamonds.  Because if you’re not gonna have diamonds on your toothpick, what was the point of closing down that Children’s Hospital to put up a new condominium complex, huh?  They don’t call them blood diamonds for nothing.

The Douche Burger:  $666

666 Burger is a food truck in New York City that makes it harder to make fun of them because they are inherently aware of how retarded this burger is.  They describe the burger by saying it “may not taste good, but will make you feel rich as fuck.”  It is a “Kobe” beef patty that is stuffed with foie gras, wrapped in gold-leaf, and smothered with caviar, lobster, truffles, Gruyere melted with Champagne steam (whaaat?), and a BBQ sauce that’s made using Kopi Luwak coffee (to save yourself a link click, it’s the world’s most expensive coffee, brewed from coffee beans that were fed to, and subsequently crapped out by, Asian palm civets.)

We’ve got to admit, the folks at 666 Burger are our kinds of Americans.  In fact, in reading a Q&A of Franz Aliquo, the man behind this burger monstrosity, we’re pretty sure we’ve fallen in love, or at the very least, we’re ready to send him a bottle of AFFotD whiskey that doubles as a job offer.   Here are some choice quotations.

“The idea came from our deep-seated disgust and hatred of all the other douche burgers out there.  A burger is just meat, bun, and cheese.”

“I mean, what’s the point of putting gold flakes on your food?  It doesn’t add to the flavor, it’s just to be able to say you ate gold flakes.”

And of course, when asked if anyone could actually buy this burger, he responded, “Absolutely.  I’ll tell you that you’re an asshole, but I’m still going to take your money.”

For those wondering, only one of these burgers has ever been sold, which actually has given us a new found confidence in the intelligence of American consumers.  Well, only temporarily.

The 777 Burger:  $777

Have you ever wanted to poop an iPad?  Well, if you go down to Le Burger Brasserie in Paris Las Vegas with an expense account and a severe over-estimation over the economic value of the work you do, you can be just 24 hours away from getting as close as you ever will when you send $777 worth of food on a one way trip through your gooey insides.

The 777 Burger is made from quote-un-quote Kobe beef with fresh Maine Lobster, caramelized onions, imported Brie cheese (…isn’t most Brie imported?), 100 year aged Balsamic vinegar, and to make it actually kind of worth the price tag (but not really at all) a bottle of Rose Dom Perignon champagne.  Which makes perfect sense—most people who spend nearly $800 on a hamburger would prefer to be given enough alcohol that, if they finish it by themselves, will leave them having a hard time remembering the actual taste of the burger they just ate.

We normally would try to come up with a more clever way of saying, “If you are the kind of person who would unironically purchase this burger, we hate you, and if you ordered it ironically, we still hate you,” but, really, if you’re the kind of person who would unironically purchase this burger, we hate you, and if you ordered it ironically, we still hate you.

“Oh, haha AFFotD, that’s…”  No.  Shut it.  We’re 100% serious.  We hate you.  With hatred.

FleurBurger 5000

Five.  Thousand.  Dollars.  This burger, served at Fleur de Lys in Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas will cost you five.  Thousand.  Dollars.  Granted, it comes with a bottle of 1995 Chateau Petrus, which normally costs about $2,500, and it comes with Ichendorf glasses, which you get to keep.  But otherwise, it’s a pretty underwhelming way to spend the down payment on a small house.  It is a Wagyu beef and foie gras burger patty, which comes with a truffle sauce, shaved black truffles, served on a brioche truffle bun, probably having been cooked in a truffle burning oven after being prepared by Truff L. Truffle, the celebrity chef who gained notoriety when a tragic gamma ray/gene splicing accident made him part man, part black truffle.

Of course, the cows from which the Wagyu was procured were each hand fed by Chef Truffle, using only the finest truffles from the truffle mines of India, a thing that no one was aware existed until this very minute.  Each cow was named after truffles, there was Truffle Moo, Truffle Tasty, and of course, Truffle Shuffle.  After burning truffle inscents around them for days, they were humanely dispatched, and their meat was gently massaged in truffle oil and the meat was ground into burgers using a rare meat grinder which is made primarily out of, you guessed it, truffles.

Oh, and don’t worry, when you order it, you get a certificate of authenticity to let your friends know exactly how much of a money-tossing tool you are.  We can only assume that the certificate is made out of pulped truffle.

uSocial Burger:  Bidding Starts at $10,000

This burger is thankfully only available one time through a charity auction held by an Australian advertising agency.  While on one hand, we appreciate their unique approach to charity, we sort of hope no one actually buys this, because whoever would want to buy this should probably hold onto that money for their son’s ransom, erm, we mean, for their…kid’s…college fund?  A blend of Australian Wagyu beef with a solid white truffle core, it’s topped with aged cheddar, Jamón Ibérico de Bellota, which is a rare Spanish ham from free-range pigs who feed only on acorns during the last period of their lives, the whole thing is then covered with sliced white truffle, 24kt gold leaf, and saffron.  Finally, it’s placed on a black truffle brioche bun, and every time you take a bite into it, a masked man runs up and hit’s you in the dick with a sock full of quarters because you’re the kind of asshole who would spend ten large on a burger.

Now, at this point you might point out that this burger is not technically American, like the other entries in this list.  And while that’s technically correct, we’d have to point out two things.  First of all, fuck you, there’s a reason why we never want to hire a fact checker.  And secondly, Australia is basically America at this point, and you know that if anyone actually buys this, it’s going to be some dick-nozzle who is sitting sullenly in his Central Park penthouse after deciding not to buy a Douche Burger after the food truck owner called him an asshole.

Because he is an asshole.  But at least he’s an asshole with a whole crapload of gold flecks floating down his small intestine.  For what that’s worth.

“Okay, okay, cool it with the fried foods, my…my chest, my chest hurts, it really hurts…”

~AFFotD Food Critic, John Goodman

We’ve made it a habit to go out of our way to tell you about fried foods that most people would consider “impossible” or “an abomination” or “as a professional cardiologist, I think it is criminally irresponsible for you to be consuming this much fried food.”  That’s because as soon as we tell you about a new, insane fried food (fried beer, anyone?) some glorious American decides to fry something even more insane (like, say, a frozen margarita).

This is called capitalism (also obesity) and it is the reason why this country is great.  It’s with that spirit in mind that we present to you even more American glory, with…

America’s Fried Foods:  Part 6

America’s greatest culinary achievements can best be described as Uncle Sam whipping your heart with its own aorta while screaming, “stop hitting yourself, stop hitting yourself.”  If you’ve ever eaten something that’s made you think, “Was that a burp, or a heart spasm?” then you’ve done your duty as an American.

That’s why we love the following foods.  Because every time you eat them, you pause for a moment, because you could have sworn you heard a tiny whisper of, “Please, no more” come from inside your chest.

Fried Club Salad

Salads are disgusting, because someone once told us they have these things called “nutrients.”  The fuck is that?  But sometimes you mess up your grocery run, and end up with more lettuce than hamburgers to put it on.  What do you do then?  Well one intrepid American decided, let’s deep fry the fucker.  So, they made a salad out of chicken, ham, iceberg lettuce, carrot strips, cherry tomatoes, bacon, and cheddar cheese (because even if you’re making a salad unhealthy by frying it, it helps to have it be pretty unhealthy to begin with), roll it up in a spinach wrap, and then fry the sucker.

The only way we could imagine this being better is if the salad inside was one of those Midwestern salads that’s made out of cool whip and marshmallows, and if the outside was just fried dough.  Come to think of it, holy shit why hasn’t someone invented that yet?!

Fried Biscuits and Gravy

Holy mother of God, look at that.  We can’t even figure out how it’s made, but we know it came out during last year’s Texas state fair, and we know that we want a dozen of them right now.  Every time someone eats one of these, the nearest Weight Watchers has to close for the next week.  Whenever these monstrous delicacies are put in the deep fryer, a treadmill somewhere will suddenly combust.  If you’ve ever eaten an entire order of this by yourself, surprise, you’re actually dead and walking the world as an unknowing ghost and will need the help of a child with special vision to show you the way to the afterlife!  Spoilers!

Deep Fried Bacon Wrapped Cheddar Hot Dog On-a-Stick

And fried foods might have just jumped the shark.  This item, available in the Wisconsin State fair, is a hot dog, covered in cheddar, wrapped in bacon, and is skewered lengthwise with a stick that, upon watching people eat it, we are sure will stab dozens of mouths this summer.  We can only imagine the meeting where they decided to make this.

Wisconsinite 1:  “Let’s deep fry a hot dog”

Wisconsinite 2:  “Naw, that’s played out, that’s old hat, see.”

Wisconsinite 1:  “Uh… we could douse it in cheddar first?”

Wisconsinite 2:  “Naw, see, it wouldn’t stay in place, ya mook.”

Wisconsinite 1:  “…then let’s wrap the whole thing and put it on a stick.”

Wisconsinite 2:  “Now, see, that’s the bees knees, I tell ya, I’d eat that six ways to Sunday.”

Wisconsinite 1:  “Why are you talking like you’re a parody of a 1920’s fast talking gangster?”

Wisconsinite 2:  “Nyeah, I think I’m having a stroke, see.”

We’re not saying that eating this will be delicious, with the downside being that you are guaranteed to stroke out, but we’re pretty much saying that.

Deep Fried Stuffing

We’re pretty sure Paula Dean responded to her diabetes diagnosis like those guys who get arrested for catching chlamydia and then purposely going out to have unprotected sex with as many women as they can.  That’s the only way we can try to understand the fact that not only does this unhealthy version of an unhealthy side exists, but she’s telling you how to make it at your very home.  Listen, we’re pretty sure it’s illegal to post the schematics for a nuclear bomb on the internet, and we know for a fact that you’ll get in some deep trouble for going to those sites, yet no one has a problem with anyone with a skillet being able to look up how deep-fry fat-soaked bread?  We’re pretty sure that most doctors would consider this a form of domestic terrorism, is what we’re trying to say.

That said, if you’ll excuse us, we’ll be frying up as much fried stuffing as we can fit in our chomp holes.

“Pizza pizza, go in my tummy, me so hungie, me so hungie.”

 ~The Worst

While America can’t lay claim to the invention of pizza, we certainly eat it better than anyone else.  Pizza has become an integral dietary requirement of drunks and stoners alike, and even if Pizza Hut gets a little weird with it overseas, it is a simple yet effective grease-delivery advice.  At its core, pizza is just bread, cheese, sauce, and whatever topping you want to choose in order to start arguments with the coworkers who are also stuck working late with you.

Of course, people say the same thing about hamburgers, and look what rich people have done to that.  That’s right, America, it’s time to take out your monocles, practice your best “Character from Monopoly” accent, and try to contain your natural inclinations to begin a class war, as we present you with…

The World’s Most Expensive Pizzas

When ordering a pizza, most of us have a budget somewhere between “how many gallons of grease can I get for every dollar spent” and “I want to impress my date, so a twenty dollar deep dish pizza it is, then!”  This is largely for the same reason that most of us buy tooth brushes instead of bribing third world adoption facilities to get you an army of underprivileged children trained to scrape away all your dental plaque every night using their tiny little malleable fingers.

Of course, if you can afford the health insurance for your poison-testing butler, you’ll probably have no problem shelling out for a slice or two of these exorbitantly priced pies.

Gordon “Fucking” Ramsay’s Commercially Available $178 Pizza

When you go to eat in London, you expect to eat either some hodgepodge of animal intestines with all the semblance of flavor broiled out of it or something that tastes good while a former soccer player yells obscenities at you.  True to form, if you head to Gordon Ramsay’s London restaurant, Maze, you will find what the folks at Guinness incorrectly label as the most expensive pizza in the world, coming in at $178 per pie.

The pizza itself, which is available on the restaurant’s everyday menu with no advanced notice needed if you order it, is baked in a wood fire and topped with onion puree, fontina cheese, baby mozzarella, pancetta, mushrooms, white truffle paste, pickled mizuna lettuce, and a letter from Gordon Ramsay personally informing you that, even though you just spent nearly two hundred bucks on a pizza, your date clearly is not impressed as she and the chef are currently entwined in the physical act of love in the nearest broom closet.  As you take your first bite and notice the empty seat in front of you, you can’t help but think that onion paste doesn’t sound like a very fancy ingredient to put on such an expensive pizza.

The $450 Pizza That’s Covered In Lobster And Caviar

How many of you have actually had caviar?  Like, the actual expensive, Russian sturgeon, kind?  Not to be vulgar, but it sort of tasted like fish vagina, didn’t it?  We’re not saying it tastes bad, we’re just saying that we suspect a lot of the reason why people pay so much for it is because it’s viewed as a rich-person thing to eat, as opposed to just fish eggs that taste like sorta like a fish’s snatch until you put a dab of sour cream with it.

So maybe we’ve established ourselves as biased, but we think that putting caviar on a pizza seems like a waste of both the pizza and the fish vajayjay.  Steveston Pizza Company out in British Columbia, Canada, clearly feels differently, as they have concocted a $450 pizza that is covered with Lobster Thermidor (“Thermidor” being a method of preparation that is French for “if you haven’t heard of this, you can’t afford it”), black Alaskan cod, and some Russian Osetra (douchebag/Russian for “sturgeon.”  Just say sturgeon) caviar.  Unlike Gordon “fucking” Ramsay’s pizza, this one needs to be ordered a day in advance (because, typically, Lobster Thermidor takes about a day to prepare), and while it’s not been flying off the shelves, as of June, 2012, at least one person has actually sat down and ordered this pizza.  That person was described by this pizza’s chef, Nader Hatami, as “A very rich person,” which of course is code for “this guy was the worst.”

If you ever drunkenly approach a well-dressed stranger and, for no discernible reason, punch him in the face, it’s probably because you could tell that he’s the man that ordered this pizza, no doubt while saying something like, “I bet this pizza costs more than your rent” to his waiter before taking his first bite.  And you’d totally be in the right for hitting him, because fuck that guy.

If You Spend $1,000 On A Pizza, You Still Have To Pay Your High-End Escort For Her Services At The End Of The Night

Taking things back to America (“It’s about time, AFFotD!”) we have the Bellisimia Pizza from Nino’s Restaurant in New York City, a pizza costs as much as renting out a skywriter to spell out the words “Fuck You Poor People, haha!” assuming you don’t mind hiring non-union.  Because it would be patently absurd to expect to pay that much for a pizza without it sounding like it would taste disgusting, the pizza has $820 worth of six different kinds of caviar, while also being covered with lobster, salmon, and wasabi paste, because if you’re going to spend $1,000 dollars to have a pizza served to you by the love child of Joe Pesci and Grandpa Munster, it might as well sound horrible.

We have to give these pizza chefs credit though—have you noticed how small all these pizzas look?  Seriously, you’re making people pay hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars for a pizza, and you can’t scrounge together enough ingredients to cover an 18-inch pie?

Why Put Gold On A Pizza?  Uh…Look Over There, TRUFFLES!

Margo’s Pizzeria in Malta decided to make a thin crust pizza with white truffles, buffalo mozzarella, and 24-carat gold leaf and sell it for a cool $2,382.66, because it would be too easy to just charge three grand for it.  According to the linked article, the pizza, “has already been ordered twice by a local hotelier, who had to be persuaded not to have tomatoes on the pizza, as the acidity clashes with the taste of the truffles.”

You can roll your eyes at the pizzeria that decides to make a tomato-less pizza covered in gold and charge over $2,000 for it, but you can’t help but legitimately loathe the man who sees a pizza retail for that much and decides, “I’m going to buy this, but first, let’s see if I can have them change the ingredients first.  And then I’m going to try again.”  This pizza has to be ordered a week in advanced (but hey, at least they’ll include delivery costs if you want to eat it at home and away from the hungry eyes of those lesser plebeians you feel such contempt for), which also means that this nameless hotelier had to twice pick up the phone, call Margo’s and say, “Hey, I’d like to buy your gold covered pizza.  Yes, next week is fine.  And can you make it lousy with tomatoes?  Are you sure?  I really like tomato sauce on my pizza.  No, I don’t know what a truffle is, I just wanted to purchase this pizza to compensate for the emotional void that I’m constantly trying and failing to fill with material items.”

At Least This Pizza Is For Charity

James Bond is pretty cool.  He shoots people, sleeps with exotic women, and drinks martinis until he finds a way to make millions by ordering a goddamn Heineken.  But one thing you never see James Bond do is eat a slice of pizza.  Think about it, have you ever seen someone take a bite out of a pizza and thought, “Oh man, that was so suave and cool.”  No.  It’s impossible to look badass while stabilizing the front end of the pizza with one hand and awkwardly tilting your head to take that first chomp.  So while we can forgive Chef Domenico Crolla of Glasgow for making a $3700 pizza back in 2006 for charity, we have to question why he’d want to name it the “Pizza Royale 007.”

Crolla says the name comes because Bond is luxurious, much like this pizza, which is topped with champagne-soaked caviar, cognac-marinated lobster, an organic sunblush tomato base, Scottish smoked salmon, medallions of venison and, you guessed it, delicious, odorless, flavorless gold sprinkles.  We can’t speak too ill of this pizza, just because it was made to raise funds for a charity that finds ways to prevent curable blindness in developing countries, but seriously, what a stupid ass name.  Pizza Royale.  Groan.

Pizza Hut Wants You To Propose At A Pizza Hut (And Possible Conceive A Son In Their Bathroom)

There’s nothing particularly special about this pizza, other than the fact that for $10,000, on Valentine’s Day 2012, Pizza Hut was willing to supply you with limo service, flowers, a fireworks show, a videographer, and a $10 dinner box to go along with a red ruby engagement ring.  Because, let’s be honest, if she was going to say “yes” after you spent ten grand to take her to a fucking Pizza Hut on Valentine’s Day, she won’t care if the ring has diamonds or not, she’s already too busy thinking about how she’s going to fuck the pool boy as soon as you go to work on Monday.

Of course, finally, that leads us to the most expensive pizza we’ve yet to encounter.

Yeah, for $12,000 You’d Better Make The Damn Pizza In My House

At least the website for Renato Viola’s Louis XIII Pizza is honest.  “Louis XIII:  Very Expensive Pizza.”  For those of you who clicked the link and began screaming in justified American rage at seeing a foreign language, the pizza-making process involves three chefs (the pizza-maker, sommelier, and a separate chef) bringing ingredients to your home, where they will construct a pizza containing eight different kinds of cheese, three kinds of caviar, lobster, prawns, Squilla Mantis (which is unfortunately just a Mediterranean species of shrimp, not a badass B-movie about a hip-hop part-squid-part-praying-mantis), pink Australian sea-salt, and of course champagne and cognac are involved, because why do you even care at this point?

We’re just sort of numb to all of this excess by now, so if you’ll excuse us, it’s time for us to find the cheapest, greasiest slice of pizza from a hot-plate rack at a liquor store we can find.  Now that’s quality.

“Well, to be fair, can you think of a breakfast food that WASN’T invented as a way to cure hangovers?”

~Hmm…you’ve got a good point there, actually

Americans developed an infatuation with breakfast as soon as it was named the most acceptable time to eat bacon.  Of course, it helps that it’s an extremely versatile meal as well.  If you’re running late in the morning, you can just put some milk on random dried grains doused in sugar, or pick up some sort of surprisingly unhealthy egg sandwich from a fast food joint.  And when it’s the weekend and you can take your time, you can create something meticulously crafted to cure every kind of hangover you can possibly imagine (for more information, buy AFFotD’s “101 Different Types Of Hangovers, And Their Cure” on Amazon.com next fall).

There are of course many staples of the American breakfast that are worth praising.  Pancakes, waffles (a.k.a. pancakes with syrup traps), bacon, omelets, all of these are delicious and, when done right, incredibly unhealthy ways to combat the fact that you drank two four lokos last night before playing flip cup with vodka cranberry at a random party before stumbling into a cab, texting your ex, and yelling at the cab driver when you erroneously assume he’s taking you the wrong way.  But arguably the best American breakfast dish that can help you momentarily forget the shame you’re feeling as you have to send off an apologetic group text the following morning remains…

Eggs Benedict:  The Best American Breakfast With The Least American Name

When you first heard the name “Eggs Benedict” you probably assumed that the dish was named after noted American traitor/the picture we sometimes put up on our dart board when we get tired of having the French flag up there, Benedict Arnold.  We’ve pondered this very issue on our Facebook page, because the two don’t seem to really go together.  One is an English Muffin covered with eggs, ham, and Hollandaise sauce used to cure hangovers, while the other was an American general who turned over West Point to the British before defecting to their army.  But, do not worry, Eggs Benedict fans, this tasty open-faced sandwich not only isn’t named after the traitorous turncoat, but it was invented nearly a hundred years after his death.

What?  Then you mean to tell us this picture isn’t 100% factually accurate?

The general consensus is that the Eggs Benedict first appeared on menus no earlier than the late 19^th century, and recent years have seen dozens of variations of the delicious meal.  In its purest form, the dish consists of two halves of an English muffin that is topped with ham (or bacon), poached eggs, and Hollandaise sauce (basically an emulsion of egg yolk and butter).  There are of course versions of this dish that use corned beef (Irish Benedict), salmon (Eggs Hemingway), or asparagus and crab meat (Oscar Benedict) and all of them are fucking delicious, but these are merely adaptations of the initial dish, which remains about the closest a drunken brunch can come to achieving perfection.

So how did this delicious template of artery-clotting goodness first spring into existence?  Well, there are three prominent stories regarding the origin of this particular breakfast sandwich, though we’re going to save the most likely for last (it’s most likely because it was made explicitly as a hangover cure.”

Origin Story 1:  Edward P. Montgomery writes a letter to The New York Times Magazine from France (ugh) with the recipe, attributing it to Commodore E.C. Benedict

This one seems hard to believe for a couple of reasons.  First of all, you should never trust a letter from an American ex-pat living in France.  Secondly, if Commodore E.C. Benedict did invent the Eggs Benedict, you think that’d be the first thing mentioned on his Wikipedia page, because that’s an important enough rumor to warrant at least a thousand words of explanation.  But, the fact remains, food critic Craig Claiborne wrote a column in September of 1967, where Edward Montgomery claims the dish was invented by Benedict (who died in 1920), with the recipe passed on to him by his mother, whose brother was friends of the Commodore.  If that sounds needless complicated, and especially suspect because Montgomery went 40 years before sharing it with anyone, we’d have to agree with you.

It just goes to show you, do not trust letters from France, as it is a nation of lies.

Origin Story 2:  Mabel Butler calls Edward Montgomery out, probably implies that France is a nation of lies, says Delmonico’s invented it

Two months after the publication of Clairborne’s column, Mabel Butler sent a letter to The New York Times Magazine saying, in as polite of a way as possible, “You shut your whore mouth, Edward P. Montgomery, I know who invented the Eggs Benedict.”  According to her, she was a relative of Mrs. Le Grand Benedict, who lived with her husband in New York around the turn of the century, and would dine every Saturday at Delmonico’s.  One day, Mrs. Benedict asked the maître d’hotel if they could get her something new and off menu (you might remember this scene playing out in the movie Ratatouille).  When he asked for a suggestion of something to cook up (because he clearly wasn’t very good at his job) she suggested poached eggs on toasted English muffins with ham, Hollandaise sauce, and a truffle on top, because whenever someone asks us to make up a dish off the top of our hands, we all tend to ask for five separate specific ingredients that come from three different culinary traditions.  Obviously.  We don’t mean to say that the Le Grand Benedict family are full of shit, but they are absolutely full of shit.

That’s why we choose to believe this final tale.

Probably The Actual Origin Tale:  Lemuel Benedict was hungover as shit at the Waldorf in 1894

This is what really happened, folks.  Back in 1942, The New Yorker did an interview with a retired Wall Street stock broker named Lemuel Benedict, who claimed he wandered (stumbled) into the Waldorf Hotel in 1894 hoping to find a hangover cure.  He ordered himself “buttered toast, poached eggs, crisp bacon, and a hooker of Hollander.”  We know you just got really excited by the inclusion of the word “hooker” there, but unfortunately “hooker” was just an old-timey term for, basically, a shot of booze.  The maître d’hotel of the Waldorf, Oscar Tschirky, decided the dish was delicious (duh), and added it to his menu, replacing the bacon with ham, and replacing the toast with toasted English Muffin.

Of course, this has to be the real account.  Because only the collaboration between a hungover stock broker and the man largely known for popularizing Thousand Island Dressing can really explain how such a glorious American breakfast item could come to our collective consciousness.

So thank you, Lemuel Benedict and Oscar Tschirky, for curing untold millions of hangovers, and causing untold thousands of coronaries.  And screw you Benedict Arnold, just because.

“No, no no no, please, I’ll say anything you want, just please stop making me eat these dishes, NOT ON THANKSGIVING GODDAMNIT!”

~AFFotD Food Critic, John Goodman

Thanksgiving is one of the most incredible American holidays imaginable.  If you’re anything like our staff, you relish the opportunity to drink beer and watch football as your family members awkwardly assume outdated gender roles while you wait to get drunk enough to start lecturing your nieces and nephews about the unfair pricing practices of the local Filipino rub and tug massage parlor.  Listen, we’re just saying, given how much the happy ending costs, we’re pretty sure that tip should be included in the price already.  But we digress.

This is a wonderful time of year, a time where we can sit back and reflect on all the Indians we’ve brutally slaughtered in the past, and give thanks for the fact that turkeys are so ugly that they’re just begging to be beheaded, plucked, and put in an oven for half a day.

But sometimes, dark storm clouds gather over what should be a joyous day.  Maybe there’s a Lions fan in your family.  Maybe everyone tries another one of those pesky “interventions” because “when you drink you get angry and say hurtful things” which would mean, you know, no day drinking.  Or maybe, God forbid…a vegetarian somehow ends up being in charge of your food options.

So when we were made aware of this article by the Mother Nature Network entitled “5 Amazingly Tasty Vegetarian Thanksgiving Options” we couldn’t contain our bloodlust.  No turkey?  Really?  Fuck Mother Nature Network for even positing such a terrifying alternate reality.

Let’s take a look at this list.  May God have mercy on our souls.

Baked Stuffed Acorn Squash

If we ever asked someone what they were bringing to our Thanksgiving dinner, and they started off by saying “baked stuff…” we’d get really excited because we’d assume they’re bringing stuffing, and stuffing is delicious.  But you know what makes stuffing delicious?  The fact that you don’t put meat in it, but it’s still not a vegetarian food because it’s cooked by the kitchen appliance commonly known as “a turkey carcass.”  However, when they finished the sentence with “..ed acorn squash” they’d no longer be our friends, because what the hell kind of sick joke are they playing at?

The recipe for this includes mushrooms, cherries, sage, bread crumbs, and half a cup of hot water, which honestly is the most worrisome ingredient on the whole list.  We’re not going to read what the recipe entails because, eww, it sounds like it’s trying to be healthy, but if you’re using water as a primary ingredient and you’re not making a soup, we just don’t trust you.  Then again we also won’t trust you if you try to bring a fucking baked squash to sabotage our dinner of green bean casserole, canned cranberry sauce, and gravy doused turkey, you asshole.

Lentil, Mushroom, and Spinach Gratin

The beauty of Thanksgiving is that you know exactly what you’re eating by its name, which is conveniently in English.  Turkey.  Mashed potatoes.  Makers Mark.  You know, the staples.  But what the fuck is gratin?  Sounds French to us, so we already hate it.  And the ingredients required for this particular dish include… fat-free egg substitute?  That’s a thing?  God, see this is exactly the problem with all these so-called “healthy dishes.”  You show up to a thanksgiving dinner bringing some vegetarian fat-free egg substitute containing lentil, mushroom, and spinach dish expecting it to help you live a longer, healthier life, when really the host is going to poison it since they’re 100% sure you’re the only one who is going to eat it, and no one will miss you when you’re gone.

Spinach Barleycakes

You know how in Clockwork Orange they brainwash that guy into having a visceral, agonizing reaction every time he listens to Beethoven because it was something that he once deeply loved?  We think that’s what the Mother Nature Network is doing to us with cake.  We love cake.  Cake is delicious and it sometimes gives you a reason to pretend to give a shit about your co-workers birthday so you can get a sanctioned twenty minute break.  Why the hell would you do this to cake?  What did cake ever do to you, you monsters?  This is like finding out that those stories about snakes coming up through the toilet while people use them are real—even though we’ll probably never encounter it, we’re going to spend the rest of our life assuming we will.  Every time someone offers us cake from now on, we’re going to have to ask “…not spinach barleycake, though, right?”  Goddamn it.  Goddamn it so much.

Quick Garbanzo Gravy

Okay now you’re just fucking with us.  You’re honestly going to try to make one of the best things slather on your food from Thanksgiving and try to take the meat out of it?  You think that beans are an appropriate substitute for the very essence of a turkey’s soul?  Who hurt you, Mother Nature Network?  Who hurt you to make you this way?

Squash-Stuffed Shells

If you’ve managed to get to the point where you’re describing your fifth and final vegetarian dish to the people sharing the table with you, and you’ve not yet been tarred, feathered, and run out of town on a rail, you might want to double check and make sure you’re not just celebrating Thanksgiving by setting up eerily lifelike mannequins around the table in your studio apartment again like last year.  Quick, are there PAX re-runs of Touched By An Angel on the twenty inch box screen TV that flickers the only light in the room?  Does your fridge have multiple soy-based protein products?   When you read “Meat is delicious” is your initial instinct to go on a diatribe about the poor conditions livestock are raised in?  Did you let yourself get excited about five “vegetarian” Thanksgiving dinner suggestions?  Well, at this point are you really surprised no one wanted to spend Thanksgiving with you?  Given the choice between inviting “the loner who doesn’t eat meat” and “the guy who shows up drunk with this” every host in America is going to choose the latter every time.

And, because we actually care about this great holiday, and we care about you, here’s a picture of a bacon-wrapped Turducken as our way of apologizing for showing you such foul, foul foods.

Have a Happy Thanksgiving, America.

“No, we can’t write about Wendy’s!  THEY’LL FIND US!”

~Johnny Roosevelt, AFFotD Editor-in-Chief

As some of our more intrepid readers might remember, AFFotD has a dark history with one particular American fast food establishment.  Yes, for a period of time every spicy chicken sandwich you ate directly helped feed the AFFotD gambling debts coffers, but it came at the cost of our souls.  Also at the cost of a few of our weaker family members, and one of our staffers house cat. Eventually, we were able to free ourselves from the corporate shilling curse, and continue to be independently drunk and American.

Of course, Wendy’s knew we couldn’t keep from talking about them forever.  And after a few hard hitting exposés about Japan’s attempts at subverting American fast food, we  discovered that Japan treated Wendy’s the same way they treat just about every goddamn fast food chain, so we figured we’d be safe of Wendy’s Necronomical influences if we talked about it, given that they were received so meekly in Japan that in 2009 they closed all 71 of their Japanese locations.  Unfortunately, this lasted less than two years, and now Wendy’s has again opened its doors to Japanese terror culture.  As of now, there are only two restaurants in the entire country, but that of course hasn’t stopped them from making nightmarish culinary creations that, despite our misgivings, force us to exclaim…

Goddamn It Japan, You’re Doing It Wrong:  Japanese Wendy’s

In America, Wendy’s is considered a slightly classier fast food establishment than your Burger Kings and McDonald’s.  They brag about how their square burgers are always fresh, never frozen, and they’re not afraid to put their spicy chicken sandwich on fancy bread with fresh jalapenos.  Since Japan always tries to take an American idea and then enhance it until it borders on insanity, Japan’s latest incarnation of Wendy’s has decided, fuck it, let’s make sandwiches that are so expensive you wonder why you don’t just bother trying to go to a nice sit-down restaurant to get a cheaper, probably better, burger.  It’s basically like they read our article about expensive hamburgers, and decided “Yeah, but how can we do that with fast food grade burger patties?”

Oh, and before we get into the list of absurd menu items, to answer your slightly-racist question—why yes,  Wendy’s in Japan is hosting a Cosplay contest.  Because, of course they are.

The $16 Foie-Gras-And-Truffle Wendy’s Burger

We’re not going to lie, this burger looks like it could actually taste good, as opposed to most of the terrifying creations that come out of Japanese fast food kitchens.  This is a basic Wendy’s hamburger that’s topped with Foie Gras and Truffle, because who says “Wendy’s” can’t mean the same as “Fancy”?  (The dictionary, that’s who).  This Wendy’s burger (which again, we cannot stress this enough, at it’s very core is just a fast food hamburger patty) was sold for 1,280-yen, which is about $16.45 is non-gibberish money.  And even with the truffle and foie gras, that seems excessive.  There are hamburger places throughout America that make burgers with equally decadent toppings, and they rarely cost more than, say, $12 if you’re going to the right places.

Admittedly, apart from the price, this doesn’t seem totally batshit insane.  Yes, by charging more for a burger than most other places you’re effectively doing the opposite of what ever fast food company in existence has ever done, but it’s not like they’re going off the deep end by making every burger of theirs impossibly expensive, right?

The Surf & Turf Wendy’s Burger

Apparently, Japanese Wendy’s doesn’t serve anything that costs less than $16 bucks, because here is a $16.28 burger that literally is just a typical Wendy’s hamburger with some lobster meat plopped on it.  Look, Japan, we’re glad that you’re not trying to make the bun out of cheese stuffed shrimp or something like that, but at this point you’re making a product that’s more expensive than you’d get anywhere else.  They took a $3 burger, put a single lobster claw on top of it and were like, “So, what, that should be an extra thirteen bucks, right?”  We’ve found restaurants that’ll put lobster in your mac and cheese, and that only cost us an extra four clams, and yes that pun was intentional, and yes it was awful, but anyway we’re still pretty damn sure there was more lobster in that meal than they’re putting on this burger.

It’s like Japan has forgotten how to make something that’s appetizing, fancy, but not fucking insane, so they just decided everything would sell for $16 and they’d just throw together random, fancy sounding ingredients.

The Lobster-And-Caviar Wendy’s Burger

Oh Goddamn it, you’re fucking with us now right?  So you decided that, for the same price as the previous burger, you would just get rid of the hamburger patty and replace that with fucking caviar?  Okay, you’re starting to understand idiotic-rich-people cuisine, but in the process, might just be forgetting that you’re a fucking fast food restaurant.  What we actually are most bemused by is that Japan’s Wendy’s decided they want to make fancy, super-expensive burgers, that they forgot that most people adjust all the other ingredients accordingly.  Why does a burger that is just lobster and caviar on a bun need to have lettuce, tomato, and onion on it?  Do they want to make sure that by keeping the onion on there you couldn’t possibly taste the lobster or caviar you’re paying for?  This is the closest we’ve ever seen Japan get to doing something right, and goddamn it, they’re still doing it wrong!

Fuck It, There’s A $20 Wendy’s Lobster Salad, Too

Yeah, it’s basically lettuce, egg, cherry tomatoes, red onions, avocado, lobster, and caviar.  Or, essentially, they took the goddamn caviar and lobster burger and replaced the bun with avocado, and decided that was enough to boost the price another four bucks.  Listen, we’re not going to mince words here—if we ever catch you paying $20 for a salad, we will hunt you down like cattle.  We’re just saying.

Whatever The Fuck This Is

This is apparently a Mont Blanc-flavored roll cake that Wendy’s sells too.  We don’t know how much it costs, but knowing the people in charge of the Wendy’s over there in Japan, it’s probably more than a Spicy Chicken Sandwich over here.

So to recap—the one fast food restaurant in all of Japan that decided to make things that looked like they could actually not taste like insanity decided to totally ignore the meaning of “Fast Food” and make overpriced, faux-gourmet hamburgers and salads.  Japan…why do we even try to teach you the right way to do things at this point?  Goddamn it.

“Why would you go and do that to a perfectly good hot dog?”

~AFFotD Food Critic, John Goodman

America’s tireless of cholesterol-boosting culinary delights have yielded some of the most delicious foods imaginable.  Our can-do attitude allows us to not only invent the key lime pie, it drives us to invent a way to fry a key lime pie.  We’ve crafted the perfect hangover drink, and we’ve learned how to make pizza alcoholic.  And of course, we as a nation are also responsible for the most efficient and glorious nitrate delivery system—the hot dog.  The hot dog is the epitome of America’s culinary excellence, but for every delicious meat tube scarfed down in an eating competition, there is a monstrosity created by someone overreaching to try to make a hot dog something it is now.

Hot dogs are cheap, delicious, American, and can support a multitude of region-specific toppings, but sometimes we go too far.  And while we salute those who try to push hot dogs upwards to dizzying heights, we also caution them that sometimes one may soar too high, and it’s best not to look down.  Especially when you are creating…

America’s Strangest, Most Terrifying Hot Dogs

Hot dogs are a lot like your wife’s college years—you’ll be a lot happier if you try not to think about what went into them.  The hot dog is a tube of meat that we put into a piece of bread we cut in half, but it’s of course much more than just the sum of its parts.  Sure, the perfect hot dog already exists, but each hot dog and bun is a blank canvas ready to birth a masterpiece.  Sometimes this leads to someone putting chili and cheese in your toilet on a hot dog.  And sometimes, it leads to hot dogs like the following.

The Chocolate Éclair Hot Dog

This entry into insanity actually comes from our neighbors up north, but we’re going to assume that they smuggled some American transplants to come up with this terrifying idea.  Listen, we’re all for combining savory and sweet food items, but  it feels sort of unholy to see someone stuffing a hot dog into an éclair.  We can’t put our finger on it, but our best guess would be that saying “stuffing a hot dog into an éclair” sounds like a really obvious sexual euphemism, but since it’s with an éclair it sounds like it would involve a French woman?

Listen, we know it’s really easy to make dick jokes about hot dogs, but you’re not really doing the food any favors by replacing the bun with a pastry that’s filled with cream.  Come on guys.  Of course, more American-based sweet-and-savory hot dog combinations don’t seem any less unsettling.

Brownie Corn Dogs

Yes, this is real.  Hey, if you want to make them yourself, here’s the recipe.  No one has really thought of combining hot dogs and brownies before, but that’s mainly because no one has ever looked at a hot dog and thought it would be a good idea to drizzle chocolate over it.  You know how every once and a while there’ll be a nature show, or an episode of Survivor, where someone bites into a fig and thousands upon thousands of baby spiders start crawling out?  Well, it doesn’t matter if you’ve ever seen that before, because that’s the official sponsor for your nightmares tonight.  You’re welcome.  What we’re saying is, with that image in our head, the idea of biting into a brownie and finding chunks of meat in there that, let’s be frank, look kind of like human fingers at first glance does not sound particularly appetizing.

See, even if you didn’t think that the picture up there looked like fingers before, you do now.  And again, chocolate on a hot dog?  That’s…that just sounds gross.

The TNT Super Dog

Okay, full disclosure, we’d actually eat the hell out of this hot dog.  But, much like mainlining an obscene amount of heroin at once, or having sex with Angelina Jolie after she’s mainlined an obscene amount of heroin, while we’d enjoy the experience, we probably wouldn’t survive it.  Available at Pasadena’s The Slaw Dogs, this sumbitch takes a foot-long Vienna beef hot dog, adds beer chili, cheddar, bacon pastrami, French fries, grilled onions, and a fried egg, and wraps it all together in a tortilla.  If you asked us to make a sketch of this so-called Hot Dog, we think we’d be able to pretty accurately represent it just by drawing a heart monitor as it’s flat-lining.

The Big Hot Dog (Gun Not Included)

Jesus Christ.  This porn star’s greatest nightmare is said to be enough to serve 40 people, though there’s not much useful advice as to how.  You’d probably have to cut it into segments with a knife, which makes this less of a “hot dog” and more of a “the world’s most disappointing prime rib carving station.”  Listen, this is America, and bigger is always better, especially when it comes to phallic heart attack expeditors, but your dinner should never come with the option of “eat it, or cut it open and crawl into it like a goddamn Tauntaun.”

Whatever The Fuck This Is

We don’t know who was the first person to decide to insert raw spaghetti through chopped up hot dogs and boil the whole terrifying concoction, but we wouldn’t be surprised if one of these days a few dozen bodies turned up in their yard after a particularly heavy rainfall.

“We have to go deeper…*VROOOOM*”

~Cheese-ception

It’s been a while since we’ve taken the time to be topical and relevant for you.  Sure, there have been epic articles describing every state in America, or telling you about terrifying educational rap videos from the 1990’s, but we’ve mainly been educating you on the past, as opposed to the present.

That’s not always been the case.  We’ve had moments in the past when something was so important we just had to tell you about it, even if the article was so rushed it’s not even worth clicking here to read it (seriously, we missed some opportunities by not having an “Osama is dead” article in the can before that shit went down).

While the days of a monthly news post are gone, that doesn’t mean we can’t occasionally bring relevant discussions of current American issues to the forefront.  As you’ve no doubt noticed with Facebook profiles lately, there are potentially monumental changes for the country on the horizon.  We would be foolish if we didn’t address them in a calm, straightforward manner, since it is something that will touch the lives of millions upon millions of Americans, and it would be irresponsible to pretend it’s not happening right this moment.

That’s right.  Doritos is making a Doritos Locos Tacos flavored Dorito.  Yes.  Inception finally has an official junk food snack.

AFFotD News Item of the Month:  Doritos Locos Tacos Doritos Will Doom Us All, Taste Delicious

We all remember when Taco Bell announced they would sell a taco whose shell was made out of nacho cheese Doritos.  While AFFotD staffers thought, “Yes, this is amazing…AMAZING!” some asked questions like, “What the hell are they thinking?” and “No wonder Americans are so fat” which isn’t even a question, dumbass, but we thank you for the compliment on our ability to eat.  Making a taco out of potato chips sounded like something a persuasive five-year old would force his inexperience babysitter to make for him as dinner, not something prominently displayed on a nationwide fast food purveyor’s menu.

Of course everyone wanted to try one.  Just one.  And unlike other novelty items that you’ll try once, say, “Well, that was surprisingly unsatisfying,” and go on living your life until the inevitable coronary sets in the next day, people ate the Locos Tacos.  And kept eating them.  To the tune of one million a day.  By the end of last year, the Doritos Locos was responsible for 15,000 jobs being added to the economy last year, and despite costing less than $2 a taco, over half a billion dollars were spent eating Taco Bell tacos made out of Dorito shells last year.  Why did we keep coming back?  Well, a few states did legalize marijuana during the elections, but it’s simpler than that.

The product simply works.  When you’re first told “Taco shell made of Doritos” you think, “God, combining two unhealthy foods, how typically (read as, awesomely) American.”  But then it starts to make sense.  We like cheese on our taco…and when your cheap, 35%-beef-beef taco is surrounded by cheese you’re focusing less on the quality of the “meat” and more on, holy shit this is pretty delicious, what’s that, it’s only a buck thirty?  Rock on.

Okay, yes, the stoner contingency absolutely helped boost those figures, too.

So as Taco Bell recently launched their Cool Ranch version of this groundbreaking taco (which not nearly as fun as the nacho cheese flavored one, simply because it looks like a normal taco), Taco Bell found a nation grateful for the new, groundbreaking ways they could get us fat on the cheap, while also highlighting America’s finest qualities by proving that, yes, we can revitalize an economy by mashing together two unhealthy snacks that’s specifically geared for drunk and stoned people looking for food at three in the morning.

America is nothing if not restless, and our fine marketing minds couldn’t rest knowing that there had to be some way we could continue to capitalize on this trend.

The answer of course, was Inception.  Well, it’s like watching the movie Inception, only your breath smells bad for two days.  That’s right, we took these Nacho Chip flavored tacos and made them nacho taco flavored chips.  With science. 

Or chemicals.  Whatever.

We’ve yet to try these chips, but we can only imagine they’d taste like the original chips, only with a hint of meat and lettuce added to it.  Is it groundbreaking?  Not really.  Will we order a bag?  You bet your sweet candy ass we will (we apologize to all readers who do not have asses they’d describe as being “candy”).  Will it eventually cause a downward spiral that leads to a Doritos Tacos Locos made out of Doritos Tacos Locos Doritos, and then a Doritos Tacos Locos Dorito Tacos Locos, and so on, and so on, ad infinitum?

Well, probably.

Uh…

VROOOOOOOOMMMMMM

No matter what dystopian future where Tacos Locos become our currency and only the Taco King can reign supreme this will eventually cause, we can at least take a step back and appreciate how American we are that we can even make our chips meta as shit.

“That’s not a pizza, it’s a damn casserole!  I feel strangely threatened when I see different versions of a food my city’s supposed to be known for!”

~New Yorkers

At its heart, pizza is just cheese, dough, and tomato sauce, topped with whatever additional ingredient you want.  Inherently, pizza exists to breed creativity and adaptivity.  In the hands of madmen and foreigners, this culinary freedom can be disastrous, but in the hands of true Americans, this can create an unhealthy, delicious American meal glorious enough to single-handedly keep additional-belt-hole-punchers in business.  One of the most glorious examples of this, of course, is the Chicago-style pizza.  Less of a pizza pie, and more of a pizza cake, Chicago’s deep dish pizza gives you as much fat, grease, and cheese as you’d expect to find from a city that’s primary gift to the realm of fine cooking involves hot dogs and roast beef dipped in its own juices.

So with a casual, “Get over it, yes, we get it, you guys are proud of your pizza, and you have good pizza places, but stop acting like you’ve done anything original to the style just because you use special tap water to make the crust” to our now-livid readers in New York, AFFotD is proud to present you with…

The History of Chicago-Style Pizza

For those readers who have never been fortunate enough to taste Chicago’s take on pizza, you might look at a single slice of pizza and consider it more of a “snack” than a “meal.”  Sure, if you eat enough slices you’ll get full, but you can say the same thing about Kraft singles or thin mints.  Chicago-style pizza (we’re going to ignore Chicago-style thin crust, because meh) as you know it is a deep dish “stuffed” pizza pie, with crust up to three inches tall at the edge, and ingredients piled up to a similar height.  While most pizzas are layered with the cheese on top, Chicago-style pizza makes a thin-to-medium-thick dough crust before putting ample amounts of cheese and ingredients in the middle, dousing the whole thing with chunky tomato sauce at the top.  We don’t have the nutritional information on hand for how many calories each slice has, primarily because when you search for, “How many calories are in a slice of Chicago-style pizza?” google comes back with a youtube video of George Wendt laughing at you.

The Chicago-style deep-dish pizza was invented at Pizzeria Uno in 1943, and most accounts claim that Uno’s founder, Ike Sewell, came up with the recipe.  Pizzeria Uno was able to turn the deep-dish pizza into such an important staple that the restaurant had to open up a second location, Pizzeria Due, a block away to manage the overflow.  Since then, Uno’s has become a national franchise, which just means “You can go to a place called ‘Uno Chicago Grill’ in Colorado or Texas but they’re not the same at all, and if you’re going to eat there you’re doing yourself a disservice not eating at one of the Chicago locations.”

Strike one: this looks like an Applebee’s.  Strike two: it’s in New Jersey.

While it is widely known that Uno’s originated the deep-dish Chicago-style pizza, a 1956 Chicago Daily News asserted that the actual inventor was Uno’s original pizza chef, Rudy Malnati, the father of Lou Malnati (more on him later).  In the 1970’s, an second Chicago-style of deep dish pizza was invented, the stuffed pizza.  An American interpretation of a recipe for an Italian Easter pie called scarciedda, tends to be deeper than deep-dish pizza, with several layers of dough encircling the cheese and ingredients, all covered with a thinner layer of tomato sauce covering it.  This style tends to use a more bready crust as opposed to the oiled-and-fried crust seen on many other deep-dish pizzas.  While the preference between deep-dish and stuffed Chicago-style pizzas is a hotly debated topic, it’s still widely accepted that both styles are delicious, and each slice is the equivalent of eating four thin-crusted pizzas worth of cheese and topping goodness.

Yes, drooling is the proper response.

Of course, Chicago has a handful of deep-dish and stuffed pizza pioneers, and so we’re here to break down the “iconic” pizza locations of Chicago, in no particular order, with a list chosen by one of our Chicago writers who has probably not been to your favorite pizza place, and who is exceedingly hungover right now.

PIZZERIA UNO

As mentioned above, this is the one that started it all.  Ike Sewell and Ric Riccardo (no relation to Ricky) opened the restaurant in 1943 in Chicago’s River North neighborhood, originally wanting to open a Mexican restaurant (Sewell eventually did, albeit 17 years later).  In response to demand, Pizzeria Due (pronounced do-eh) was opened in 1955 just down the block to take overflow customers, and both locations take focus on their bars, which follow the tradition of Chicago’s speakeasies.

Uno’s pizza uses a cornmeal crust that sets it apart from many deep dish pizzas that have since come, but the primary reason it’s on this list is its role in the creation of this glorious pizza style.  Like the Sex Pistols and punk music, they did it first, and while many since have done it better, they still deserve credit where credit is due.

LOU MALNATI’S

Of the Chicago-style pizza chains that base all of their stores in Illinois (we’re looking at you, Uno’s), Lou Malnati’s is the one most commonly listed as a “favorite” of Chicago pizza fans.  Originally founded in Lincolnwood on March 17^th, 1971, Lou Malnati’s has expanded to more than 20 locations in the Chicagoland area.  Lou Malnati worked with his father to co-manage Pizzeria Uno in the 1950s before he decided to open his own restaurant.  The pizza style mirrors that of Pizzeria Uno’s, with the cornmeal crust of the former replaced by a thin, flaky butter crust.  Instead of using crumbled sausage, Lou’s places whole sausage patties throughout an entire layer of the pizza, ensuring each fork-and-knife-necessitating bite will have a healthy hunk of meat in there.

Lou’s is also the best pizza to send to Chicago expats who are desperate for a taste of home, since they will actually freeze their pizzas and mail it to you for what is sure to be not at all obscenely expensive.

GINO’S EAST

Gino’s East was founded in 1966 by two taxi drivers, Sam Levine and Fred Bartoli, with their friend George Loverde, who worked in the grocery and meat business.  It’s since established itself as one of the best places to get a pie in the city of Chicago, despite having moved from its original location before re-opening the same location in 2007, much like the Oakland Raiders.  Gino’s is known for their more bready crust, as well as their tendency to encourage people to write or carve their names or other messages onto the wooden interior walls.  While we question the thought process behind “making vandalism a part of your brand” we have to admit they make a pretty damn good pizza, with ten locations in Chicago and its suburbs, and one in Wisconsin because fuck you people from Illinois we know you will totally overpay for familiar food if you’re on vacation at Lake Geneva.

GIORDANO’S

Giordano’s is perhaps the most popular of the stuffed Chicago-style pizzas, and it definitely is the Derrick Rosiest.  Because it’s a stuffed pizza, as opposed to a deep-dish, their pizza has more cheese and toppings, and while it’s sacrilegious to eat a pizza without a protein, Giordano’s mushroom-and-spinach stuffed pizza is actually one of the few pizza orders without meat that doesn’t enrage AFFotD staffers.  They claim that they invented the stuffed pizza, but their origin story was suspiciously familiar to the story of Nancy’s Pizza, which opened the same year.  Of course, Nancy’s doesn’t get a spot on this list, because most people who live in Chicago usually don’t go all the way to Harwood Heights to get good Chicago-style pizza.  Listen Nancy’s, if you want to be on a list of go-to Chicago-style pizza chains, try opening more than one restaurant inside the actual city, okay?

Giordano’s has 13 locations in Chicago, and another 30 in its surrounding suburbs, meaning you’re about as likely to find a Giordano’s in Chicago as you are to find a Wendy’s.  By the way, one of the reason our staff loves Chicago so much is that you can say “it’s easier to find a deep dish pizza in this city than a fast food restaurant.”  Beautiful.

PEQUOD’S

Pequod’s Pizza is one of those pizza places that hasn’t reached the same heights as the chains listed above, but it does add its own unique twist that makes it a Chicago mainstay.   Pequod’s is best known for “the famous caramelized crust” which is made by spreading a thin layer of cheese along the outside of the crust before baking it, giving a burnt appearance that adds a chewiness to the crust of the pizza.  The crust is thicker than most deep-dish pizzas, which limits the amount of toppings you can cram into your arteries in your quest to do your best impression of a Chris Farley heart attack, but anytime you can get rid of any cheese-less spots on your pizza, we have to give you credit for it.

OVEN GRINDERS

Oven Grinders primarily makes this list because it was the name-dropped pizza place of choice in The Chicago Code, which was one of the more underrated crime dramas of the past decade.  Operating in the basement of an old house, after a fire the building was rehabilitated in 1972, with Oven Grinders opening under the name “The Chicago Pizza and Oven Grinder Company.”  While they advertise themselves through their oven grinders (giant Italian sandwiches baked in their ovens) they’re perhaps most famous for their Pizza Pot Pie, an upside down pizza concoction that is part Calzone and part stuffed pizza. A bowl is lined with cheese, sausage, sauce, and whole mushrooms before being topped by a dome of dough, where it’s baked.  The pot pie is then flipped over, the bowl is removed, and what’s left is a filling, cheese-filled pizza that’s shaped in a half-sphere, making it by far the best non-flat pizza the city has to offer.

Of course, there are dozens of other authentic and delicious (read as, gloriously unhealthy) pizza places, and our Chicago readers no doubt are upset that their favorite isn’t on the list.  Well, let us know if that’s the case.  It’s not like Americans would ever turn down incredibly unhealthy pizza being offered to them.

“Goddamn it AFFotD, now I REALLY want pizza for dinner.”

~You

We here at AFFotD have a hard time shutting up about pizza, probably because it’s delicious and incredible and if you don’t like pizza you’re a bad person and you should feel bad.  However, in our rush to point out things like “Pizza with toppings put in the crust” or “Goddamn it Japan you’re doing it wrong” we’ve overlooked one of the most important aspects of pizza’s culinary life—its European beginnings, and America’s impressive ability to adapt it for its own heart-clogging purposes.  Pizza as a dish originated in Naples, Italy, much more recently than you would assume—while variations of bread baked with cheese have been around since the ancient Greeks, and Italians were eating some combination of baked bread, cheese, and tomato called “pizza” since the 17^th century, the “modern” pizza likely wasn’t invented until 1889, using red tomato, green basil, and white mozzarella so as to cover the pie in the three colors of the Italian flag.  It’s basically the same logic that America applied when inventing red, white, and blue jello shots.

Despite being such a famously “Italian” food staple, America wasn’t particularly far behind the curve in the pizza department.  The first American pizza establishment opened up in the Little Italy neighborhood of New York by 1905.  Once pizza reached our shores, we went to work on perfecting it, and we’ve since gone on to develop countless regional forms of the dish, some of them barely resembling the original Italian creation.  Usually that’s for the best.  Sometimes, not so much.

But we are a land of experimentation, and we’re here to embrace that quality, so join us for the first part of a two part pizza spectacular where we show you the best and worst of America’s regional pizzas, starting with the best because we know you’re hungry right now and we do so love to torture you.

The Five Best Regional Pizzas In America

America isn’t the only country to put their own unique twist on the deliciousness that is pizza.  Brazil uses less tomato sauce, occasionally removing the sauce entirely and using sliced tomatoes instead.  Israeli pizza, not surprisingly, doesn’t use meat as a topping.  Japan is, as always, terrifying.  Yes, pizza is a universal food, but we all know that America does it better than anyone else.  America embraced pizza with such passion that we didn’t settle on just one single national pizza style—there are arguably more regional American styles of pizza than you can find in all of Europe combined.

Not all of these are particularly tasty (we’ll get to that tomorrow) but when they work, man, do they work.  Here are, in our biased opinion, the five best regional pizza styles in America.  As you surely know, New York and Chicago are going to be the first and second slot, but we’re not sure which way it’s going to go yet (we put a “New York” and “Chicago” shirt on two of our interns and are having them fight to the death while we cheer them on like that one scene in Django, which admittedly seems like a weird criteria to judge pizza, but that’s just how we do things around these parts, and we suspect that New Yorkers would feel better about losing out if they found out someone died in the process).

Well let’s get started, shall we?

5:  Providence-Style Grilled Pizza

In 1980, the Al Forno restaurant in Providence, Rhode Island made the first Providence-style grilled pizza after owners Johanne Killeen and George Germon basically failed to realize the difference between “wood-burning ovens” and “wood-fired grills”.  As a general rule, whenever the words “surprised” and “invented” are used as modifiers in the same sentence you’re expecting something useful but gross, like Penicillin or Jose Canseco.  That wasn’t the case with grilled pizza, as instead of falling through the grate as expected,  the crust’s dough immediately hardened when exposed to the heat of the grill’s open flame, resulting in delicious and unique style of thin-crust pizza.

Grilled pizza is cooked relatively quickly, since the speed at which the thin crust hardens means it also can be easy to overcook.  The dough is placed directly over the fire of a grill, and turned over once the bottom has baked (which normally takes about a minute) at which point the toppings are placed in a very thin layer on the recently-baked side.  Since the pizza is cooked for such a short period of time, the thinness of the toppings ensure that they will heat throughout.  Topping such as peppers or sausage are usually precooked and placed on the pizza later, as they wouldn’t have enough time to cook fully, and as much as we like pizza, people apparently get their panties in a knot about salmonella being introduced to their stomach.  We know, weird.

Garlic and herbs can be added to the crust for flavor, because if someone ever turns down the addition of garlic and herbs to pizza that’s pretty much irrefutable evidence that you’re dealing with a vampire. We’re honestly surprised that it took until 1980 for us to start putting pizzas on the grill, since as much as we as a nation love pizza, we love grilling even more, and it was just a matter of time before we had a Reese’s moment like this.

4:  New Haven-Style Pizza

In New Haven, Connecticut, they call pizza “Apizza” because the fuck if we know.  Maybe they’re bored and the extra syllable helps the time go by?  Whatever.  Either way, the Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana was the first to make this unique take on Neapolitan pizza that now can be found throughout the area.  New Haven-style pizza is known for its unusually thin crust, cooked in high temperature ovens to ensure a crispy shell, often resulting in burnt black spots called “the char”, with a chewy and soft inside.  The main difference between normal pizza and a-beets (no, seriously, they pronounce “apizza” as “a-beets” because they failed to realize we’re trying to compliment them in this article but that naming their pizza stupid things does not help us do that) is that a “plain” New Haven pizza consists of a crust, oregano, tomato sauce, and a small amount of grated pecorino romano cheese sprinkled on top.  Mozzarella is not a core part of the pizza as it is elsewhere, but instead is a topping, which is locally referred to as “mootz” because we went through a good fifty year period in the first half of the century where Italian immigrants weren’t allowed to nickname things without them sounding like they came from one of the mobster characters in The Simpsons.

Of course, there’s more to New Haven pizzas (we’re not calling them apizzas, you’re not going to make us do that) than “a deliciously thin crust where you have to pay extra for mozzarella”.  For any Americans finding themselves on the East Coast with a desire to trek down to Bar or Sally’s Apizza (your best two options) you’re also left with a regional-specific, and delicious sounding white clam pie, a white pizza that combines the famous New Haven crust with olive oil, oregano, grated cheese, chopped garlic, and freshly shucked littleneck clams.  People who order this particular pizza are generally politely discouraged from adding mozzarella to it, because that sounds horrible, you just paid $12 for clams why would you not want to taste them, what the hell is wrong with you, you goddamn tourist.  No, stop it.  You’re embarrassing us.

Anyway, this approach to pizza apparently has built up a little bit of a following, and you can even find New Haven pizza out in Oregon, because trust us that little plug is the only time the West Coast is going to make our list of good pizzas.

3:  Detroit-Style Pizza

Detroit has given us (the motherfucking) Robocop, a alternatively impressive and depressing auto industry, and a state of decline that literally remains the only thing Cleveland has left to hold onto, so it’s fitting that they’d be responsible for the first entry that says, “Hey, pizza’s supposed to be greasy as sex and twice as dirty, none of this dainty fancy-oven-crispy-thin-crust shit.”  Yeah!  You tell them, hypothetical Detroiter who either is doing sex wrong or is someone we’d never want to accept a slice of pizza from!

Enter the Detroit-style pizza.  If you’re thinking that pizza looks incredibly unhealthy and delicious, you’d be correct.  You might also say, “Heh, but if it’s from Detroit, they probably cook it in something super-stereotypical like automotive manufacturing parts trays or holy shit, I’m right aren’t I, you’re using me as the hypothetical reader because they actually bake them in leftover parts trays?  Seriously?”

This more-common-than-you-might-think style of pizza is cooked square because of the previously mentioned well-oiled square tray the pizza has been baked in ever since its inception at Buddy’s Rendezvous (which started off as a “blind pig” tavern, which is a fancy way of saying “speakeasy”) in the 1930s.  Wet dough makes a thick crust that is airy on the inside, yet crispy on the outside.  Originally, pepperoni would be layered directly on the dough, covered by cheese (typically Wisconsin Brick) that touches all sides of the pan in order to caramelize at the corners, because there are few more beautiful combinations of words than “caramelized cheese crust.”  Additional toppings, and a thick Sicilian tomato sauce are added to the top.  The end result is greasy, without any crust that’s not covered in either cheese, sauce, or toppings, because we all know that the crust at the end of the pizza is the most boring part, so why not just get rid of it.

This type of pizza has been made widely available through various Michigan based national pizza chains (such as Domino’s, Jet’s, and Little Caesars), and if you’ve ever had a thick crust pizza in a square you’ve likely had it without realizing, as these chains tend to put the sauce underneath the cheese to slightly differentiate it from the original style.

Of course, as good as Detroit pizza might be, it can’t compete with the two pizza heavyweights of a nation full of, well, heavy-weighing-people.  That leads us to…

2:  New York-Style Pizza

Anarchy!  Fight!  Fight!  Every New Yorker right now is ignoring the fact that they’re being listed as the second-best pizza in America (and thus, in the world) and are probably instead talking about how New York City tap water has minerals that make their pizza crust the best in the world, and hey, you’d be a sucker if you didn’t spend hundreds of dollars on New York tap water for when you make your own pizza!  In the time it took for us to write that sentence, our tires were already slashed and someone wrote “Chicago doesn’t make pizza they make casseroles” in shaving cream on our windows.

New York versus Chicago is a debate that will never be resolved, and ultimately goes down to either personal preference, your upbringing, or the fact that our intern gladiator representing the Chicago style was just a step faster and wanted it more.  We’re not going to get into that murky debate.  Instead, let’s extol the virtues of the often mimicked, but never duplicated, New York pizza pie.

Pizza in America started in New York, of course, when Gennaro Lombardi started the first pizzeria, simply called Lombardi’s Pizza (which still operates today).  Originally a small grocery store in Little Italy, Lombardi’s employee, Antonio Totonno Pero, started making pizza to sell, using mozzarella fior di latte (we  think that’s Italian for “cow cheese”) as opposed to the more expensive buffalo’s milk mozzarella used in Italy.

The first pizza pies in New York cost five cents, which many people could not afford, since five cents in 1900s money was probably, we don’t know, ten bucks?  Maybe?  Oh God, really, it was just a buck and change?  God, people were poor back then.  Anyway, they would offer to pay what they could, and would get a slice of pizza corresponding to the amount they paid.  More than anything else, this would prove to be the true legacy of New York pizzas, as the floppy thin crust New York slice grabbed on the go was culturally iconic even before Louis C.K. had a successful TV show.

There are over 400 pizza joints in New York, and while many restaurants make high end, delicious New York style-pizzas, we best know New York pizza as a 1/8 slice of an 18-inch pie that ends up being a little bit more food than you’d need as a snack, but not quite enough for a meal.  Basically, the New York-style pizza is the perfect amount of food for anyone drunk at two in the morning.  And delicious drunk food it must be, as New Yorkers and former New Yorkers alike swear that no finer pizza has ever been conceived.  They did it first, they did it best.  That might be their opinion, but as the twitching body of our New-York-shirt-clad intern might attest, we’ve gone a different route with…

1:  Chicago Style-Pizza

This is no mere drunken snack eaten over a white paper plate soaked through with delicious grease and giving you the fuel to stumble to the nearest subway stop.  No, Chicago pizza takes “obesity” and turns it into an art form.  This pizza you’re trying to lick up there is the true champion of American pizza, the Chicago-style deep-dish pizza.  We’ve covered the virtues of this pizza before, so we can save you some of the jargon on who invented it, and where you can eat it, and why this pizza looks so good you’ve become hungry enough to gnaw at your own arm.

Chicago-style pizza comes in three forms.  There’s thin crust, which differs from the New York slice in that it’s cut into squares as opposed to wedges, the crust is crispy instead of floppy, and as much as die-hard Chicago pizza fans might try to trick you otherwise, it’s not nearly as good.  Sorry, Chicago, if we wanted to see your impression of something New York is known for we’d watch a Broadway musical a year and a half after it’s opened without all the famous actors in the cast.

No, deep-dish and stuffed pizzas are where it’s at in Chicago, two delicious and radical takes on the pizza pie where a slice is enough for a whole meal and someone wearing a Frank Thomas jersey will call you a pussy if you don’t eat three.  This is a dozen pizzas crammed into one, something that the inventors of the medium would shudder to even contemplate.  New Yorkers might get jealous and call this a soggy bowl of cheese and sauce.  The rest of America likes to call it…perfection.

Stay tuned for tomorrow when we write about the worst pizza styles in America.  While reading this article likely made you want to pick up your phone and order a pie, tomorrow’s will probably make you want to pick up a bottle of bourbon and drink until pizza looks good again.  Enjoy.

“It’s magnificent.  It’s glorious.  I can see a beautiful shining light.  I’m heading towards it.”

~Every American With A Pre-Existing Heart Condition Eating Any Item On This List

Doughnuts.  They’re so hot right now.  Doughnuts.  While doughnuts have been fattening Americans up under the guise of “Breakfast” for hundreds of years, they’ve recently experience a renaissance among those brave individuals who like to intake their sugary carbs in savory or alcoholic forms.  We now live in a world where any doughnut shop that doesn’t make a maple bacon doughnut is full of shit, and if you’ve never tried a doughnut covered in fruit loops you’re not legally allowed to vote in Oregon.

What once was just a simple fried dough confectionery for the masses has now evolved farther than it was ever intended, sort of like New Jersey.  But unlike New Jersey, the vast majority of the strange, bewildering doughnut products that we’re being exposed to are actually delicious, enjoyable, and something you’d consider taking home to your parents.  Your fat parents.  From the fat side of your family.  That you eat fatty foods with.  Just…fat…fat… JUST LISTEN THIS IS A LIST OF SANDWICHES MADE WITH DOUGHNUTS YOU KNOW YOU ARE GOING TO EAT THEM RIGHT NOW FAT FAT ALL AT ONCE FAT FAT FATTIE SOO-WEE SOO-WEE OINK OINK OINK!!!!! oh wow, Jesus Christ, we don’t know what happened there.  We started looking at our research for this article, and everything went red for a second, and when we woke up we were covered in jam somehow.  God, we hope it’s jam.

Anyway, the 2010s have been a revolutionary time for people who like doughnuts, but hate the fact that you can’t buy them with additionally unhealthy foods in the middle.  And they’ve gone out of their way to correct this oversight by making…

America’s 7 Craziest Doughnut Sandwiches

We don’t know who invented the sandwich, though if we had to guess we’d say it was the Earl of Essex.  Still, it’s strange to think that there was a time before sandwiches existed, when people would eat slices of bread without even thinking of putting meat, condiments, or hundreds of dollars’ worth of ingredients in between.  Likewise, doughnuts were around for hundreds of years before the Luther started to appear in county fairs, junk food restaurants, and the nightmares of nutritionists.  That was just the beginning, because once we realized, “Holy shit, you can totally cut a doughnut like a bagel and put shit in it” the flood doors were opened, and so many people are going to die with a smile on their face because of it.  Since we’re pretty sure that your face freezes into a sort of hideously demonic looking grin when your heart implodes.  Ha ha, diet and exercise and living past 50 is overrated!  Onto the sandwiches!

DUNKIN DONUTS GLAZED DONUT BREAKFAST SANDWICH

You can tell that a trend has been around forever once the media latches onto a specific example of a fad and reports on it with a sense of awe, fear, and admonition usually reserved for new parents the first time they see that their child has just totally wrecked a diaper.  “FOUR LOKO IS ALCOHOL WITH CAFFEINE THAT TASTES SWEET!” they scream at us two years after we were at that party where Schmiddy had a minor heart attack after his seventh vodka red bull.  “YOUNG PEOPLE ARE USING TEXT MESSAGES TO SEND NAKED PICTURES!” they shout as we squirm uncomfortably in front of Chris Hansen.  “TEENAGERS ARE DOING A ‘CINNAMON CHALLENEGE’ AND IT COULD MAYBE PROBABLY NOT KILL YOU!” they alert us while our cinnamon challenge video has been up for, seriously, two years now, and we’ve not even topped 100 hits, what the shit is that?  So when everyone begins tripping over themselves to report on Dunkin Donuts’ glazed doughnut breakfast sandwich it’s enough to make you think that the whole “using a doughnut as bread” thing might be over and done with.

Then we take a look at the sandwich up there and realize, we can never stay mad at you, doughnut sandwiches.  As far as food crammed between sliced doughnuts go, the Dunkin Doughnuts breakfast sandwich is downright healthy—while numerous news articles breathlessly report that this dish of peppered eggs and bacon in between a standard Dunkin Donut has a whole 360 calories, they don’t mention how the multigrain bagel from their “DD Smart Health Menu” has 350.  While early reviews of the sandwich have proved to be underwhelming, it still passes the true American culinary test, which is “will most people see it on a menu, shrug, and say ‘eh, whatever, I’d eat it’?”

Eh.  We’d eat it.

KRISPY KREME SLOPPY JOE

While the good folks at Krispy Kreme haven’t exactly responded to Dunkin Donut’s foray into the sweet-meets-savory game with the typically American “anything you can do I can do better” attitude, “Chicken” Charlie Boghosian, inventor of deep-fried Kool-Aid and deep-friend breakfast cereal, clearly did when he introduced the Krispy Kreme Sloppy Joe to the San Diego County Fair.  The very concept of this dish seems flawed, since you’d think putting something called a “sloppy Joe” on a bun that, usually, has a hole in the middle would be a good way to ensure that an obscene amount of the meat, cheese, and tomato sauce seeps out while you eat it.  Krispy Kreme doesn’t endorse this product, or plan to sell it themselves, which is disappointing but understandable when you think about how many millions of dollars they would have to spend cleaning red stains out of each and every franchises’ everythings.

Still, this remains a curiosity, something we’d desperately want to try, even as we tremble in fear anticipating what will become of us when we do.  Will we gag at this combination of flavors that honestly shouldn’t go together so long as there’s a just god in this world (we can get behind mixing doughnuts and beef, but doughnuts and tomatoes sounds like a crime against taste buds) or will we take a single bite, shed a single tear at the realization that we’ve found our favorite food, and that it’s awful, before slowly wading into the ocean until the current takes us out to sea never to be seen again?  Actually, no matter what we’d probably be so drunk when we ate it that we’d wake up six hours later with red stains all over our shirts shouting, “Oh goddamn it, it happened again!  Guess I should call my lawyer.”

THE MONTE CRISTO DOUGHNUT

The Glazed Gourmet in Charleston, South Carolina, knows our darkest, most twisted fantasies.  Sure, we can donate to charity (buying beer for high schoolers who can’t afford fake IDs is a charity, right?) and smile politely in public events all we want, but Glazed Gourmet knows about that time we had that dream where we were having sex with a family feast bucket of KFC chicken and were mildly disappointed when we woke up and it wasn’t real.  They know.  And knowing the sick, shameful ways Americans look at food, they saw a doughnut and said, “We know you want a sandwich of ham, melted cheese, and strawberry jam placed inside a glazed doughnut and dusted with powdered sugar.”  They know us better than we know ourselves.  Of course we love sandwiches that are traditionally dipped in batter and fried, but we don’t have the courage to stand up and admit that we’d rather take things up a notch by replacing that fried bread with an even more delicious, sugary, unhealthy lump of fried dough.

We’re not saying that the glazed doughnut Monte Cristo is being used as some sort of sadistic method of population control to kill off everyone with diabetes, we’re just saying that if you placed one of these near a diabetic, it would be impossible for them to resist it, and we’re pretty sure that there’s enough sugar deliciousness in the picture above to knock even a completely healthy person into a diabetic coma.

PUMPKIN PULLED PORK SANDWICH

This is the one item on this list that’s more or less made by scratch, and its existence seems to be confined to a youtube video of two stoned guys cooking a “midnight snack” that’s more complex and labor intensive than anything you’ve ever even considered trying to cook in your life.  We’ve watched the video a dozen times, and we can guarantee that if we ever tried making this ourselves we’d end up looking like The Hound from Game of Thrones after we forget how you’re supposed to put out a grease fire.

The pulled pork is slow cooked with pumpkin, which was something we didn’t know you could do, and is topped with candied cayenne bacon, which again is a combination of words we didn’t know existed but now we want to eat it immediately, and barbeque sauce, which surprisingly is the only thing they don’t try to have you make from scratch in this entire video.  Speaking of making everything from scratch, they create and deep fry carrot cake doughnuts in front of our eyes, though adding vegetables to the thing seems to defeat the purpose of having a doughnut, with a carrot glaze, which involves using some sort of magic to extract juice from shredded carrots, which our scientists assure us is impossible, so these guys must have just CGI’d it in post.

So if you’re a culinary master chef with a PHD in cookery (that’s a thing right?) you can just amble over to your kitchen, put some yogurt, pumpkin puree, nutmeg, allspice, ginger, pepper, cinnamon, and salt in a slow cooker with some bone-in pork butt, let that cook for a whole day, and then bake up some bacon with sugar and cayenne pepper on it, while creating a yeast-less carrot cake doughnut out of shredded carrots, sour cream, flour, eggs, sugar, vegetable oil, cinnamon, nutmeg, and baking powder, which you scoop out, fry in boiling oil, cover in a glaze of sugar and carrot juice, cut in half, and fill with pulled pork, bacon, and barbeque sauce as you collapse of exhaustion before you have the chance to even take a bite of what now looks and smells like the best thing you’ve ever created in your otherwise worthless life.  When you wake up, they’ll be gone, having been munched on by your roommate as you lay in a deep sleep like a man who succumbed to dehydration moments before reaching water, and your roommate will assure you that they were “so good, man, you should make these more often.”

And then, there is nothing left for you to do but weep.

KFC DOUBLE DOWN LUTHER BURGER

The Luther is the old standby for doughnut sandwiches, putting meat and bacon in between a halved doughnut as a sweet savory treat enjoyed by everyone who owns a shirt that has an unexplainable grease stain that never washes out no matter how hard you try.  Now, some “classy” restaurants try to ramp up the Luther by replacing the hamburger that most Luther’s are, by definition, comprised of with fried chicken.  These dishes look delicious, but almost unsettlingly wholesome.  You know it’ll give you a heart attack, but it’ll probably be one of those “oh, my chest feels a little heavy, I should call a hospital and get an EKG” sort of heart attacks, and not one of those “Oh God, the pain is unbearable, I’m not gonna make it, Jimmy.  Tell your sister she was a mistake” heart attacks.  You know, a heart attack.

The folks at Top Cultured took the “fried chicken Luther” idea and took it to its logical, terrifying conclusion—the KFC Double Down Luther Burger.  There’s an old folk saying in America—when a giant fast food corporation makes a terrifyingly unhealthy bacon sandwich/sodium delivery system that replaces bread with fried chicken, it’s your God-given duty to put that between two halves of a Krispy Kreme doughnut.  Yes, as far as adages go, it’s a bit of a mouthful, which would probably explain why you’ve never heard it before, but the fact remains that this is a real thing that people have done.

The Double Down sandwich in its original form is a unique exercise in regret.  Eating one is much like soliciting a prostitute for the first time—on a primal, carnal level you’re aware that you’re enjoying the experience, but as soon as you’re finished you feel dirty and experience a unique form of guilt knowing you’ve done something shameful that you’ll never be able to un-do.  No matter what, for the rest of your life, if someone asks you if you’ve partaken in that one regrettable activity, you will have to hang your head and say, “Yes.  Once.”  Anyway, if eating a Double Down is like that, we’d have to imagine eating a Double Down Luther would basically be the equivalent of accidentally killing a hooker during.  It’s messy, terrifying, and even though it will haunt you for the rest of your life you will tell no one the things you’ve done.

But you’ll know.  You’ll know that you did it, and even worse, a small part of you, the blackest part of your soul you constantly struggle to bury so deep it can never be seen, knows you liked it.  And wants to do it again.

GRILLED CHEESE DOUGHNUT

Wow that got dark there for a second.  Let’s regroup here.  Wow, a grilled cheese made with a doughnut!  That sounds delightful!  Yay!  Let us talk of dead hookers and dark urges no longer!  This one has banana on it!  Om nom nom!

Tom + Chee opened in Cincinnati, where it has multiple locations, but you can also find it just across the Ohio River in Louisville, because such awesomeness cannot be confined to a single state.  They offer a grilled cheese doughnut, but don’t limit themselves to the basic “cheddar melted in between two doughnut halves” approach.  Sure, you can get that, but why not get a fancy grilled cheese doughnut?  Like caramelized banana with gouda.  Or peanut butter, banana, and mozzarella.  Or blueberry and blue cheese.  Hell, you can even build your own, adding whatever cheese, meats, and toppings you want as a way to punish your body for making you feel out of breath whenever you go up more than two stairs.

It never occurred to you to use a doughnut to make a grilled cheese, but the moment you heard about this you had an internal debate about if you have enough vacation days to just hop in a car and drive to Ohio to try one, didn’t you?  That’s okay, we don’t blame you.  When we posted that picture, half of our staff ran out to their cars so fast that their chairs are still spinning.  We’ll let them get away with it so long as they bring back some for the rest of us.

THE LADY’S BRUNCH BURGER

We’re not here to say that Paula Deen is a bad person who doesn’t know how to cook, and instead just throws unhealthy shit together in an attempt to get the highest sugar/fat/calorie content imaginable.  Well, we’re pretty much saying that, we just mean to point out that, as much as we love unhealthy, pointless food, we can’t get behind Paula Deen.  We know how to deep fry cheesecake and give it to our kids for breakfast ourselves, thank you very much, we don’t need a heavily mascara’d Oompa Loompa to tell us that.

Maybe that’s why this testament to arterial plaque rubs us the wrong way—Paula Deen basically added some shit to a Luther and acted like she invented the concept of making a doughnut sandwich.  In this case, it’s a hamburger that’s topped with a fried egg and bacon between two whole doughnuts, which basically has been a “Luther with a Fried Egg” since the 70s.  She also added her own flair by putting a whole English muffin in there, because carbs.

We tried to figure out the calorie count of this burger, but the website we used just linked us to this video and our computer caught on fire, so we’re going to go out on a limb and say it’s not exactly healthy.  Really the most “impressive” part of this recipe is that you’re asked to make the hamburger yourself out of ground beef, onions, and seasoning, which basically means that you’re being asked to turn meat glop into a patty of meat glop, which if you’ll remember is what Play-Dough spent years training us to do.  Otherwise, you just buy bacon, eggs, and doughnuts.  Oh right, and English muffins for reasons we will never understand.  Anyway, EAT UP FATTY WE ARE ALL WATCHING YOU EAT AND ARE LAUGHING AT YOU RIGHT TO YOUR FACE BECAUSE OINK OINK SNORT SNORT SOO-WEE SOO-WEE oh wow, sorry about that, again, everything just went red.  Now if you’ll excuse us, we have some doughnut sandwiches to drunkenly eat.

“I mean, sure, it’s good, but it’s BETTER when there’s booze inside of it.”

~American chocolate consumers

America loves chocolate more than just about everyone.  Sure the Swiss might have us outgunned, but we still eat about 10 pounds of chocolate a year, per person.  We don’t want to look it up because we have a specific AFFotD search engine that locks your computer for two days if you try to search for anything about vegetables, but we’ll just assume that this means Americans eat more chocolate every year than they do salad.  You’d think chocolate is a relatively easy to acquire food item, but it’s actually surprisingly arduous to turn cacao beans into deliciousness—they’re naturally bitter, so they have to be fermented, dried, cleaned, and roasted before their shell is removed and the remaining nibs are ground into pure chocolate in its “rough” form, which is then separated into cocoa solids and cocoa butter, which is mixed in varying proportions, and often combined with sugar and milk.

If you stopped reading once you saw the word “fermented” while your mind drifted to visions of alcohol dancing in your head, well, it did for us too, so that’s totally understandable.  The key is, chocolate is everywhere, and mankind has been ingesting it in one form or another since about 1400 BC, and while America doesn’t lay claim to any particularly revolutionary adaptation of it (with the possible exception of Hershey’s) just about every straight man in America has bought chocolate to appease their stressed out girlfriends, and most of them have subsequently gotten in trouble for saying something along the lines of, “Hey babe, this should help with the PMSing, right?”

It shouldn’t be surprising that we have more types of chocolate than “dark, milk, and white.”  It’s not even surprising that some variations of chocolate might do a disservice to the original treat.  We’re not here to focus on that.  We’re here to tell you, the intrepid American who just finally finished the last of the base of your giant chocolate bunny you got for Easter, five of the strangest flavored chocolates in the world.  Because you’ll probably want to eat a few of them, and you’ll definitely want to purposely avoid at least one.

Five of the World’s Strangest Chocolates

If we didn’t have multiple kinds of chocolate to eat, we wouldn’t have box of chocolate manufacturers going around finding ways to trick us into eating the coconut one when all we wanted was the toffee.  But whenever we achieve variety in the things we love, there are bound to be strange and occasionally horrifying missteps.  Like the following.  Granted, we’d eat all of them, but that’s largely because sometimes when you get wasted you really want some chocolate.

Tabasco Chocolate

This is easily the one product on this list that most people would absolutely eat, unless they don’t like spicy foods, chocolate, or joy.  Tabasco is an inherently American product that makes everything taste better, from eggs to pizza.  Plus, it makes mosquitoes explode.  It’s magic spicy vinegar from Louisiana, and apparently you can buy dark chocolate that’s been infused with it, because fans of spicy foods can find a way to put hot sauce in anything.

There are places that make fancy hot chocolate that’s mixed with chili peppers, so for people who are really into chocolate, it isn’t really surprising that this product exists.  That being said, someone still had to take a look at a product used extensively on savory foods and decide, hey, let’s put this in some chocolate.  America is so great, you guys.

Tobacco Chocolate

This one actually seems gross.  People at least eat Tabasco sauce.  Yes, normally it’s mixed with other foods, and the one time we had our staffer chug an entire bottle of the stuff he had to take down half a gallon of milk before dry heaving into our coffee pot, but at the same time no one’s gonna get mad at you if you pour a bunch in a bowl of soup.  But if you sprinkled tobacco in someone’s soup?  The response most likely would be, “What the fuck man, why did you just ruin my soup, what is wrong with you!?”

You smoke tobacco, or chew it if you’re a baseball pitcher in the 1960’s, or press it to your lower lip if you’re, like, really redneck.  You don’t eat it, the same way you don’t smoke chocolate (and if you tried you’d probably just end up with, well, melted chocolate).  Some people say that the notes sort of go together, and that a dark chocolate can go well with a fine cigar, but that’s like saying that you’d want to eat a cake made out of shoes because you like the smell of leather.

Chocolate Pop Rocks

Yes, this product in question is a bunch of pop rocks covered in chocolate, though there are other candy makers that make pop rocks chocolate as well.  This one has us on the fence, because while we love pop rocks, we’re not sure if creating chocolate that explodes and fizzles in your mouth would make the chocolate taste better, or just make it more terrifying.  All we know is that if we were to buy this product, we’d go around to unsuspecting people and have them eat it without telling them it’s pop rocks, and then document their subsequent freak outs when the chocolate in their mouth starts feeling like its full of bang snaps.

Camel Milk Chocolate

Al Nassma is a chocolatier founded and owned by the ruler of Dubai to supply the world chocolate made with camel milk as requested by exactly zero sane people.  They bill themselves as the only provider of camel milk chocolate, which would make sense because that’s a stupid idea.  You can’t just pick a random animal, milk it, add that milk to chocolate, and then expect us to think you’re anything but a crazy rich Sheikh with a camel farm and way too much time on your hands.  That’s pretty much the Middle Eastern equivalent of the New York subway system coming out with rat milk chocolate sponsored by that one episode of The Simpsons where that actually happened.

Cheese and Onion Chocolate

Oh God, what have you done, Ireland?  What on Earth have you decided to do?  Yes, this is a chocolate bar that is cheese and onion flavored.  Of course it’s from the United Kingdom, because you can’t think of any other country where that would seem like a good idea, and of course it sold out of the first 100,000 bars they produced already because clearly there are forces in this Universe that exist only to upset our not-so-delicate sensibilities.  We’re so mad that this exists that we can’t even wrap our minds around the fact that it’s popular.  Now we know how our parents felt when we first came home with that Backstreet Boys CD.

“This is unholy.  This is an abomination.  I want ten of them right now.”

~You, with most of these menu items

Fast food holds a dear place in the hearts of all Americans.  No, we mean that literally, everyone reading this has a tiny chunk of a Big Mac lodged somewhere in their arteries, waiting patiently for the best time to stroke strike.  Do not fight it, and it won’t fight you.  Yes you want fries with that.

But as much as people have been focusing lately on how “unhealthy” and “disgusting behind the scenes” fast food places are, good old American gumption helps us stay strong by covering our ears and going, “La la la I’m not listening I’d like a Whopper with no onions please.”  And part of the reason why fast food is here to stay is that, like many Americans, they’re not satisfied with the status quo.  They’re constantly evolving their menu and testing out new products that can range from “surprisingly glorious” to “ah, look, a Double Down wrapper.  I think we’ve found our cause of death.”

Food items are not added to menus lightly (okay, sometimes they are, and it’s hilarious).  Honestly, did you think that this just fucking happened?  Of course not, you can’t roll out a Monster Thickburger to an unsuspecting nation without endangering the lives of the residents of, say, Columbus, Ohio first.  So we’re here to give you an inside glimpse into the minds of the fast food giants by letting you know what they’re currently testing in markets that you (statistically, probably) don’t live in.  Some of which you can’t wait to see on menus nationwide, and some of which will terrify you but you also can’t wait to see on menus nationwide.

Fast Food’s Most Insane Products Currently Being Tested

Oh we’re so sorry to start this article with a tease like the above picture.  Wendy’s never actually tested a 3,000 calorie, 9-patty burger and called it the “T-Rex” burger.  No, one Wendy’s owner in Brandon, Canada decided, “Fuck it, give the people what they want” and put this on the menu.  When it became big news (because of course it would, it’s a 9-patty burger, we’ve had dreams where we only stopped at 7-patties) the upper management of Wendy’s decided (incorrectly) that it probably wasn’t the best for their image to be known as “the company that puts half of a cow on a single burger.”  But fear not, loyal readers!  There are plenty of other unhealthy, borderline terrifying foods that are being sold at this very moment, just waiting for their chance to be on the menu of that fast food restaurant you always end up going to when you’re drunk.  You know, all of them?  So keep dreaming, you glorious fireflies, because someday you might get to eat…

The Taco Bell Waffle Taco

You don’t know how to feel about this, and that’s okay.  We’ll get through this together.  In May of 2013, Taco Bell rolled out an 89-cent breakfast taco in three of its Southern California locations, because if there’s one place to market an unhealthy, cheap, kind of gross looking taco product, it’s in a health-obsessed part of the country that pretty much devotes 95% of their fast food related calories to Del Taco and In-N-Out.  But yeah, good idea, Taco Bell, it’s not like you’d find any half-drunk-half-hungover Notre Dame students in South Bend who’d be interested in having a meat, egg, and folded waffle combo that’s sold with what’s basically a Screwdriver if you replace the vodka with Mountain Dew.  Nor would those same students very probably end up buying that drink in bulk so they can add vodka and discretely get drunk while tailgating.  Yeah, good call selling that concept to a part of the country where you have to stay sober enough to drive places.

So, we have the Taco Bell Waffle Taco.  Which pretty much adheres to the Taco Bell rule of “woah woah, who told you that it’s possible to put four different ingredients together?  They are lying, sir.  All you need is three.”  Instead of their hot sauce packets, because God could you imagine, this comes with a syrup packet, which probably isn’t made out of horse meat.  Actually, the meat itself probably isn’t horse meat either, because in America our fast food doesn’t come with horses, it comes with so much filler you’re only getting 35% meat.  The biggest surprise?  The eggs in the center.  Yup, those are from horses.  They are totally horse eggs.  Eh, we’d still eat it.

The Taco Bell Fiery Chicken Cool Ranch Doritos Locos Tacos

It seems Taco Bell has decided that the more names you give something, the more likeable it is, a lesson they no doubt picked up from watching a film starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt.  We were honestly hesitant to put this on our list at first.  “Come on, we’ve already got Doritos Locos Tacos.  Hell, we already have Cool Ranch Doritos Locos Tacos.”  And then we had to take a step back and say, how jaded have we become?  Yes, once the Doritos Locos Tacos came out, and America bought 500 million of them, it became pretty hard to be surprised by anything else they’d make.  But that’s not the right way to think about it.  That’s like if someone told you “Aaron Hernandez apparently shot three more people outside of a club last year” and your response was, “Well…duh.”  Just because someone has done one terrible thing doesn’t mean you should allow yourself to be surprised when more surfaces.

And with that in mind, just think about this taco, which again is only being tested at select locations in Southern California, without previous prejudice.  Do you really want to be the type of person who would say, “Oh, what’s that?  Someone is turning a Cool Ranch Dorito chip into a taco shell, and filling it with chipotle doused shredded chicken that’s got to be at least 35% toes?  Pshh, that’s old hat.”  No.  You want to embrace this because we live in a world where it’s only a matter of time before scientists find a way to reverse-engineer a Dorito and turn it into a cheesy tortilla that can be used to make burritos, and then Taco Bell will change its name to Doritos Taco Bell and you’ll be so happy it happened.  Who wouldn’t want a cheesy Doritos Loco Burrito right now?  Exactly.

McDonald’s Southwest Burger

What does one do when creativity wanes?  When you think, “I have the canvas, but yet, it remains sadly blank, and inspiration has left me, seemingly for good”?  What do you do when faced with such an overwhelming existential crisis of imagination?  Well, if you’re McDonald’s, you throw some fucking Fritos on it and see what sticks.  Now, we can’t all be heavy hitters like Taco Bell and afford a lucrative partnership with a chip company and…oh, okay, Doritos and Taco Bell are all owned by Pepsi.  Right.  That’ll explain why these “clearly Fritos” go by the generic ingredient name of “tortilla chips.”  But yes, they basically took the McDonald’s hamburger patty, tossed some Fritos on it, added white cheddar and barbeque sauce, and then probably did some outdated southwestern stereotype action like firing some fake guns above their heads while going “Yeee-hawwww.”

This is one of multiple burgers being tested for their “Dollar Menu & More” testing in about ten markets.  Ignoring the fact that everything on their menu that costs more than a dollar (so, everything) technically would belong on the “Dollar Menu & More” the sandwiches being tested out include a Bacon McDouble, McChicken Delux, Dijon Swiss Burger, Buffalo Ranch McChicken, and Bacon Hot ‘N Spicy McChicken, but of these burgers, most seem to be just basic alterations of previously existing McDoubles and McChickens.  Except of course for this Frito-laden son of a bitch right here.  Yee-haw indeed, McDonald’s.  Congrats, you’re the only fast food company to admit that, when you run of ideas, just turn to Fritos.

The Subway Crunchy Chicken Enchilada Melt

Oh what was that we just said?  We take it back.  Step aside, McDonald’s, time to let a company that’s actually owned by PepsiCo to take things from here.  None of that bullshit “tortilla chips” malarkey, this incredibly unhealthy looking sandwich from a company that purports to be healthy is blowing McDonald’s out of the water.  Using shredded chicken in enchilada sauce, melted Monterey Cheddar, Fritos chips, and a handful of you saying “Well duh, we can read the fucking picture you posted,” this Subway flatbread sandwich has mainly been spotted in Central Florida and Seattle, probably because if they released it to one of the fatter states to start things off we’d probably have a lot of coronaries on our hands to deal with.

The only thing that tapers our excitement about getting this sandwich (DUDE!  FRITOS!) is that it’s Subway, which basically means it’ll be fine.  It won’t be bad.  It won’t be amazing.  It’s…you know, it’s Subway.

Carl’s Jr. Pop-Tart Ice Cream Sandwich

After such a hearty meal, you have to save room for dessert, and the Newport Beach Carl’s Jr. has just the thing for you.  A hand-scooped (whatever that means) Strawberry Pop-Tart Ice Cream Sandwich.  This is far more interesting than making their burgers cost six bucks by adding fresh baked buns to them.  No, this is a test product that we can fully support, because though we not be doctors, we’re pretty sure the medical cure for blocked arteries is diabetes.  This first appeared on 4/20 because of course it did.  There’s nothing particularly novel here, it’s the combination of two ingredients that, if you’ve not tried to make it at home before, you absolutely are going to now that you know it’s possible.

It’s a satisfying way to finish a satisfying meal…that you can’t get anywhere.  Except for Southern California, though, which apparently gets to test four of these because apparently California doesn’t like to share.  Dicks.

“It’s been so long since we’ve talked about fried foods, my Cholesterol  levels have almost gone done to healthy levels.  Almost.”

~AFFotD Food Critic, John Goodman

Fried food.  Crunchy goodness.  Grease’s children.  The culinary manifestation of a fat man punching himself in the heart.  Whatever you call it, battering food and dipping it in boiling oil is as American as apple pie, assuming that you battered the apple pie and immersed it in boiling oil beforehand.  We’ve documented the cutting edge of American fried foods six times before, but it’s been about a year since we’ve sat down and scoured the dumpsters of our nation’s state fairs to find the latest in delicious food that technically can be considered a murder weapon in several of our more obese states.   And that is far too long to go without terrifyingly complex fried foods.

So grab onto your nutritionist’s desperate letters urging you to, “Stop, for the love of God, do you have a death wish?” because things are about to get a little unhealthy.

America’s Craziest Fried Foods:  2013 Edition

The internet is a tool, and like most tools, it can be beneficial, or dangerous.  Similarly to how a hammer can build a house or be used by a chap named Maxwell for more sinister purposes, likewise the internet can be used to perpetrate crime or, ugh, Japan, while also serving as a beacon of light in a sea of dark ignorance.  No matter what evils we stumble across in our dubious internet searches, there are always people out there who say, “Why do carnivals have all the fun?  I have a deep fryer, let’s get weird with this.”  And those people are true American heroes.  So while, yes, state fairs remain the hotbed for unhealthy food creation, we’ll start to have some homemade dishes work their way in here, so you might be inspired to go home with your cornballer and splatter your kitchen with flecks of oil that are kinda a pain to get out.  Which brings us to our first dish.

Beer-and-Bacon-Battered Deep-Fried Doritos

If there’s a reason why we toss the word “hero” around a lot here, it’s that America is pretty chock-full of them.  Take the folks over at Dude Foods, for example.  They didn’t have to take Doritos and deep-fry them.  They didn’t even have to use beer in the batter.  And they didn’t have to add bacon to that crunchy concoction.  But, they knew that America needed this, so goddamn it if they didn’t combine all three into glorious triangles of delicious death.  Getting a coronary while munching on these isn’t quite as good of a way to shuffle off this mortal coil than, say, a heart attack during sex, but it’s about as close as we’ve found yet.

It’s important to keep in mind that Doritos…are fried in the first place.  A Dorito is literally a cut up and fried tortilla that is then seasoned to taste like deliciously fake cheese.  And we decided that was too healthy so we fried it with beer and bacon.  Goddamn it, America, every time we think we can’t love you any more you go ahead and do something like this for us.  It’s okay, we just need a minute.  It’s just, it’s so beautiful.  It’s really dusty in here.  *wipes away a single tear*

Now if only someone thought to do that with Cheetos…

Deep-Fried Cheetos

You guys!  Really, that’s too kind of you, you’re spoiling us here.  Brooklyn’s Park Slope Chip Shop decided that we weren’t spoiled enough, and made a double fried Cheetos for our culinary pleasure.  Somewhere, we’d like to imagine that the creepy new CGI Chester Cheetah is watching a woman eating these while leeringly purring, “Careful Karen.  You’ll burn yourself.  On the cheesy.”  Man Chester Cheetah, when did you get so sketchy?

Deep-Fried Jelly Belly Jelly Beans

You know who loved Jelly Beans?  The Gipper.  You know who else loves Jelly Beans?  Everybody.  Little balls of sugar that can be made to taste like everything from watermelon to awful, they’re a delicious snack that can be enjoyed by everyone, except for the spice flavored ones you sometimes find in your Easter basket because seriously fuck those spice flavored jelly beans.

We’re not upset that it took us this long to find a way to put jelly beans in dough and deep fry it into balls of sugar, but we are a bit disappointed.  Think of all the years we missed having not found this holy union.  This delicious, heart-clogging union.

Fried Jambalaya

It takes a lot to win the Texas State Fair fried food competition, but the sheer brilliance of deep frying a classic Cajun dish almost seems like cheating.  By combining shrimp, sausage, rice, and seasonings in flour and frying it to a “golden perfection” as Chef Abel Gonzales states, spicy ranch is served with the dish because the only thing that sounds better than fried Jambalaya is fried Jambalaya with spicy goddamn ranch dressing.  Gonzales claims he gained 20 pounds while perfecting the recipe, which we believe even if we think he got it right on the first or second try and then just started eating it for every meal for the next month, because that’s exactly what we’d do if we were him.

Fried Picnic-on-a-Stick

While the Fried Jambalaya won last year’s Texas State Fair’s taste test, this magnanimous monstrosity here was definitely in the running, if only because it’s been a while since we saw Frankenstein so we forgot how that movie ends.  The fried Picnic-on-a-Stick doesn’t have the best grasp of what most of us bring to picnics, but we’re not going to nitpick when someone tells us they plan on combining fried chicken, tater tots, and dill pickle for the sole purpose of frying it all together in stick form.  We can only assume that this concoction was created in the first ever fried foods-version of Jenga.  When they added the pickle, it warbled, so when they tried to add the pie to all of it the whole damn thing collapsed, they all screamed “Jenga” (or, more likely, “OH GOD IT FELL RIGHT IN THE BURNING OIL AND INTO MY EYES I’M BLINDED OH GOD NOW I KNOW HOW THAT ONE KID IN SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE MUST HAVE FELT”) and decided it’s best that they just stick with the 3 ridiculously combined fried ingredients, for safety sake.  And then promptly went on Craigslist to find a new head chef.

Fried Bacon Cinnamon Roll

Since we’ve already got two entries from last year’s Texas State Fair, we might as well close things out on the trifecta by showing you the winner of the “most creative” contest.  It’s simple enough that you can find recipes to make it online, though there’s always a 50% chance that when you click on that link it’ll re-direct you to a coffin warehouse website.  All you have to do is take a cinnamon roll, dip it in sweet pancake batter, roll the batter in fried bacon crumbles, then deep fry it and add powdered sugar afterwards because you’ve already made your life decision and what do a few extra calories and diabetic blindness matter when you’ve gone so far down this road.  Just embrace it.

Embrace all of it.  This is your future, America.  And it’s delicious.  Also fattening.  But, mostly?  Delicious.

“Pizza is a lot like sex.  When it’s good, it’s really good.  When it’s bad?  It’s still pretty good.  And when it’s God awful, you find you can’t stop screaming, and it takes years for the nightmares to finally stop.”

~You

Yesterday, we showed you the five best regional pizza styles in America, with a hidden agenda of angering New Yorkers.  Today, we’re looking at the dark underbelly of pizza.  Because, as great as America is at making pizza, not everyone can get it right.  Hell, Brazil makes and eats 1.4 million pizzas every day, but even with all that practice they still do shit like put chocolate on it.  So as great as pizza is, it’s not always a winner.  The best pizzas?  Are glorious.

These pizzas?  Are terrifying.

The Five Worst Regional Pizzas In America

California-Style Pizza

When talking about California, it’s hard to separate the numerous demographics in our nation’s largest state.  San Francisco has about as much in common with Los Angeles as Amsterdam does with Singapore.  But if there’s one thing that’s generally assumed about the state, it’s that if you’re not talking about hamburgers, it’s best not to leave the state to their own devices when trying to make junk food.  As we mentioned yesterday, in 1980 the East Coast was discovering that you could put a pizza on a grill.  That same year, on the opposite side of the nation, a chef working for an Austrian-run chain of restaurants and a few chefs working at a Berkeley restaurant decided that pizza doesn’t have to be pizza.

California style pizzas are prepared on a thin crust, but the crust itself doesn’t matter as much as the ingredients, which tend to be nontraditional and heavily focused on fresh produce.  Here’s a bit of a pro-tip when it comes to pizza—crust matters.  The consistency, flavor, and dexterity of a crust is all you need to differentiate a New York-style pizza pie with New Haven, Chicago thin crust, or a goddamn DiGorno’s.  If you can’t describe your crust with any more detail than, “I don’t know, uh, Italian-style?” you’re doing pizza wrong.  California-style pizza focuses on toppings, but instead of tomato sauce, cheese, sausage, and heartburn, you’re left with honey, soy sauce, peanuts, and the undying hatred towards whoever asked you for a slice of pizza.

When you were first introduced to California pizza…well, you were probably in high school, and your friends thought that CPK was a classy way to spend a lunch.  It didn’t really occur to you that the only pizzas on the menu were either strange combinations of ingredients with the name “Spicy Chipotle Chicken” or just normal pizzas that look disgusting.  Does a California Club with bacon, chicken, lettuce, and mayonnaise sound good to you?  It does, right?  Now, how about taking all that shit, placing it on a pizza crust, and tossing it in the oven.  Not so great, right?  We didn’t think so.  Of course these pizzas (mostly) at least have cheese, unlike…

Tomato Pies

Tomato pie is a type of pizza that’s been around America almost as long as regular pizza, as it’s been available since at least 1914.  The difference between pizza and tomato pie largely stems from the fact that pizza is warm, delicious, and makes you forget your troubles, while tomato pie is lukewarm, without cheese, and hands you a bottle of pills while whispering, “Go ahead, do it, no one will miss you.”

Tomato pie takes a thick, focaccia-like dough, covers it in tomato sauce, and then sprinkles enough grated romano cheese to make you say “huh, I guess there’s a little bit of cheese on this thing.  Maybe.”  Once it’s cooked, it’s not immediately served, as tomato pie is supposed to be served at room temperature, making tomato pies equal parts “salmonella risk” and “the worst thing to serve to your twelve-year old daughter as you talk to her about her changing body.”  This style typically is seen in New Jersey, Utica, Pennsylvania, and other cities where people occasionally walk into pizza restaurants and leave disappointed.

Listen, pizza only has three main ingredients—bread, cheese, and tomato.  At the end of the day, that holy mixture is the reason why pizza is as popular as it is today.  Tomato pies apparently decided to remove the best one without doing anything special to the remaining two other than “let it cool down on the counter for a while so you can really taste the…room-temperature-ness of it all.”  Here’s the thing about room temperature—it’s a great temperature for a room to be, and a terrible one for any kind of food.  A room temperature pizza sounds about as appealing to us as a room temperature beer, and goddamn you for making us think about the sin that is room temperature beer.  Ugh.

Quad City-Style Pizza

Eww gross, someone threw up on this pizza!  Wait…wait, really?  That’s how it’s supposed to look?  Um…

Quad City-style pizza, perhaps not surprisingly, originated in the Quad Cities region at the border of Iowa and Illinois, which comprises of Moline, Rock Island, and East Moline in Illinois along with Bettendorf and Davenport in Iowa.  We’re just going to list off what makes this pizza style unique without breaking off into commentary, but just assume that after every other word we’re saying “gross” in parentheses.

A Quad City-style pizza uses a dough that has a “spice jam” that is heavy on malt, leading to a toasted nutty flavor, which is then coated with a thin spicy tomato sauce, and covered in sausage and mozzarella before being put in a gas oven for 12 minutes.  It is then cut with scissors into strips instead of being cut into slices because wait okay we can’t hold our tongue any longer, are they fucking serious here?  “Spice jam”?  Malt?  Scissors?  And, again, just look at that thing.  It looks gross.  And that’s when you have someone trying to make it look as tasty as humanly possible.  Wikipedia is far less kind.

Ugh, at this point we’re starting to worry that we bit off more than we could chew.  That might be a pizza pun, we don’t know, it’s all just running together as a string of awful looking pies.

Ohio Valley-Style Pizza

Ohio has suffered a lot.  Cleveland is, well, Cleveland, their whole population spends all their time trying to get out of there by going into space, Pennsylvania is always making fun of them, they have a rough lot.  Making matters worse is that their attempt at making pizza, the Ohio Valley-style, seems to have been invented by a chef who wanted to find an elaborate way to turn pizza into a joke on an entire region.  Like the delicious Detroit-style pizza, this is cooked in a square.  Unlike that testament to grease and cooking-shit-in-industrial-parts-trays, these pizzas are filled with cold, uncooked toppings.  That’s right, after the sauce (don’t get too exciting, it’s literally just stewed tomatoes), crust, and a tiny amount of base cheese is cooked, the rest of the cheese and additional toppings are sprinkled on top like a fucking lunchables.

God.  Dammit.

To quote a native Ohio Valley…an, “Are we ahead of our time when it comes to making pizza, or are we just fucked up?  I’m voting for the latter.”  We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.

St. Louis-Style Pizza

Oh boy.  Here we go.  St. Louis isn’t that far from Chicago.  It’s not.  So, maybe much like the residents of the Quad City area, they feel like they have to compete with what we’ve determined is the best pizza in America.  If that’s the case, they clearly got a case of the yips, because the pizza style that they developed looks less like a delicious meal and more like a suicide note left by a despondent chef.  They went out of their way to find a unique way to ruin each of the key three ingredients of pizza in a way that, honestly, is impressive.  When someone takes a test and tries to get a zero on it, it’s almost as impressive as getting a 100%, because you have to know enough about the right answers to purposely get it wrong.  That’s why we at least will tip our hats to St. Louis, because they clearly know enough about pizza to fuck it up beyond recognition.

First, let us start with the crust.  As opposed to other pizzas, or any type of bread other than matzo, St. Louis-style pizza doesn’t use yeast, resulting in a thin, cracker-like crust.  Obviously, eating a burnt cracker is only so appealing, so to take things up a notch by putting sugar in their sauce, since if you’re going to make something awful, you might as well let it punish the diabetics stupid enough to try to eat it.  Finally, they created their own type of cheese to put on this pizza.  Having more in common with Velveeta than anything you’ve ever wanted to put on a pizza, Provel cheese is popular in St. Louis and nowhere else because just look at it.  The fact that it’s the awful cheese put on an awful pizza would explain why it never caught on with the rest of the nation.  Why St. Louis embraces it remains a mystery.  We suspect that the entire city is being held hostage by Kraft Foods.  “Dammit, buy Provel and eat St. Louis Pizza, or so help us, we’ll poison Matt Holliday’s coffee.”  (Pro tip:  St. Louis residents will do anything in order to stop a member of the Cardinals from being poisoned.)

Ugh.  Just thinking about all these pizzas is making us sick.  Here, go back to the one about the tasty pizzas again.  That’s a much better way to go.  Just go to your happy place.  Your cheesy, saucy happy place.

“Eww?  Right, that should be my response?  Eww?  I still want to try them.”

~American Oreo Consumers

Oreos are great.  We’ve discussed in some length the history of the company, and some of their more interesting products (here’s looking at you, Football Oreos) in the past, but we feel like we have to really bring that point home because sometimes it’s hard to remember exactly how good Oreos are.  Whenever an American sees a full glass of milk, they instinctively try to twist open an Oreo even if they’re not even holding one.  That’s called conditioning, and it was invented by a bell-maker named Pavlov.  Though, despite the fact that Oreos are a timeless classic, the past few years have seen a slew of “Limited-time” flavors appear that range from “not chocolate and cream” to “no, seriously, why are you making Oreos that are flavored anything other than chocolate and cream?”  It’s gotten to the point that we at AFFotD feel it’s time to step in and take a hard look at some of the odd varieties of Oreos that people have flocked to Target to buy.  Every single one of them shouldn’t work…and honestly, probably don’t.  But you have to at least give Nabisco credit for trying.  Even if they’re tampering with perfection.

The Grossest Oreos To Hit American Shelves

Oreos are such a staple in American society that some people will go out of their way to make a machine that actually separates the cream from the cookie, even though you’d have to be a raving lunatic to prefer the cookie over the cream.  Of course, Americans always strive for progress, so even when you just about perfected your product back in 1912, the R&D department’s still got to justify why they exist.  As a result, you get a slew of limited-edition cookies that are just daring you to buy it, if only to see if it could possibly taste as bad as it looks.  Yup, there are Americans among us who have actually purchased…

Watermelon Oreos

In nature, animals and plants tend to be brightly colored as a warning sign that they’re either dangerous or poisonous.  But dull colors?  That lets you know it’s safe.  If an animal stumbled across a plain old black-and-white Oreo, they’d not hesitate to try it, and would be rewarded with chocolaty-creamy goodness.  Even when someone tries to play a trick on you by giving you “Golden” Oreos, it’s still just a dull yellow with white cream.  Not so for the Watermelon Oreo, which swirls unnaturally bright green and pinkish red cream within vanilla cookies to create the snack equivalent of those bright red berries you ate a few of that one summer as a kid that made you sick for a week.

When you’re making an Oreo, you’d probably assume that since your medium is cookies and cream, you’d want to limit your flavors to to those that actually would taste good in cookie or cream form.  Watermelon does not meet that criteria.  Some fruits mix well with cream.  Strawberries and cream?  Sure.  Raspberries and cream?  Delicious!  Watermelon and cream?  What the fuck is wrong with you?  That sounds disgusting, why the hell are you pitching taste ideas to a food company if you clearly were born without taste buds?

Yes, they’re bad, though apparently a handful of people seem to really like them, which is worrisome because we didn’t think that the watermelon lobby had so much clout.  The watermelon taste is apparently very faint, which is good for people who don’t want to gag down Oreos that reek of artificially flavored watermelon, but is bad for people who are able to think to themselves, “If this is so brightly colored, yet doesn’t have any flavor… what are they putting in here?  What are you hiding, Nabisco!?” 

Ice Cream Rainbow Sure, Bert!

Sometimes, we have staffers that like to go on thinkgeek.com and buy ghost pepper flakes.  Basically, it’s crushed red pepper, only instead of using a slightly spicy chile pepper, they make it out of one of the spiciest peppers to ever exist.  We’re talking “400 times spicier than Tabasco sauce” spicy.  Anyway, one thing we sometimes do is go into pizza places that we don’t like or that yell at us when we try to chug a bottle of bourbon while waiting for our order, and we swap out the red pepper flakes on their tables for the ghost pepper.  They look exactly alike, but everyone who sits at that table ends up with the worst surprise they’ve ever had.  One time we saw someone get wheeled away in a gurney.

The point we’re trying to make is, Oreo released not one, but two, limited-edition Oreos using vanilla cookies and the exact same two colors of frosting.  One tastes like Watermelon’s ass with an hour-long lingering aftertaste, and the other is a horrible pun that combines lime and raspberry sherbet flavors, because when you have a cream-based product you might as well try to make it taste like a non-dairy alternative to ice cream.  So you’d have a hard time discerning between the two if they were both presented to you at the same time.  Though, instead of being the difference between crushed red pepper and burning hell flakes, no matter which Oreo you end up here, you’re going to lose in the long run.  They’re apparently pungent, with a distinct fake-fruit flavor, and, okay seriously, there’s no reason to even try to discuss the merits of this product, since just by naming it “Shure, Bert!” you’ve ensured the hatred of a nation.

Actually, allow us a minute to harp on this product name.  At first we thought that maybe it was a Sesame Street tie in or something.  It wasn’t.  So that just left us with more questions than answers.  Why can’t you just call it “sherbet”?  And if you really like puns that much, why is “sure” spelled “Shure”?  Wouldn’t “Sure, Bert” actually make more sense?  At least that wouldn’t set off the red squiggly lines of Nabisco’s spell check programs.  You know what, we don’t want to know the logic behind this.  We’re probably better off not knowing.

Candy Corn Oreo

Eww.  Granted, just about all of these entries can start with “eww” but candy corn tastes so fake to begin with that making an even more fake version of it seems like some cruel method used primarily to punish diabetics.  Oreo at least has the good sense to use the vanilla cookie instead of chocolate when making these sickly sweet creations, which is about as high of a compliment as heaping praise onto someone for using a condom when they pick up a twenty dollar hooker off a street corner.  Candy and cookies are two different things, and they should be treated thusly.  The people at Oreos should be ashamed for even thinking this was a plausible idea.  If someone ever goes to you and says, “Oh yeah, I’ve had the candy corn flavored Oreos” you should probably just give them a hug and whisper, “It’s okay.  We’re sorry.  We’re so sorry.”

Banana Split Crème Oreos

On a purely philosophical level, this flavor works.  Banana splits are made with ice cream, and usually have a scoop of chocolate in there somewhere.  And hey, everyone loves a chocolate covered banana, right?  And then you look at the crème inside the Oreo here.  It’s pretty much the equivalent of taking home a one night stand and discovering she was wearing four pairs of spanx.  Once you open up, you just have to sort of hide your disappointment and get on with it.  They took a perfectly good Oreo and decided to make the inside of it look like they melted down The Yellow Bastard from Sin City.  We don’t even care if it ends up tasting good (apparently it just tastes and smells very strongly of extremely artificial banana, so hey if that’s your thing) we’re not going to eat an Oreo where the insides look like they were scrapped out of a biohazard waste bin.  Let’s put it this way—there is a facebook group out there petitioning the return of the Banana Split Crème Oreos.  It has six members.  Six members.  Seriously, you could find more people in support of bringing back Smallpox.  We’re not saying that Smallpox is better or more popular than Banana Split Crème Oreos, we’re just saying that if Nabisco didn’t want us to make that assertion maybe they should have worked a little harder at finding a not-gross food coloring for their cream filling.

Oreo 100^th Birthday Cake Cookies

No.  False.  You are not allowed to put sprinkles inside your cookie, Oreo.  We don’t care if it’s your goddamn birthday.  Stop it.  Stop it.

Nothing to see here, folks.  Just go back to your loved ones and open up some classic Oreos with a glass of milk and be happy.  Or, if you really want to push the envelope, go with Double Stuf Oreos.  Now that is an innovation.

“OH GOD IT BURNS GET IT OUT OF ME OH GOD JUST TAKE A KNIFE AND CUT IT OUT OF ME!”

~AffotD Food Critic John Goodman

If you do a quick quick Google search, you’ll find that many people outside of this country assume that Americans don’t like spicy food.  Ignoring the fact that American cuisine has been embracing spiciness with increasingly fanatical zeal for the past seven years or so, or that we are responsible for a little thing called Cajun food, cultures that embrace “flavorful” cuisine operate under the assumption that Americans were raised eating bland, lifeless food.  Of course, anyone who has ever stared in wide-eyed horror at the slew of fried foods state fairs have to offer knows that that America doesn’t have any problem doing insane, irresponsible things to our meals, and that line doesn’t stop at spiciness.

No, if America has one culinary trait that trumps all others, its our love of taking normal food and making it recklessly unhealthy or uncomfortable to eat.  There’s a reason why we had a show called Man vs. Food that literally consisted of, “Let’s take Adam Richman and make him eat impossible to eat things that restaurants actually sell to customers every day.”  So, yes, of course we love spicy food.  And not only does America like spicy food, we like stupidly spicy food.  Literally dozens of Americans will purchase chili peppers 10,000 times spicier than Tobasco sauce, and will film themselves eating them, because this is America goddamn it and besides, stomach lining grows back.  Right?

Naturally, AFFotD needed to put this myth of bland food to rest by showing you the spiciest dishes being served in America.  Some of you are going to immediately hunt down these dishes to eat them, and you will be so angry that you did that, and our staff will laugh so hard at your misery.  That’s only part of the reason why we’re doing this.  The rest is, you know, uh, spicy food is delicious and America does spicy right.

The Five Spiciest Meals in America

Determining the exact “spiciness” of a food generally comes with a fairly large amount of subjectivity.  Many people simply utilize the crude but moderately effective rating range of “oh wow, yeah, that has a little bit of a kick at the end” to “OH MOTHER OF GOD WHY DID I DO THIS TO MYSELF PLEASE JUST KILL ME TO RELEASE ME FROM THIS PERSONAL HELL.”  That’s when science stepped in and came up with the Scoville scale which, though not exactly precise, still gives you an idea of the spiciness of a pepper or food.

The feeling of searing pain in your mouth, lips, and oh God genitals why did you have you scratch your genitals after touching the seeds of those habañero peppers comes from a chemical compound called “Capsaicin” which stimulates receptors in your nerve endings to make them feel pain.  Biting into a hot pepper makes your body scream, “UM DUDE I THINK SOMEONE IS STABBING US WITH A MOLTEN BLADE IN THE MOUTH,” and the Scoville scale is our way of determining if our invisible foe is wielding a pocket knife or a katana.  By taking an alcohol extract of a dried pepper, and adding a solution of sugar water, the Scoville scale is calculated by determining how much sugar water must be added before a number of tasters (usually five) can no longer detect any spiciness.   Which means that for a jalapeño pepper to have 5,000 Scoville heat units, it would take 5,000 drops of sugar water to neutralize a single drop of jalapeño oil.

And that’s just child’s play.

Since many people talk about spicy food in inaccurate “oh man, these wings, ho boy” terms, we limited our list of spiciest food dishes in America to ones where we could get a concrete Scoville rating, so you can get a proper idea of exactly how much of the skin from the inside of your mouth you’re going to have slough off after every bite.

We know, readers.  It’s weird to see us trying to use science too.  We’ll just dive straight into the spicy.

#5:  Bushido Spicy Tuna Roll Challenge- 250,000+ Scoville Heat Units

Most restaurants that serve dangerously spicy dishes put everything out there at once for you.  “Oh, you think you like spicy food?  Here’s a bowl of soup that was made out of peppers that can only be grown in pools of Satan’s semen in the middle of Death Valley.  If you eat every last bite of it, you won’t have to pay, but seriously baahaha go fuck yourself.”  Bushido Japanese Restaurant in Charleston, South Carolina decided to go a different route which is why, though this dish is by far the least spicy of any other listed in this article, it definitely belongs with the big boys.  “As seen on Man vs. Food” (honestly, you’re going to be hearing that a lot.  Pretty much anytime you find a dish listed as ‘the spiciest in America’ a character from South Park pops up and shouts “RICHMAN DID IT RICHMAN DID IT”) Bushido offers the Bushido Seppuku Challenge.  In case you didn’t get the not-so-subtle reference, seppuku is the form of Japanese ritualistic suicide where a samurai disembowels himself.  It’s a metaphor people! 

The challenge consists of ten different spicy tuna rolls, each one getting increasingly spicier, which you have to eat in a row without drinking anything that would lessen the effect of the capsaicin.  The first five rolls work their way up to a level of spiciness that’s about on par with eating a raw jalapeño pepper, at which point you’re told you have to sign a waiver if you want to continue.  The waiver includes a clause that, if you throw up during one of the “levels” you have to eat that spicy roll again before you can move on.  The eighth (or, third most spicy) roll has a Scoville rating of about 250,000, which means that by number 10 (filled with Ghost Pepper, ie, the chili nature devised to punish us for Global Warming) you’ll probably be over 500,000 units.

If you’re able to finish all ten rolls, you get a samurai headband because racism(?) and a $25 gift certificate that you will never use because your stomach has now been converted to a bubbling maw of lava and it will slowly eat away at you until you wake up in the morning as nothing but ash.  But hey, that was some tasty tuna, right?

#4:  East Coast Grill’s Pasta Plate From Hell:  Somewhere Between 500,000 and 1,000,000 Scoville Heat Units

We don’t have any concrete numbers on actual spice levels of the East Coast Grill’s Pasta Plate From Hell, which they only sell in December during their “Hell Week.”  What we do know is that it’s made with enough ghost peppers that it has at least 500,000, and may possibly exceed the spiciness of some of the other dishes on this list.  We also know that it is so spicy it once sent someone to the hospital.  We’d be lying if we said that’s the last time you’ll see that happen in this article.

There’s no better way to describe this dish than East Coast Grill did in the waiver they make you sign, which contains such vague legalese as “Rectum?  Damn near killed ‘em,” “imagine an angry Goliath Birdeater crawling down your throat, the irritating sting of its barbed urticating hairs penetrating the membranes of your tongue and esophagus.  The large hairy spider reaches your stomach and sinks its fangs into your intestines… Hours later it tears out the other end, alive,” and, most succinctly, “You Will Get Hurt.”

Heh.  Damn that rectum line was pretty good actually.  We’re gonna feed this dish to our writers as punishment for them not coming up with it first.

#3:  Chunky’s Burgers & More’s Four Horsemen Burger-  850,000-1,000,000 Scoville Heat Units

As seen on “Man vs. Food” (RICHMAN DID IT RICHMAN DID IT), Chunky’s Burgers & More in San Antonio, Texas decided to make a delicious looking burger that tastes like someone dared you to put a burning coal in your mouth and you were stupid enough to say yes.  The burger is called the Four Horseman partly because it uses four different types of peppers (jalapeño, serrano, habañero sauce, and ghost chili) and also because everyone that has finished one has gone immediately insane for they have seen the arrival of the apocalypse and they have discovered that none will have been deemed worthy to be spared.

If you’re able to finish the burger challenge, it’s free.  However to do so, you have to finish it in 25 minutes without spitting, “double tasting”, going to the bathroom, or eating or drinking anything that could cool down the fire in your mouth.  Additionally, once you finish it, you have to wait five minutes before you take any spicy food remedy.  Yes, there’s a puke bucket provided, and yes they charge you twenty bucks if you miss said bucket.  Telling you that this clocks in between 850K and a million Scoville units doesn’t do it justice.  It’s like telling you “Pluto is 4.7 billion miles from Earth.”  You see the number, but don’t comprehend how impossibly big that number actually is.  Let’s put it this way—you notice how the hand in this picture has a glove on it?  They make you wear that as you handle the burger.  So you don’t get pepper burns.

Burns.  From pepper.

Either way, out of the thousands who have tried this challenge, only 47 in all of America have completed it as of the writing of this article.  Go ahead and click the Chunky’s link, there’s pictures of all of them.  Every single one has tears in their eyes, shirts drenched with sweat, and lips that are so red and raw that they look like Heath Ledger’s joker.  So, anyway, guess it’s time for us to book a ticket to San Antonio.

#2:  Brick Lane Curry House’s Phaal Curry- 1,000,000 Scoville Heat Units

Most dishes that are spicy enough to melt through iron like the saliva from the Queen Mother in Aliens require a waiver to be signed.  Sometimes, you’ll see a waiver that’s just a gimmicky document for a not-crazy-spicy dish that lets the people who finish say, “lulz, you guys, I just ate like, the spiciest thing, and I’m a real man, and all the women should now form a line for the sex starting at this certificate I won with my dollars.”  However, you don’t really doubt the sincerity behind the “seriously, you will get very hurt and it’ll be your own damn fault” sentiment when you’re signing a waiver to eat a dish that has to be cooked while its chefs wear gas masks.

The Brick Lane Curry House, located at various locations in New York City (and Jersey, which for these purposes, and at the request of Northeastern Jersey residents, shall henceforth be referred to as New York City), prides itself for its Phaal Curry, which boasts a hefty 1,000,000 Scoville heat units, and has been known to cause hallucinations.  It’s appeared on Man vs. Food (RICHMAN DID IT RICHMAN DID IT) and it has sent two people to the hospital.  Phaal is a type of purposely evilly spicy curry that originated in Indian restaurants in the United Kingdom, while hilariously sharing the same name as a gravy-less, char-grilled, non-tongue scorching street foot in Bangalore.  We can only assume they named it as such to punish every Bangladeshi immigrant who ever craves a taste of home.  Brick Lane Curry House is likely the best known example of this curry, as it is spicy enough to make you confess to crimes you never committed (fun fact- we think we arrested the Son of Sam.  We got the wrong guy.  Phaal curry is why).

If you eat 24 ounces of this culinary manifestation of every time you got really mad at someone and thought, just for a second, “What if I did this horrible thing to oh God, no why would I even think that what is wrong with me” in one sitting, you get a certificate, a beer (because you’ll goddamn well need one), and the directions to the nearest hospital that has an available stomach pump.  And then, the next time you find yourself at a singles bar, you can feel confidence and bravery, knowing you’ve tackled the near impossible, and without a twinge of embarrassment will stroll up to that extremely attractive person of your desirous sex and say, “HUHHRRRHHHHH!”  Because, lol, you don’t have vocal chords anymore, you burned them off, you big curry eating silly.

#1:  The Emperor’s Egg Roll From China Blossom- 7,100,000 Scoville Heat Units

Holy shit, guys.  We don’t know if we want to play this game anymore.  This is like that part of the movie where we’re the fun-loving teenage couple that just got picked up while hitchhiking because #OMG #YOLO #ForeverYoung and after having a really friendly conversation with the driver he just casually mentions how he’s killed people before, saying something like, “I remember the last time I picked up hitchhikers.  Looked just like you two.  Young.  Carefree.  Thinking, sure, 7.1 million Scoville units, that’s nothing.  My stomach can take it.  I dumped their bodies in a ditch.”

We’re trying to say that the Emperor’s Egg Roll from China Blossom in North Andover, Massachusetts has killed people, and while it didn’t do it on purpose, it didn’t really feel bad about it either.  Clocking in at an impossible-sounding 7.1 million Scoville units (for those of you calling bullshit, we decided to go with the lesser of estimates we ran into.  This video lists it as between 7 and 10 million, and one site lists it at 16 million) this egg roll is jam packed with the Naga Viper pepper (ie, the pepper that took the Guinness World Records “Hottest Chilli” title away from the Ghost Pepper, ie, the pepper that takes the combined anguish of a full year’s worth of unsolved Juarez murders and transforms it to chilli form), and then tops that with an additional secret spicy sauce.  Oh, and the whole thing is then sprinkled with 23-karat gold flakes, because ha ha fuck you poor people if you want this money you have to put hell in your mouth first.

This little doozy is on the secret menu, probably because, legal waiver notwithstanding, they’d be arrested for negligent homicide if someone accidentally ordered it off their menu not knowing what they’ve done, and as far as we can tell, the best anyone has ever done was to eat just half of the damn thing, with most people giving up after the first or second bite.  We can’t imagine anyone being teased for being unable to finish this gastronomic monstrosity, we assume that as soon as someone takes the second bite and collapses on the table, people just start cheering the same way they did at the end of Rocky because, sure, he lost, but he lost to the champ and he made it a fight.  If we ever attempt to eat this behemoth we’re going to make sure we start dating a shy, coy, borderline Asperger-y pet store worker named Adrian just so we can shout her name out when we finally crumble to the mat.

“ADRIAN!  ADRIAN!  BRING ME A GODDAMN GLASS OF MILK!”

Or, you know, we could just stick to putting Sriracha on everything and remain completely content with that.  To each their own.

“What in the living hell?  What is going ON here?  This is terrifying.  I want it all.”

~AFFotD Food Critic, John Goodman

The American fast food industry has a rich history of creating unhealthy Frankenstein meals, possibly as part of a sadistic plan to fatten up the populace enough that Soylent Green becomes a financially viable food product.  Ever since Taco Bell created “Fourth Meal” and White Castle whipped out their “What you Crave” slogan as a not-so-subtle way of telling you “these sliders taste like sex when you’re drunk or high,” fast food chains have gone in two directions with their meals.  They either cater their menu to daytime customers, the kinds of people who might want to nibble on a nice Egg White McMuffin on the way to work, or just have a Whopper with fries for lunch, or they realize, “huh, for some reason our locations around colleges are empty during the day, and then have lines out the door at three in the morning” and start offering food that sounds like it would be fucking delicious when you’re hammered.

Here’s a quick sobriety test for you.  Did you know that Burger King sells tacos?  If you said, “Oh God, that sounds disgusting” you’re probably only a few beers into your day.  If you read that and thought, “Man, I would love to try that right now” you must be pretty hammered.

Apparently Jack in the Box has decided to fully embrace this concept in a way that borders on insanity, which is why our nation is about to be presented with the Jack’s Munchie Meal.  And because it will take about six shots of whiskey and a familial history of mental illness to truly demonstrate everything going on with these $6 “man how drunk was I last night?” meals, we’re bringing back our News Item of the Month feature to really delve into the true eyes of corporate fast food madness.

Behold.

AFFotD News Item of the Month:  Jack in the Box has lost their GODDAMN MINDS

   Okay, so deep breaths everyone.  Let’s dive into this.  Jack in the Box has decided to revolutionize the concept of stoner/drunk meals by offering the Munchie Meal from 9PM to 5AM.  For six dollars, you get two tacos (yes, Jack in the Box sells tacos), Halfsie fries (half curly fries, half French fries), a 20 ounce drink, and one of the following menu items.  Yes, the menu items are new, yes, they are insane, and yes, you want them right now.

Option 1:  Stacked Grilled Cheese Burger

When you see a hamburger, do you ever think, “This is delicious, but really I wish that the top bun was a grilled cheese sandwich”?  If so, your cardiologist just called and wanted to thank you for helping pay for his kids to get into college, but also, Jack in the Box has got the fucking sandwich for you.  Taking a standard Jack in the Box cheeseburger, they top this fucker with a sourdough grilled cheese sandwich, because the voices in their heads demand cheese more cheese damn you.  We would order the shit out of this in roughly three seconds to be honest, because look at it.  It is a brilliant, delicious idea, but it’s also the kind of idea that you only come up with if you’re eight years old or really wasted, sort of like mixing every soda together to make a suicide.

Option 2:  The Brunch Burger 

When certain McDonald’s locations decided to start selling their breakfast menu items after midnight, that was pretty much them raising a white flag and saying, “You win, drunk people, enjoy that McGriddle that you won’t remember having ordered next morning.”  Jack in the Box, however, felt that such a concession was for pansies.  If you’re going to offer wasted people breakfast food in the middle of the night, you might as well make a sandwich that sounds like it was created by a person with a very specific kind of Tourette’s that only makes him shout out random breakfast foods.  “So, I was thinking, CROISSANT, that maybe, for your menu, BACON, you could try to, EGGS, maybe make a cheeseburger, HASH BROWN, with some breakfast stuff on top of it?”

Option 3:  Exploding Cheesy Chicken Sandwich

Okay, we need this right now.  The exploding cheesy chicken sandwich takes a chicken sandwich, widely known as “the most boring menu item on a fast food menu unless it’s spicy in which case it’s delicious” and douses it with a gooey cheese sauce…AND THEN JAMS A FUCKTON OF MOZZARELLA STICKS IN THERE.  That’s so beautiful we don’t even want to make a joke about it.  We’re just so happy right now.

Option 4:  Loaded Nuggets

These are just your standard chicken nuggets, only they’re covered in two kinds of cheese, ranch dressing, and bacon.  This is sort of the Coldstone Creamery logic of fast food—people like chicken nuggets right?  Then let’s just smash a whole lot of other shit on there that people like, fuck it!  However, the crazy train doesn’t end there, because when you get each of these items (again, with a half-and-half fries and curly fries combination as well as two tacos) you get the Spin the Taco and the Napkingami, which show that Jack in the Box has crossed over from “having drunk and stoned people design their menu” and gone straight into “getting their ideas from a Ouija board operated by their schizophrenic cousin who used to write for collegehumor.”  Just take a look at the inside of the box you get with your tacos.

We have two initial responses to this.  First of all, yes, that’s fucking hilarious.  And secondly, this is a multi-billion dollar corporation that agreed to print this on millions of pieces of cardboard.  Is there something about fast food tacos that’s supposed to breed Adult Swim like humor?  We totally support this, don’t get us wrong, but you do realize that this idea had to go across the desk of a millionaire in a suit at one point, and he had to go, yeah let’s send this out to America?  We’re not sure if that makes us proud of the state of our nation’s millionaires, or worried that our millionaires have found a way to pander to young drunk Americans.  It gets even more comically inane, because the other part of the taco box contains…

Spin the motherfucking taco.  How does this ever become a thing?  The concept itself is funny, but if you look at the options on this thing, we’re starting to suspect that Jack in the Box randomly suffered an aneurism and spontaneously decided to ruin their customer’s lives.  Burping your name or kissing your taco seems like an innocent enough thing to do, but “text your ex”?  How drunk do you know we are, Jack in a Box?  You remember that scene in Sideways where Paul Giamatti got wasted on wine and then called his ex and it was really sad and disastrous?  What’s that?  You haven’t seen Sideways in 10 years so you don’t really remember that scene?  Well, okay, there’s a sceen in Sideways where Paul Giamatii gets really wasted on wine and calls his ex, and it’s really sad and disastrous.  That’s going to happen so many times from inside a Jack in the Box now.  Great job, Jack in the Box.  Next thing you know they’re just going to hand out napkins that say, “Text ‘are you free tonight?’ to that clingy girl you hooked up with a year ago and had to distance yourself from.”

Of course, at the end of the day, you really just have to sit back and appreciate that for six bucks you can give the drunk version of yourself everything it ever wanted.  Sober you can deal with the digestive implications later.  This menu was rolled out yesterday, so if you’re lucky enough to live by a Jack in the Box, looks like you plans for when the bars are closed and you don’t want to quite go home this weekend.  Get one of those mozzarella stick chicken sandwiches for us, if you’d be so kind.