“What do you mean you only have baked potatoes?  Are you an Irish farmer?”

~New York Restaurant Patrons

Since the turn of the century, the restaurant business in America has constantly evolved.  We don’t remember 1999 too well because alcohol and constant internet stimulation has pretty much decimated our ability to hold onto memories to a degree that would make people really sad and go, “Aww” if we were old instead of just young(ish) and irresponsible.  But, if memory serves (it doesn’t) back in 1999 people only ate at Taco Bells giving out Star Wars Episode 1:  The Phantom Menace action figures, and if you wanted to impress your date right out of her flannel shirt you’d take her to a nice French Bistro and try to tell yourself that the shear amounts of butter being used was enough to forgive the food for it’s French origins.

Since then, there’s been a foodie revolution in our country, which has brought us wonderful culinary delights as well as pretentious shit that makes us roll our eyes.  And one of these trends, for better or worse, is single-item eateries, restaurants that only serve one specific dish.  Sure, opening an eatery that only sells, say, overpriced baked potatoes might not be the most sound practice, but some places manage to find enough excitement in their ability to do one thing really well that they thrive.  Even if you can’t fathom how enough people could manage to support a place that solely exists to give you pudding.

But hey, if you’re in New York you might as well be doing something other than waiting in line at 4AM to get a fucking doughnut, so sure, we’ll help you out by telling you some of the more unique and unusual single-item restaurants out there.  Technically in America, but let’s be real, this concept totally spent the last 8 years radiating outwards from New York.

America’s Unusual Single-Item Restaurants

Most Americans crave diversity.  The reason why Walmart became so popular was because they exploit their labor pool to offer low prices are the only place where you can buy a Virgin Mary candle, a shotgun, and a case of beer without having to walk more than 25 feet.   We created food courts because sometimes you don’t want to decide between a pizza and a burger so you’d rather put your Whopper on top of your Sbarro and call it a greasy day.  But that doesn’t faze the following enterprises from saying, “No, we only sell French Fries.  Yes we are serious.”

Cereality

Cereality was a national chain, and you probably might even recognize it from that time one opened near your college campus and everyone was all, “Oh man, it’s a restaurant that only sells cereal?  I might have to try that just for the lulz” but then you kept forgetting because, man, you’re hungry and a little buzzed and holy shit there’s almost no line at the Chipotle right now LETS GET SOME BURRITOS BITCHES and then the next year someone went up to you and said, “Hey, did you hear that Cereality closed?” and you said, “Cereality?” and they said, “Yeah, that place that only sells cereal,” and you were like, “Oh man, a restaurant that only sells cereal?  Damn, I wish I had tried that, just for the lulz.”

So yes, this place just sells cereal, and no, they are not making their own cereal.  They literally just sell you boxes of cereal you can get at any grocery store.  Now, they do have toppings you can add, and even offer combinations for your choosing (the Jump Start, for example, combines Special K, Cheerios, peaches, and honey).  While we’re sure there are some delicious cereal combinations you can choose from, we can’t say we’re surprised that only two locations (one in Texas and one in Virginia) still exist, since it’s honestly easier and cheaper to just buy a box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch and eat it on your couch in your boxers while watching ESPN Sportscenter.

Dozens of Soup Restaurants

We all know that there are restaurants that only serve soup because we’ve all seen Seinfeld and they exist in literally every major city.  But just because they’ve been established for years, and they’re by far the most visible single-item establishments out there, that doesn’t change the fact that, at their very core, the concept of a restaurant that only sells soup seems strange.  Soup is not exactly a dish that you have a hard time finding.  Yes, a place that specializes only in soup is bound to have really good soup, but you can get pretty good soup at most national chains that sell sandwiches, and at that point you can actually get a soup with a sandwich, which most people in the lower 48 states might recognize as being “an actual meal as opposed to a side dish that’s primarily composed of liquid.”

The point being, if you’re only selling soup, why not buy some bread and Boar’s Head deli meats and toss together some halfway passable sandwiches while you’re at it, so all your customers don’t have to eat the same lunch as someone who just had their mouth wired shut?  We all love soup, but everyone loves soup with a sandwich even better.  Just saying.

The Meatloaf Bakery

While we spent our introduction ragging on New York for their tendency to have single-item restaurants, it makes sense that the Chicago-based restaurant to make this list would do something as unhealthy-but-actually-delicious sounding as selling cupcake shaped meatloaves.  They ask “why does a meatloaf have to come in loaf form” (because they clearly have a difficulty grasping things like “the definition of words”) and molded up some meat…uh…upcakes, which would then get “icing” out of ingredients like pasta, mashed potatoes, or stuffing because, actually, that sounds pretty damn tasty.

These hunks of meat, which range from salmon loaf to bacon-cheddar-onion-mustard-ketchup-pickles-burger loaves, come in bite-sized, cupcake, and loaf sizes, though a whole loaf sets you back between 35 and 50 dollars and sometimes is referred to as a pie, cake, or tart.  Ultimately, the continued existence of the Meatloaf Bakery proves that they’re probably very good at baking ground up meats into shapes other than “meat” while also giving us hope for our plan to someday open a restaurant specializing in erotically shaped meats.

Rice to Riches

And now we get to New York.  In the context of this article you wouldn’t be faulted for guessing that Rice to Riches was a restaurant that sells only rice, or maybe some sort of alchemical means to turn rice into gold.  The answer is better (more tasty) and worse (more obscure) than either of those options, however.

Because Rice to Riches only sells rice pudding.

Honestly, we’re sure that they make divine rice pudding.  It’s a viable company that has enough demand that they ship out 40 ounce servings at a time.  Again, this is 40 ounces of rice pudding.  They have flavors such as “Coast to Coast Cheesecake”, “The Edge of Rum Raisin”, and “Sex Drugs and Rocky Road” but at the heart of the matter, they’re selling a food item that 99% of the population views as good, but never worth going out of their way for.  Take a moment to consider the last time you ate rice pudding.  It’s probably been at least several months, and let’s be honest for most of you it’s been a couple of years.  You saw it at some pot luck and ate some, and it was pretty tasty, and then it skipped your mind and you forgot about its existence as a viable food option, because never once has someone said, “Man, remember rice pudding guys?  I haven’t had it in so long, I need some right the fuck now.”

Naturally when it first came out, people were losing their shit, because New York.

Pommes Frites

There are actually several places that sell just French fries, which you might remember as that side dish that sometimes comes free with your hamburger and that you don’t mind when your friends pick them from your plate.  French Fry Heaven is a specialty shop that only sells French fries with fifty different kinds of fries, and found enough success to expand into a national chain.  But, we’re not here to focus on unhealthy ranch-soaked Texas fries, we’d rather focus on the fact that New York has a fries-only restaurant called Pommes Frites that has been open for 10 years and still have a line out the door.  The only time we’ve waited in line for a French fry was at McDonald’s, and even then that was just because it was during their Monopoly promotion and we wanted to get four playing pieces.

People flock to spend between $4.50 and $7.75 for Belgium style fries with your choice of sauce, and while we don’t take issue with people putting curry or wild mushroom mayo on French fries, we just hope that people only eat it for snack or lunch purposes.  Because we’re imagining a family of five dressing up and hopping on over to that fancy fries place the young folks nowadays seem to like for their one dinner out all week as their kids excitedly are told they can get the medium size just this time because daddy didn’t go to the bar on Wednesday after work, and now we’re just incredibly sad.

Oat Meals

It’s fucking oatmeal, people.  Oatmeal.  Yes, this one is New York too, since apparently people will flock to spend between four and seven dollars on oats mixed with boiling water.  Oat Meal uses only oats in every aspect of its menu, which sort of pisses us off when we realized that oats can absolutely be used to brew beer.  Those bastards.

There are sweet oatmeal dishes, like Pomegranate Pistachio, and savory ones, like Bacon Pumpkin.  Do you remember how in the 90’s no one even knew what a truffle was?  Well, now you can get truffle oil and shaved Parmesan shoved in a cup of oatmeal like that’s a completely normal thing.  “What, you don’t eat your oatmeal with dried figs, crumbled Gorgonzola, and a balsamic vinegar glaze?  Oh I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you were raised on a farm.  Careful in the street, the giant shiny monsters are called ‘cars’ and they can injure you.”

At this point, there’s no fighting it.  In 100 years, there’ll be one restaurant that sells every possible type of food, and every other restaurant will sell just one thing, so we might as well embrace it and be the first to start a restaurant that sells only our favorite thing.

Oh wait.  We already have that.  It’s called a liquor store.  Well played, economy.  Well played.

“I mean, how do I…finish this?  It’s EVERYWHERE.”

~Consumers of the following

Hamburgers are a wonderful.  We’ve often explained why in great detail.  We’ve searched around for the largest in the world. Hell, we’ve even unleashed our wallets to let you know the most expensive burgers in the world.  Hamburgers are wonderful.

That past paragraph was technically a palindrome.

Anyway, as much as we love hamburgers, America loves them even more, which is why there are millions of variations of the suckers out there to clog your arteries.  Some are fancy, some are plain.  Some are tofu.  All are delicious.  Except for tofu burgers, you get that right the hell out of our face, eat yourself a nice rare steak, and write us a 4,000 word essay on why you are bad and should feel bad.  No, we’re serious, go home and think about what you’ve done.  We’ll wait.

Ahem.

Of course, as we can see with doughnut burgers, Americans love their burgers unhealthy and sloppy.  That’s why we’ve decided to scour the google internet our contact list the nation, on foot, forming painful blisters from thousands of traversed miles to find you the sloppiest, messiest burgers that our fair country has to offer.  Are there other examples of potentially messier burgers out there?  Well, probably, Jesus “messy” is such an objective term and maybe if you’re nice we’ll do a follow up to this article.  But in the meantime, sink your fangs into…

The 10 Messiest Burgers In America

Holy hell, look at that.  Just imagine ordering that, picking it up with your hands, and shoveling it into the quivering, greedy maw that you used to call a mouth but now just call Alcatraz for nothing can escape.  That is a Mexican Hamburger from Taqueria Taconmadre in Houston (don’t worry, it’s “Mexican” the same way that Taco Bell is “food”), where a hamburger is covered in mayo, mustard, pickles, onions, tomatoes, ketchup, peppers, ham, and avocado, and possibly eight sticks of butter, let’s face it, you’d have no idea and you wouldn’t care as you mash this into your face with the assistance of the dozens of napkins you’re about to sacrifice to the grease gods.  Like all the best hamburgers, it is going to cause an unholy mess, and is the kind of food you’d never eat on a first date, but would eat without hesitation after you’ve been together for a few years and you’ve long since given up trying to impress each other anymore.

Yes, this and many other burgers in our fine nation are the best thing for the American who has just stopped caring, so let’s embrace the slop, as well as our future necessity for heart medication, by saluting the following magnificent burgers.

10:  Applebee’s Quesadilla Burger

“Boooo, AFFotD, booo, we can’t believe you’d just lazily toss in some random burger item you can get at any Applebee’s in the nation.  What the hell is that?” you’re probably shouting from your chair made out of reclaimed wood by a carpenter who lives two doors down using only locally sourced nails and lacquer you made yourself by purchasing sulfuric and nitric acid, using them to soak cotton in an acid-resistant container before straining out the pulp material and mixing with a fast drying solvent.  La-di-fucking-da Mr. Co-Op, but guess what, just because something comes from some corporate national chain in no way means that it’s any less messy to replace a hamburger bun with two greasy quesadillas, okay?  Get off your high horse, hippie.

Surprisingly enough, Applebee’s website hides the nutritional information to make it pretty hard to discover exactly how unhealthy this burger is, but if we had to guess, we’d either go with either “1400 calories and 105 grams of fat” of “holy fuck 105 grams of fat are we reading this correctly?”  Between its unhealthy nature, and the fact that the thought of picking up two quesadillas with dripping hamburger meat and toppings in the middle sounds like the least humane way to murder whatever T-shirt you’re wearing at that moment, we’d say it’s more than earned it’s spot on this list.

9:   The Quadruple Bypass Burger

Well holy shit.  Here we have another burger that is both ungainly, unhealthy, and also decently well known throughout the nation.  At 8,000 calories, the Quadruple Bypass Burger from Las Vegas’ Heart Attack Grill has gotten a lot of press, mainly because they have gimmicks like “giving free meals to anyone over 350 pounds” and “having not one, but two, ‘unofficial’ spokespeople die,” and they have had several (yes, as in more than one) people sustain heart attacks while eating their burgers.  So this entry kind of works in two ways—it’s messy because, for the love of God how would you even start getting that thing in your mouth, do the owners know that we’ve not yet evolved the ability to unhinge our jaw like a fucking snake, and it’s also messy because if you die while eating a Quadruple Bypass you probably weren’t the kind of person who was planning that far into the future, and your family is going to be mired in years of legal struggles determining who gets to keep your belongings.

Either way, as you can see from the graphic above, the Quadruple Bypass consists of four separate half pound burger patties, each accompanied with sauce, cheese, onion and bacon, with the top layer getting lettuce and tomato to increase the likelihood that you choke to death on this burger while laughingly explaining that you’re “eating your vegetables.”  That’s hilarious, really solid joke there, now you have a golf ball-sized piece of cow wedged in your esophagus, and there’s far too much fat to wrestle through for anyone to even consider giving you the Heimlich.  Hope it was worth it.

(Okay, it totally was.)

8:  The Brat and Burger

Now, as soon as you saw a bratwurst on top of a hamburger you probably started shouting, “WISCONSIN THAT IS FROM WISCONSIN AM I CORRECT THAT ONLY WISCONSIN WOULD DO THIS?” and yes, you would be 100% correct.  Sheboygan, Wisconsin is home to two locations of The Charcoal Inn, and specialize in charcoal grilled sandwiches, the messiest of which is that delicious looking monstrosity you see above.  Apart from the difficulties inherent in eating a hamburger with a bratwurst hanging half out of the bun which, if you look at it with the right mindset almost makes it look like the hamburger is sticking it’s tongue out at you, the Brat and Burger is a hamburger patty/bratwurst combination that is still topped with cheddar cheese, onions, pickles, mustard, and a shitload of butter, because of course this hamburger needs more butter.

Now just imagine eating this delicious concoction.  First, you have to eat the protruding portions of the bratwurst as the rest of the burger basically spits its juices on your chin waiting for its turn for munchtown.  Then, you get to the burger, where the brat and hamburger meat mix with cheddar and toppings to overload your senses with pure, meaty goodness, all while butter dribbles down the front of your shirt.  You spend a moment deciding if you’ve ruined your shirt, or just invented the best cologne ever, and as you finish that last, hearty bite, you see a blinding light and meet St. Peter at the gates of heaven where he too is eating a brat and burger.  You say, “Oh, so I just had a heart attack and died, didn’t I?” to which St. Peter nods, points at the stains at your shirt, and says, “But, totally worth it, right?” and you shrug and say, “I mean, honestly?  Not really.  I thought the burger was delicious, but this was kind of a really premature death” and then you two will laugh and laugh.

7:  The Slayer

It’s not overly common to find a restaurant that serves a hamburger over fries, without any bun, but it’s not especially rare either.  When you see that item on the menu, you might mumble something about eating a burger with a fork and knife in passing while you continue to scour the menu.  That being said, it is one of the messiest ways to eat a burger, because only the uninspired will say “okay, so we’re going to take the burger off the bun and put it on fries…and leave it at that.”  There’s got to be some melted cheese or chili or something on that to make it worth your while, and Kuma’s Corner, a punk bar that doubles as one of the most popular burger joints in the city of Chicago, does not fuck around when it comes to their version of this purposely messy burger method.

Kuma’s, which recently caused waves by making a burger topped with a red wine reduction and a communion wafer to represent the body and blood of Christ, offers the Slayer, where they start with a bed of French fries before topping it with a 10 ounce burger patty and, well, everything listed in the image above.  Chili, melted cheese, Andouille sausage, and of course ANGER are the most prevalent ingredients for this burger which you should probably eat with a silverware except this is America so you know that at least one person has ordered this burger, tied their hands behind their back, and stuck their face in it to eat it like a pig from a trough.  We’re not saying that our staffers have done that.  But we’re totally saying that they did, and it was wonderful.

6:   Jucy Lucy

No matter how tasty something is, it’s automatically made more delicious by the addition of cheese.  While most of the nation was content with boring-old-but-still-unimaginably-delicious cheeseburgers, two bars on the same street in South Minneapolis decided that hamburgers would be far more fun and difficult to eat if they cooked a burger with cheese on the inside.  And thus, the Jucy Lucy (or Juicy Lucy, depending on which purported “founding location” you’re getting it from) was born.  It’s a simple concept, but incredibly messy—a hunk of cheese is surrounded by raw meat and cooked until it melts, leaving you with melted delicious goodness inside your burger that has a tendency to scald you if you bite into it too quickly after it’s been cooked.

We’re surprised that it took until the 1950’s for someone to think of the concept, and we’re a little disappointed that Jucy Lucy’s having spread all the way across America yet, but either way there is apparently a bit of a Jucy Lucy war between Matt’s Bar and the 5-8 club about who really created the Jucy Lucy.  5-8 Club’s staff has been known to wear shirts with the motto “if it’s spelled right it’s done right,” to which Matt’s Bar utilizes advertisements with the far less catchy, “Remember, if it is spelled correctly, you are eating a shameless rip-off!” which, come on, really Matt’s Bar?  That’s the best you got?  How about “lose the I, make 5-8 cry”?  Or “if the spelling is true, you’re eating a ruse”?  “If there’s a spelling correction, your Lucy’s a deception”?  Seriously, we just came up with three better slogans and we’ve been drunk since ten in the morning.  Get your shit together, Matt’s Bar.

5:  The Double Coronary Burger

Yes, the joke behind this name is pretty much the exact same concept as the Quadruple Bypass Burger, but honestly there’s only so many ways you can accurately describe a burger that counts as a murder weapon if given to someone with high enough cholesterol levels.  Atlanta’s Vortex Grill unleashed the unholy messy concoction known as the Double Coronary to an unsuspecting public, probably as a savory alternative to the killer éclair from that episode of The Simpsons, which is made using a half a pound of sirloin, four slices of American cheese, five strips of bacon, and two fried eggs.  Oh, and we forgot to mention the fucking grilled cheese sandwiches they used to replace the hamburger bun.

Between the cheese, the oil-grilled-cheese-filled “buns”, the bacon, and the two eggs ready to bleed yolk all over your plate, this burger’s caloric count is listed roughly as “we’ve yet to discover a number that high so let’s just put one of those sideways 8’s.”  This burger has more saturated fats than can be found in the known universe, which has caused nutritional astrophysicist to postulate the concept of “anti-saturated fats” just to explain this burger’s existence.  And that’s just the nutritional mumbo-jumbo that we don’t give a shit about (avoiding unhealthy food is for French People and robots), the sheer messiness of this burger is astounding.  You might think it’s impressive if you had a hamburger that managed to soak through a plastic plate you put it on, but we’re pretty sure that this hamburger drips so much yolk, grease, and cheese that the ceramic plates they’re served on come back empty but permanently stained.  Goddamn it we want to eat this burger so much.

4:  The 666 Burger (Friday the 13^th Edition)

This is not the first time we’ve written about 666 Burger—that also happens to be the name of the New York City food truck that sells a “Douche Burger” for $666. (Don’t worry, it’s not made out of douche, it’s just lobster and gold and caviar and everything you’d insult someone for ordering on a burger.)  This burger, however, has no relation to food trucks, New York, or monetary extravagance.  It’s a seasonal offering from the hilariously named Weiner and Still Champion in Evanston, Illinois, that is released for the weekend of every Friday the 13^th for $13.  This hot dog and burger joint takes pride in making absurd hamburgers, ranging from double cheddar burgers topped with a fried chili patty and two bacon-wrapped hot dogs to putting country fried bologna on top of your burger at your request.

Of all their burger creations (well, except for possibly the 911, which is nine burger patties with eleven slices of American cheese), the 666 burger has got to be the most impossible-to-eat-yet-delicious-to-smash-your-face into-as-if-you-were-reenacting-the-last-moments-of-James-Dean burger in Illinois.  Taking their standard double cheeseburger, they cover it in six slices of cheese, six pieces of bacon, and oh God what is that why does your chest feel so tight your left arm is all tingly six mozzarella sticks.  This is one of the most appropriate celebrations for the spookiness inherent with Friday the 13^th, because if you go here to order it there’s the very real chance that you’ll sit down with your meal that taunts the very existence of God and, moments before you take your first bite, someone at a neighboring table will start pounding their own chest in frantic desperation before suddenly becoming silent and slinking in their chair with pearly eyes.  And you would shrug and eat your delicious mozzarella stick burger.

3:  Mac ‘N’ Cheese Burger

While less gargantuan and more sparse than many of the previous items, Rockit Burger Bar in Chicago (because apparently Chicago is on a quest to take the “Nation’s fattest city” title away from McAllen-Edinburg-Mission, Texas) decided to make the Mac Attack, taking a standard Angus burger and replacing the bun with two discs of deep-fried macaroni and cheese.  While this sounds absolutely delicious, and it looks relatively manageable in the picture above, you know for a fact that, in addition to the toothpick necessary to hold each half together, there is glue at play there, because there are literally no more than five or so foods you can fry that would be more messy to eat than mac and cheese.

Fried mac and cheese is one of the fried foods that most often requires a fork because the moment you bite into the thin film of breading, noodles and cheese start spilling out at an incredible rate and despite your frantic efforts to shovel it back in, you eventually concede defeat start licking the dripping cheesy pasta off your plate because you don’t care if anyone sees you, you’re huddled in the corner chugging whiskey and eating fried food all by yourself, God you’re pathetic.  Well, take that feeling of food-coma-assisted desperation, and put a burger in between it, and let your imagination do the rest.  By the time you finish this dish your plate is going to look like someone made a bowl of chili mac, ate half of it, and then dumped it on your plate of lettuce and tomatoes to teach you a lesson.  A lesson about what?  The fuck if we know.  Probably something like “this is what happens if you eat vegetables.”

2:  Fried Twinkie Burger

Take all the “Oh God, it’s making such a mess, I’m a monster, why am I eating this, man just chewing has me feeling out of breath” qualities of the previous fried-food-as-a-hamburger-bun entry, substitute pork belly for the beef in the patty, add bacon, and then replace the bun with something no one would ever even consider using as a bun, and you’ve got the Fried Twinkie Burger from Philadelphia’s PYT.  Instead of something cheesy or savory as the bun, PYT has decided, fuck it, let’s just take a recently-revived classic American snack cake, deep fry it to make it impossibly greasy, and mix that overly-sweet concoction with a pork belly burger, cheese, and bacon.

The first fifteen people who bought it received the burger for free, though now if you’re going to order it you’ll have to pay $12 and a wheelbarrow to cart out the customers who previously dove into this monstrosity.  While this honestly sounds like a horrific combination of flavors for a hamburger, you know that we’re still going to seek it out if we end up in Philly, because we’re America and any burger with a fried food bun is something we’re contractually bound to try.

The Terrible Garbage Burger

Holy mother of Christ.  Florida has a reputation for being America’s craziest state, but McGuire’s Irish Pub in Pensacola, Florida might be the most insane thing to ever come out of that state.  We can’t even pretend like this burger looks good—normally, we see heart-wrenching horror and we think, “Good God, we must put that inside us.”  Not the Terrible Garbage Burger, which seems to be a close cousin of the Cement Mixer shot in that its sole existence is predicated on making you do terrible things to your body.

The ingredients in this Satanic tower of calories (all of which has to be propped up and stabilized with a 6-8 inch skewer) are as follows:  Liverwurst, corned beef, onions, mushrooms, jalapenos, black olives, banana peppers, pineapple rings (wait, what?), wasabi, guacamole, pepperoni, chili, sauerkraut, marinara sauce, barbecue sauce, peanut butter (hold on, can we go back for a second, did you just say peanut butter?), tomatoes, red onions, five kinds of cheese, a couple of strips of bacon (yes because bacon is the one ingredient that you need to show restraint with), remoulade sauce, and vanilla ice cream (WHAT NO WAIT WHY) topped with hot fudge (STOP IT YOU STOP IT RIGHT NOW) and a maraschino cherry stuck in there with a mini Irish flag toothpick.  If you just read that entire sentence without blinking, surprise, you’ve just instantaneously gained ten pounds.

Actually, just typing that has made us feel a little…overheated.  It’s just, woah, we are really sweating here.  Getting…lightheaded…

Must…finish…last…bite of..bur..

Agpehiogpahp;aednpafffffffffffffffffffff

“Pizza Little Party?  Oh man, let’s try to avoid jokes calling Pizza Little Party a Japanese pizza establishment, I’d be so rac…oh God, it’s real, isn’t it?”

~Johnny Roosevelt, Editor-in-Chief of AFFotD

Before we get started, let’s take a deep breath and look at that screenshot.  Just, really soak it in.  Let it wash over you like a cool stream.  This is a thing that exists, that happened in real life, that is currently happening in real life.  Don’t let yourself forget that.                                                                       

For a website that dedicates itself to the Americanness of being American, we sure do seem to talk about Japan a lot.  You might wonder, “Why?  Why are there more articles about Japanese Doritos on this site than ones about Ben Franklin?”  Well, for starters, if you ever tried to write about Ben Franklin’s life, you immediately would come down with a severe case of 18^th century syphilis, and we’ve yet to find a writer to volunteer for that (though, come to think of it, we might have a perfect candidate).  But secondly, Japan takes American ideals but then warps them in fascinating, terrifying ways, and we hope that maybe, just maybe, by showing them the craziness of their ways they might take things down a notch and start embracing a more normally (read as, “less tentacles”) American way of life.

You’re right.  It’s futile.  They’re too far gone to be saved.  Just look at how they do pizza chains.

Goddamn it Japan, You’re Doing it Wrong:  The Pizza Little Party Pizzeria

We honestly had not heard about Pizza Little Party before writing this article, primarily because we’ve generally focused our attention to Japan’s terrifying treatment of Pizza Hut.  But when someone comes out with a pizza that is filled with hamburgers, it tends to grab our attention.  As such, when we heard that Japan was selling a hamburger/pizza Frankenstein called “Megaburgerpizza” and that it came from a chain of pizzerias called “Pizza Little Party” we just assumed someone was being racist with Google translate.

Since then, we’ve been on a journey of discovery, which is a deep-sounding way to say we’ve been trying to make sense out of the jumbled mess that is their corporate website.  Our first introduction to Pizza Little Party (that name will never stop being hilarious) was this:

Just look at that fucking thing.  You’ve got pizzas being used as a hamburger bun, and underneath the top pizza are, we’re seeing, at least six cheeseburger patties.  When we saw this, our first thought wasn’t “HOLY SHIT THIS IS A $26 DOUBLE PIZZA WITH HAMBURGERS STUCK BETWEEN,” it was in fact, “Eww, they put ketchup, onions, pickles, and mustard on it as if it were a real hamburger.”

Naturally we went to their website, and even tried to translate it, and were unable to find anything out about this place other than that they apparently want us to Summer with them and that they sell a scallop, shrimp, and steak pizza as well as many other topping combinations we can’t even begin to comprehend.

We also found the following.  Which we will post here without further comment.

Of course you can’t stop a journalistic powerhouse such as AFFotD, so we eventually were able to find an English translation of their menu, which was about as confusing and terrifying as their website.  Oh, and we must reiterate, their website is confusing and terrifying.

Ha ha, what the actual fuck?

At this point there’s no use in trying to approach this pizza chain rationally, so we’re going to list off some of the more unnerving pizza options on their menu instead.  But first, to get us through this, we’ll need some ice cold beer.  What’s that?  Pizza Little Party can get that for us?  Hopefully they don’t find a way to make it terrifying!

Trololol, oh Japan, you make everything so crazy.  But, if we’re reading this right, if you have less than 12 beers they’ll still let you hop on your motorcycle and drive home.  The Japanese are nothing if not responsible.

But anyway, on to the actual pizza.

Keep in mind that even though this came from their English menu, they chose to keep the little terror generator mascot’s words of excitement in Japanese characters.  He’s probably saying, “Silly Americans, you know not your fate.”  Who knows.  Either way, cream, corn, potato, and sauce are four words that, individually, are perfectly fine words.  Some are even great words!  Potatoes are delicious!  Cream?  Yum!  But if you take those four words and add “pizza” at the end, you suddenly have what we like to call nightmare fuel.  Pure, unimpeded nightmare fuel.

Okay, there actually doesn’t seem to be that gross or strange.  It’s a perfectly fine vegetarian pizza if you stop before they get to the “potatoes and asparagus and we don’t know what we’re doing here” part of the ingredients.  Onions, tomatoes, and mushrooms?  Fine.  Really we’re just putting this one up there because we think that the translation of “Full of Vegetable Healthy Pizza” is one of the most hilarious names we’ve ever seen for a pizza.  And by warning us it’s “healthy” they’ve saved us from ourselves accidentally ordering it and having to chug some bacon grease to even things out after.

This is easily one of the most confusing side dishes we’ve ever seen.  If we had to guess, they had one guy with an okay-but-not-great grasp of the English language doing all the translation for these dishes, and this poor fella was looking through his list of English food terms and said, “Hmm, we are at H.  Hushpuppies are a fried dish, yes?  That looks like this, yes.  But wait, a puppy is small dog.  Americans do not eat puppies.  No, they must mean to say a hushd potato.  Does that look right?  Yes.  It’s hushd potato.  Or should there be an ‘e’ there?  No.  It is hushd.  Now just put them on a plate with a single leaf of lettuce, and sell it with salt and ketchup and the regular American businessmens will say, ‘Oh, look at these delicious hushd potatoes, just like mother used to make back in old town Carolina, Tennessee, with fried peaches and fish sauce, this removes for me all home sickness.’”  And that’s what he said, out loud, to himself, verbatim.  You can quote us on that.

We don’t know what this is, and that frightens us.  This LITOPA Special (which, apparently, is just the shorthand name the pizza joint gives itself, not some virulent strain of listeria) seems to have…everything on it, and knowing Japan, that’s going to involve a lot of things that don’t belong on pizza.  While we see ham and pepperoni, which is fine, there also appears to be chives, corn, and…is that egg?  We’re pretty sure those are some chunks of scrambled eggs on there.  Listen, as a general rule, you have to be as suspicious of Japanese “specialty” pizzas as you would be a stranger walking up to you and wordlessly handing you a drink.  “Um…what’s in this?”  “It’s our special!”  “No, seriously, tell me everything that is in there so I can know what is on this slice of pizza that I’m still going to throw away.”  We’d not be surprised if the only ingredients listed on this thing were ham, pepperoni, corn, and Roofies.

This pizza’s name would be more honest if it was just called “Culinary Red Flag Pizza.”  Do us a favor and stare at that picture for a while.  Like, three minutes or so.  We’ll wait.

You feel that dull ache in your stomach?  Well, now, open your mouth.  Did you just hear a howl?  That’s right.  That’s because your stomach is currently screaming “DON’T YOU FUCKING DARE!”  We’ve got random seafood (shrimp, calamari, and…God, probably twelve different ways to catch hepatitis) littered over a pizza that is made with Negi Mochi (which, apparently, is a green onion pancake) and it’s all on top of a “special okonomi sauce.”  While any “special” sauce on a seafood pizza made by Japan should set some warning sirens blaring, it only gets worse from there, since okonomi is the Japanese word meaning “what you like.”  Which means that it’s not even some white sauce or seafood sauce, the sauce is literally just a “whatever the fuck we feel like” sauce.  We’re not saying there are going to be used syringes in your pizza, but we’re absolutely saying that.

Who did they have to butcher to become the king of the butchers?

WHO DID THEY HAVE TO BUTCHER TO BECOME THE BUTCHER KING!?

Of course, why limit yourself to one terrifying pizza, when you can have four different flavors, carefully placed next to each other to ensure that half of the pizza consists of slices where horrendously non-compatible ingredients flow over from their intended slices.  The Pote Mayo, topped with ham, potato, mayonnaise, and the confetti of a picture documenting the worst moment of your life shares a border with the Seafood Deluxe as well as the Butcher King.  These topping groupings then find themselves adjacent to the “American Basic” because you know how every week you go to your favorite America pizza place and order the basic American pizza of chives and pepperoni.  We should point out that by having three segments of the pizza covered in meat, and one covered in seafood, you’re ensuring a minimum of two slices that have some combination of pepperoni or ham with calamari and shrimp.  So, good job Japan, you found a way to ruin your own pizza which was already ruining the general concept of pizza.

So there you have it, folks.  Pizza Little Party, Japan’s conveyor of terrifying pizza products and sides (oh they sell pasta too?  Fucking wonderful) is here to make sure that Americans all over can sleep in peace knowing that Japan’s version of pizza chains truly are as terrifying and gross as we feared they may be.  Pizza Summer Party Fun Time!

Ain’t no party like a Pizza Little Party because a Pizza Little Party will HAUNT YOUR DREAMS

“They melt in your heart, not in your OH MOTHER OF GOD SOMETHING HAS GONE HORRIBLY WRONG.”

~Rejected M&M slogan

In 1941, Forrest Mars, Sr., son of the Mars Company founder Frank C. Mars, patented a process for tempering a hard shell of chocolate around chocolate pellets in order to prevent the candies from melting.  Production immediately began under the name M&M Limited (named for Mars and Bruce Murrie, the son of the president of Hershey’s chocolate with a 20% stake in the product), with an agreement to only use Hershey chocolate.  These button-shaped candies exploded in popularity during the second World War due to their durability, and the shells were given bright colors such as yellow, green, red, and violet to go along with standard brown-colored shells.  And with that, an American institution was created.

These “m” printed candies are now sold in over 100 countries, but remain the most popular to-go chocolate snack for Americans everywhere.  The simple elegance of the coated milk chocolate delivers a burst of flavor with each individual candy, and just thinking about M&Ms while reading this article has you saying, “Goddamn it, I really want a bag of M&M’s right now.”  And you should.

Throughout the years we’ve been sampling the best of America, we’ve learned through painful, gut-wrenching trial and error, that sometimes the best American ideas are cruelly marred by our at-times overzealous imaginations.  Yes, the same good intentions and terrible execution that gave us Watermelon Oreos has befallen the perfection that is the M&M candy.  And, as is our sworn duty, we are here to let you know that these mistakes exist, because it’s only when we see those we care about at their ugliest that we can truly learn to love their beauty.  Or we just like telling you about terrifying candies.  However you want to look at it.

M&M’s Grossest Flavors of All Time

This might be a tangent completely unrelated to the rest of this article, but did you know that Mars lets you make custom M&Ms that have pictures and words on them?  While that does allow you to eat M&M’s that say “Insert Awesome Here” or “I Wish I Were Bourbon” (which we may or may not have just ordered for our office) they also advertise that you can/should make M&M’s printed with pictures of your loved ones.  That is completely terrifying and unacceptable.  If someone ever had a birthday party at their place and decided to have a bowl of candies with their face printed in a dot matrix on them, we’d start looking for bodies.  No one should ever make candy under the guidelines of “would you like to eat my visage?”  That’s just thoroughly unsettling.

Speaking of unsettling, as delicious as M&M’s are in regular form (or even, we’ll admit, peanut butter, because peanut butter M&M’s are not bad at all) sometimes the Mars Company has gotten a little too overambitious.  And, just like a Valentine’s Day gift that says “I am eating the face of my girlfriend,” these following products are examples of things that just shouldn’t have any association with tiny chocolate buttons.

White Chocolate Carrot Cake M&M’s

When M&M’s announced that 2014 will see the release of a birthday cake flavored candy, we thought though that sounded pointless, and a little gross, at least birthday cake primarily contains chocolate.  Yes, adding some icing flavor to an M&M might be a little excessive and unappetizing enough to make this list, but it’s not so abhorrent to make anyone go, “Oh God, why why are you doing this?”  Then we discovered that the Mars Corporation has previously delved into the cake-flavored-M&M realm before, and that it was more terrifying than anything we could have possibly imagined.

Einstein said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and expecting different results.  The Mars Corporation found this definition limiting, as their definition of insanity involves taking something pure and delicious and throw terrifying flavors at it until their R&D staff breaks down in tears screaming, “YOU’VE KILLED IT MY GOD YOU’VE RUINED M&M’S FOREVER,” so they decided to take white chocolate M&M’s, add carrot cake flavoring, and then put the “female” M&M character on the cover in bunny ears and a seductive look on her face, because when you take away all the light only darkness remains.

These were released just for the 2013 Easter Holiday, which makes sense since carrot cake makes you think of the Easter Bunny, and also people would have been more upset at the Mars Corporation if they had decided to ruin a holiday that people got more excited about, so should really count our blessings.  Thank God they left the Fourth of July out of their nefarious gross chocolate plans.  Could you imagine?

Coconut M&M’s

In 2009, M&M’s released a limited edition “Coconut M&M’s” to help rectify the fact that Mounds bars were the only candy that no one ever took from the trick or treat basket every year.  As there apparently must have been a market for chocolate candies that make kids go, “Oh, goddamn it, this one tastes like fucking coconut, and also I’m five years old” as their first ever uttered curse word, it was made a permanent fixture in the M&M family in 2010.  You can currently find it in retail stores without too much difficulty, all you need is a few bucks and a coworker on your Secret Santa list who you really hate.

You might consider this flavor “normal” compared to some of the other items on this list, but that doesn’t mean you should eat coconut M&M’s.  No one actually likes the taste of artificially-flavored-coconut except for the chemists who first designed it in a lab and the people they subsequently infected to carry out their heinous plots.  Basically, we’re just saying that if you have a friend that walks up to you munching on coconut flavored M&M’s, we’re so sorry but nothing of them remains in that fleshy husk, you need to flee town immediately.  Leave behind anything that won’t be missed.  There’s no time! 

Strawberried Peanut Butter M&M’s

We know what you’re thinking.  “Oh God, that’s a disgusting combination.  That sounds just foul.  That has offended me in ways I didn’t know I could be offended.  Why oh why would M&M’s degrade themselves like that?  Doing a Transformers tie in?  The monsters!”  Of course, after that initial shock sets in, you’ll see that they also decided to take strawberries, mix them with peanut butter, and cover it in chocolate, and now you’re grabbing random jelly beans a handful at a time and eating them at the same time because no matter how gross the combination of liquorish and buttered popcorn might taste, it’ll at least distract you from the thought of “strawberried peanut butter.”

This limited edition flavor was released in 2009 as a tie in to the release of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.  Actually, the flavor-combination makes sense when you think about the theme of the movie they’re being used to promote.  The Transformers are machines that are more than meets the eye, and strawberried peanut butter M&M’s are candies that make you want to cry.  The ad copy practically writes itself.

Even the poor orange M&M bastards they put on the label here know they’re taking part in something that’s patently ridiculous.  They’re basically looking at each other with the same look of every boyfriend who was forced into wearing an embarrassingly emasculating outfit as part of a couple’s costume their significant other demanded they wear together.  Just look into those M&M’s eyes, they’re practically screaming, “I know bro, but if I hadn’t worn this tonight I’d have never heard the end of it.  Let’s just drink some beers and pray for the party to be over so we can take these damn things off.”

Cherry Cordial M&M’s

What percentage of Americans out there actually like cherry cordials?  Has to be less than 25%, right?  Next to the coconut, what part of every box of chocolate gets thrown out more than cherry cordials?  It’s like someone couldn’t decide between making a chocolate candy or a gusher, so they just shrugged and went with “something that, when you bite into it, resembles an alien birth scene in a 80’s sci-fi film.”  Seriously, just look at their Wikipedia page, it’s pretty much a picture of a Klingon’s afterbirth and a three sentence article written by someone who didn’t want to spend more than 30 seconds of their life having to think about cordials ever again.

The only thing we can think of worse than these gooey, liquid-bathed, overly sweet cherry entombed in a thin membrane of chocolate waiting to spill its contents all over your shirt the moment your tooth taps it would be a goddamn M&M that tried to replicate that taste and sensation.  But lucky you, it’s fucking Christmas, and there’s no better way to get back at your aunt for sending over another goddamn fruitcake than this season M&M flavor that they bring back year after year because each year the Mars Corporation sends out Christmas cards that just say, “You can go kiss our holly jolly asses, here’s some chocolate that tastes like month-old prison wine.”

White Chocolate Candy Corn M&M’s

The red M&M is not amused, partly because he looks like one of the Coneheads after a tanning salon mishap, but mainly because he has been transformed from “delicious coated buds of chocolate” to “white chocolate sacrilegiously altered to taste like waxed sugar cane sap.”  It’s really not a good sign when the packaging of your product has your mascot looking out at your customer with a contemptuous look that says, “You have to be fucking kidding me, right?”  For reasons that confound industry experts and appreciators of general human decency, you can still buy these, though the voices inside your head screaming, “NO DON’T EAT THESE THEY SOUND DISGUSTING” pretty much matches up with many of the reviews the product has gotten.  Just do yourself a favor.  If you ever find yourself in a Wal-Mart, and these M&M’s have mysteriously shown up on a shelf, when you think to yourself, “Maybe I should just buy this and try it as a joke” take a pause, and look at the M&M.  He is judging you.

Pumpkin Spice M&M’s

Much like the last entry, you can tell a lot about an M&M flavor by the look on the wrapper M&M’s face.  The difference between this guy and the candy corn M&M is that the poor guy on the pumpkin spice label looks like he just saw something that put the fear of God in him, and that something is the fact that there is such a thing as pumpkin spice M&M’s.  If you purchased a pumpkin spice M&M, you were greeted with this little guy just saying, “Oh God.  What have you done?”

You got some gross ass fucking M&M’s is what you did, because for some reason you’ve decided that, since it’s autumn, between the pumpkin beer and pumpkin spice lattes and, God help you, pumpkin Pringles, you didn’t have enough artificial pumpkin flavor in your life, so you might as well ruin your childhood by taking one of your favorite candies and subjecting it to such cruel treatment.  And it was cruel treatment.  Just look at this poor fella.  Why did you do that to him?  Why did you hurt the M&M?  Why do you only do this to the ones you love?

Just remember, America, it’s all okay.  Eventually it will all be okay.  Just sit down, get a normal bag of M&M’s (or hell, go crazy and get almond M&M’s) and just eat until you forget that these products exist.  It should take about three bags.  Hope you have a glass of milk handy.  You’ll thank us later.

*pop*

*hssssss*

“…Gas?  GAS!  GAAASSSSSS!  MASKS ON!  MASKS ON GODDAMN IT!  OH GOD TOO LATE!!!!”

~Residents of Irwindale, CA                                         

(source)

The American Evolution Of Seasoning and Spicy Foods

As multi-national media conglomerates run by rich, attractive, magnanimous Americans have mentioned in the past, Americans eat spicy food now more than ever before.  We’re not statisticians or scientists, and we haven’t run any studies or anything, which is why we can feel like we’re not lying to you when we say that Americans eat exactly one billion percent more peppers-enhanced meals than at any time in our nation’s history.  That includes the 1960’s, when hippies everywhere would eat hallucinogenic jalapeño peppers while watching Jimi Hendrix tour with the Rolling Stones at Woodstock in Camden Y ards, which is another thing we can absolutely say without feeling like frauds because we’re not historians either.

There are many reasons why we as a society have evolved from a collection of teetotalers asking for and actively preferring the Taco Bell mild sauce to become enlightened beings that only use the “hot” sauce because, goddamn it, it’s 2AM and all the drunk people before you raided all the “fiery” for themselves.  The bastards.  But the main reason for our shift away from “wimpy wimpy wimpy” to “hefty hefty hefty” in the spiciness department can be seen through the varied ways, through our history, that we as a people have gone about making boring food taste good.

You see, food toys with us.  It exists as both one of the best things ever while having the sadistic ability to become terrible really easily.  If you’re not mincing up raw beef to get Wisconsinites sick (which, less face it, is the only way to know 100% that your food will be delicious) every year you encounter hundreds, if not thousands, of food decisions that can turn from delicious to awful with the gentlest breeze.  Chicken can taste pretty damn amazing, or it can be boiled into a bland flavorless hunk of protein that your doctors force you to eat after your latest heart episode.  Just about all of us love candy, but some people insist of giving us candy that’s been filled with fake strands of coconut mashed together as a way to prove they’re monsters.  Steak is wonderful, but a well-done steak is the chef’s way of punishing you for being the worst kind of person and ordering a well-done steak.

“Sir, this is compliments of the chef.  He says, go fuck yourself with the front end of a rake, you worthless, steak-ruining piece of shit.”

For as long as we’ve had taste buds that could differentiate between more than just “poop?” and “probably not poop” we’ve needed ways to even the culinary balance and make up for the fact that, honestly, most of us can’t make good food worth a goddamn, but all of us can cover a dish with enough salt that it’ll shrivel down into a giant bar of sodium, which will attract deer, which you will shoot and eat and turn into venison jerky by curing it with more salt.  That’s how hakuna matata was created, and that’s why humanity (which, naturally, reaches its apex with America) has been adding seasonings and glorious, delicious sauces to make up for our foods’ flaws since the dawn of time.

For eons, we’ve used natural seasonings and chemical flavor enhancers to fool ourselves into thinking that our spouse’s cooking (and the oh-so-cute-and-oh-so-futile baking attempts of husbands everywhere) tastes good enough to prove to all the naysayers that you’re a successful, responsible, fully-actualized adult, even though you’re 19 years old, just got your girlfriend pregnant, just quit your job at Dairy Queen to elope in Reno (can’t afford Vegas), and now you the two of you are holed up in a Motel 6 sprinkling allspice into an unheated can of Spaghetti-O’s on a bed that vibrates if you put a quarter in it.

Nothing says “prostitutes have done it on this bed” better than this simple box.

First, we discovered salt.  A naturally occurring mineral that’s been used in the preservation of food for well over 6,000 years, salt can be found on tables all across the world, a testament to the fact that mankind once dropped a hunk of meat onto a random big ass white rock and said, “Well, fuck, I mean, it’s still good right?” and ended up liking it more than the original hunk of meat.  That is the story of how we invented both cured meats and the five-second-rule.  After dropping food on every other kind of rock imaginable to no avail, we eventually began grinding up random plants and dried up berries that smelled good, with cinnamon, herbs, and pepper being traded as far back as 2000 BC.  There were vast arrays of spices to choose from, but the discovery of the New World brought forth a cornucopia of new, delicious ways to enhance your food.  Chocolate, allspice, bell peppers and vanilla all were suddenly available for much of the civilized world, but one ingredient proved the most important of all—chili peppers.

Seen here, drowning a man who made the wrong enemies.

The beautiful thing about chili peppers is that they’re just chock-full of capsaicin, which, apart from proving that when nature tells us, “don’t eat this, it will hurt you” we will eat it anyway, just out of spite, actively is addictive.  Spicy food is a lot like hoppy beers, or that first, relaxing cigarette smoked by five -year-olds in the 1950s (this article sponsored by Chesterfield cigarettes, 1954’s number one doctor recommended cigarette brand).  At first, most (though, admittedly, not all) find it to be wildly disagreeable.  It burns your mouth, runs through your digestive tract like Usain Bolt cranked out on PCP, and causes your eyes to water, which you will then rub with the very same hands you used to eat your spicy food (because no, lovebirds, you two are not adults yet, your parents were right, Jesus Christ, why would you eat raw peppers you just found in the trash?) which will then cause you to feel like you’ve gotten on the bad side of a UC-Davis University police officer.

This pain you feel after munching on a jalapeño you found nestled under a coffee filter in your Motel 6’s lobby (you slobs.  Call your parents, they’re worried sick, you don’t have to go home, just let them know that you’re okay) also releases serotonin and endorphins, which noted neuroscientists refer to as the “Awww yeah, this feels fuckin’ great” chemicals.  Once the magical ability of spiciness became apparent, cultures slowly began introducing it to their cuisine.  While it grabbed its most visible foothold in South America and Asia, America has had a horse in the spicy food race since 1807, when the first commercially available hot sauce appeared in Massachusetts.  While these sauces were moderately popular, they never really were a definitive part of American cuisine, until one fateful day in 1868, when we were granted a magical elixir so delicious, so potent, that we had no other choice but to pour gobs of it onto a slice of pizza and eggs and oh God stop teasing just show the picture already it’s so beautiful.

Now pour two dozen eggs in there, and scramble it all up, and pour it into a skillet and *drools*

To paraphrase The Wire, while Tabasco didn’t change the game, it done made it more fierce.  Louisiana has always been America’s strange, sorta quiet cousin who, in an exotic kind of way, is actually pretty hot wait stop you can’t say that it’s ILLEGAL and WRONG oh come on now we’re not saying it sexually, just maybe like, we have nice genes so it’d make sense that they no stop that thought right there you’re wrong and bad for even thinking of it.  While most of America takes their cues from European or Hispanic ancestries, Cajun and Creole culture has made Louisiana a culinary hodgepodge combining French, Native American, Caribbean, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and African tastes and traditions which was quick to embrace the joy of spicy food.

Louisiana became one of the best places to find and grow peppers in America during the 19^th century, both due to its growing conditions and to its proximity to Mexico and Central America.  So when Edmund McIlhenny came across some seeds for Capsicum frutescens, he planted them on Avery Island in South Louisiana.  Once they grew, he put them in discarded cologne bottles (new and unused, thankfully) with some vinegar and salt to create what we in the word-making business call, “Ohhh my Godddddd oh man, it’s like, ohhhhh mannnn.”  The marketing folks at the time decided that was too many words to fit on a bottle, so they called it Tabasco.

At this point, we’re required, by website charter, to point out that Edmund’s son, John Avery McIlhenny, took over the business in 1890 only to hand the business off to his brother, Edward Avery McIlhenny, to join Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders.

Because of course the man in charge of Tabasco would be an unbridled badass who shot guns with Teddy Roosevelt.

From there, Tabasco ruled supreme, though other hot sauces flooded the market, with some legitimately spicy examples (that, by law, have to have jackass names, we guess).  Of course, with advent and popularization of Buffalo Wings in the 1970s, and the inclusion of spicy recipes seen in an influx of ethnic cook books later in the decade, spicy food remained more of a niche an America that still was struggling to toss off their “meat and potatoes” culinary reputation.

Then, in 1980, lightning struck.

Sriracha, everyone’s favorite hot sauce and flavor enhancer, is named after the coastal city of Si Racha, located in Eastern Thailand, and was first produced as a paste of chili peppers, vinegar, garlic, sugar and salt to flavor dishes served at local seafood restaurants.  Wait, this is America dammit, we’ll die before we let some damn foreigners take credit for something we perfected.  Let’s start again.

Sriracha, everyone’s favorite hot sauce and flavor enhancer, was invented (invented, goddamn you) in 1980 by David Tran, a Chinese Vietnamese farmer who had just moved to Los Angeles following one of the first migrations of the Vietnamese boat people following the Vietnam War.  He spent the next three years perfecting the recipe for his Sriracha sauce, which of course was a regional hot sauce he was previously familiar with, since he spent much of his life growing chilies and making a sauce in a village just north of Shanghai he invented in America and named after his best American friend, Steve Earl Racha, a college football player who had a particularly good pie recipe that his grandmother gave him.  The resultant recipe, being made since 1983 by his company Huy Fong Foods, has never been changed save for a switch from Serrano peppers to red jalapeño peppers, which are obviously far more American.

The rate of Sriracha usage among Americans has grown exponentially since it started.  By 2001, the company was selling 6,000 tons of chili products.  By 2010, it was selling 20 million bottles a year.  In 2012, they saw sales figures five times higher than just a decade prior.  Why has it launched into America’s favorite condiment, which we discuss in more reverent terms than we do our own loved ones?  It’s difficult to say, mainly because when you encounter perfection, it’s nearly impossible to transcribe it to words.  Those who like spicy food are required by law to have a bottle of it in their kitchen at all times, and those who don’t like spicy foods have to live with the knowledge that their experiences in life will be less rich and fulfilling than their sriracha embracing brethren.  Explaining the wonderment of Sriracha to the uninitiated would be like describing why steak is delicious to a vegetarian—you’ll get halfway through a series of jumbled, “Oh my God, how could you not have had this it’s so…” statements before finding yourself incredibly saddened at what your conversation partner is missing out on, at which point you just sort of trail off and try to suppress the urge to grab a pillow and smother them like the end scene of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest to put them out of their misery as humanely as possible.

“Shh, shh.  It’ll all be over soon.  May you find peace and functioning taste buds in the next life, my life.”

Sriracha has never once advertised their sauces, which means that it’s so good that word of mouth alone has accounted for a 20% sales increase every year, and millions of Americans somehow managing to spell “Sriracha” correctly on the first try despite the fact that it’s the only word in existence that crams together an S and two Rs in its first four letters.  Now, many people (often referred to as “people with impeccable taste”) put the rooster sauce on everything imaginable, because we’ve yet to create a food dish that doesn’t taste better with some Sriracha squirted on top of it.

With Sriracha exploding in popularity, more and more Americans are embracing spicy foods, which means that more and more Americans are being awesome.  So, from Tobasco to Sriracha, we as a nation thank all of you enterprising “oh God my mouth is on fire” product inventors.  You keep America spicy.

“I don’t care how it’s spelled, it’s delicious, give me more.”

~Webster’s English Dictionary

If you’ve ever had a donut from Dunkin’ Donuts or a doughnut from Krispy Kreme or a Canadian bump into you and apologetically hand you a free cup of coffee at a Tim Hortons, you’re well familiar with North America’s favorite fried ring-shaped treat that sometimes isn’t ring-shaped at all.  While we our never 1s to be stickelers for speling, there does seem to be a dispute on if we should call it a “doughnut” or a “donut.”  Doughnut seems to be the original term used all over the world, while donuts originated in America, which uses both terms interchangeably.  At the end of the day, we don’t care, because doughnuts (donuts) are delicious (yummy) and that’s true no matter what you call them.

But with doughnuts becoming increasingly popular, both in their native form and in the creation of ridiculous sandwiches, it’s time for us as Americans to take a step back and look at the history of our favorite deep fried sugar capsules.  Which is why we present to you…

The History of Doughnuts (Or Donuts.  Or Whatever)

Long before Homer Simpson and the similarly 90’s-based overuse of “cops eat doughnuts” jokes, the modern doughnut began its origin on America’s fertile shores.  While people have been frying various types of dough in oil ever since the first caveman realized that frying things in fat makes them exponentially more delicious, the modern doughnut first began taking its roots in the early 18^th century when Dutch settlers would cook olykoek, a version of the traditional Dutch dish Oliebol that was took fried balls of dough and covered them in powdered sugar.  For those of you who are mumbling that it’s starting to sound like the Dutch invented doughnuts, and not Americans, you need to shut your goddamn mouth because olykoek’s are still different from doughnuts, and don’t you dare interrupt us again you mouth-breathing son of a bitch or so help us WE WILL FUCKING END YOU.

Ahem.

Anyway, Olykoeks began slowly evolving, and we began calling these hole-less treats “doughnuts” by the start of the 19^th century, and by the middle of the century, doughnuts as we know them today, with holes in the center and everything, were being consumed across the nation as an inherently American treat.  The American sailor Hanson Gregory claimed to have invented the ring-shaped doughnut in 1847 while aboard a lime-trading ship as a 16 years old, saying he disliked the fact that the center of doughnuts at the time often didn’t cook as much as the rest, so he punched a hole in the center of the dough before frying it, and taught the technique to his mother.  Now, we like to believe this, because it’s a lot more gratifying to know the answer than to say “no one knows who decided to put a hole in a doughnut first, but they were a goddamn genius” but we have to question this account, mainly because it’s much more likely to see a 16 year-old boy lie about inventing something incredible than him to see him taking some time to teach his mother how to cook something.

“So, mom, all you do is stir constantly on a low-medium heat and…”

“BITCH GET OFF MY STOVE!”

Since then, we’ve expanded the breadth of doughnut possibilities, with jelly-filled, frosted, glazed, powdered, chocolate, and Boston cream doughnuts representing just a small amount of the ways that we force insulin producers to work overtime to meet the demand.  For whatever reason, our brothers up north in Canada apparently started going crazy for the things, probably because they saw us doing it and got a little excited when they were able to create a national chain that was pretty good at making the things.

In World War I, The Salvation Army served doughnuts to soldiers fighting on the lines.  In 1938, this was celebrated on June 7^th with National Doughnut Day, which now occurs every year on the first Friday of June each year (we’re waiting for it to become a mail holiday).  Naturally, Canada is jealous of this fact.

Since then, doughnuts have become an American culinary staple, because we all know at least someone who has waited more than ten minutes for the “Hot Krispy Kreme Now” light to come on at a Krispy Kreme.

So next time you’re filling your body with your daily allotment of sugar with your jelly-filled doughnut and your cup of coffee with 12 sugars, take a moment to thank the generations before you that morphed a Dutch pastry that’s literal English translation was “oil balls” and make it the most delicious way to start your day.

Now get eating.

“Subway—it’s..it’s fine. I mean, it’s Subway.  It was open.”

~Rejected slogan for Subway

For nearly a century, the Americanized Italian sandwich has played a pivotal role in filling our bellies efficiently and deliciously.  Cold cuts, cheese, lettuce, onion, and tomato, all shoved into a sliced loaf of Italian bread and drizzled with oil and seasoning, has long been the default, “I don’t know what I feel like for lunch, eh, I’ll just get a sandwich” lunch choice for generations of workers.

Widely known as the Submarine Sandwich, it goes by about 17 different names in different regions throughout America, with dozens of additional variants from people who want hot sandwiches or beef doused in it’s own juices in elongated sandwich form.  While many long roll sandwiches end to differ in name only (subs, meet hoagies, you are the same), others are radically different and even manage the eschew cold cuts entirely, but all are delicious and American.  So instead of awkwardly stumbling through the history of the “submarine, or, uh, grinder, or, uh…” sandwich, we’re going to look into each type of this classic meat delivery system in the hopes that, that by showing our differences, we can bring our nation together.  By spending some 11,000 words talking about sandwiches that are shoved into Italian bread or rolls over the course of four articles.  We’ve got a lot of ground to cover, over 25 types of sandwiches total, but first, let’s start from the beginning.

The Regional Italian and Submarine Sandwiches of America:  New England and New York

The concept of taking a long piece of bread and filling it with cold cuts (and, eventually, other meats), lettuce, and tomatoes and making something universally wonderful first came to us from the East Coast, and so it’s the East Coast where we begin our sandwiches-on-long-rolls-but-really-most-of-these-are-just-subs journey.

While Jared’s weight loss regimen might be more responsible for the increasing universality of the term “Submarine,” the concept of taking a filling a roll with meat, cheese, vegetables, condiments and seasonings is not only delicious, but has been developed independently at different locations throughout the nation.  The fact that a sub is the same as a hoagie doesn’t matter, because both were developed separately of each other, which fucking blows our minds.  That’d be like two people inventing the telephone at the same time, or Gisele Bundchen having a twin sister.  But not only did it happen, it’s happened time and time again across this great nation, which is why there are over a dozen variations of the Submarine sandwich, all of which are delicious.  But first, we’ll start with the sandwich that (probably) started it all.

The Italian Sandwich  (Maine)

Known as “Italians” to the residents of Maine, the Italian sandwich first made its mark in Portland, Maine during the beginning of the 20^th century.  Giovanni Amato, an Italian immigrant, would sell fresh baked rolls of bread to fellow Italian immigrants working the docks when he started adding meat, cheese, and vegetables to create the first “Italian.”  By 1902, the Italian sandwich had taken it’s more basic form—the only additions to the basic sandwich came in 1972 when Amato’s was bought by Dominic Reali, who added Greek olives and a sour pickle to the recipe, but otherwise it has stayed roughly the same for over a hundred years.  A standard Italian takes a soft 12 inch roll of bread, sliced 2/3 deep like a hot dog, at which point it is stuffed with ham (originally the recipe called for salami, which is still viewed as acceptable), American Cheese, onions, bell peppers, tomato slices, olives, and either dill or sour pickles.  The sandwich is then drizzled with oil and dusted with salt and pepper.

This was the first real submarine-type sandwich recorded in America, and while no one seems to think it actively influenced other variations of the sandwich, it at the very least established that there is something primal and raw inside each and every American that makes them want to cut open a long phallic loaf of bread and stuff it with our meat and sauces.  Wait.

Uh.

Let’s move on.

The Submarine Sandwich (Every State That Has a Subway, Originally From Boston, Connecticut, New Jersey or, Fuck, Maybe Even New York?  Probably Not New York, Though)

We all have a general, albeit fluid, idea of what a submarine sandwich is.  You take a 12 inch loaf of bread (crispy on the outside, soft on the inside) you slice it, and you fill it with various meats and cheeses while trying to suppress the instinctive urge to giggle at the term “fill it with various meats.”  There are literally hundreds of possible combinations all across America, though there is some debate amongst people who debate things that don’t ultimately matter on if a “hot” submarine sandwich can still be called a sub.

However, discussing who invented the sub proves to be much more difficult, as there are more explanations for the origin of the submarine sandwich than there are excuses to your wife for how that lipstick got on your collar (also, this could easily have been avoided if you’d gone out of your way to choose a mistress who doesn’t think gnawing on your fucking shirt is sexy).  Every single theory centers around the fact that people thought that the bread looks like a submarine, which is probably true if you have a very nebulous idea of what a submarine looks like and you squint hard enough (it also probably helps to paint the bread black first).

One popular theory states that the “submarine sandwich” was created by Benedetto Capaldo, a local restaurateur who served the U.S. Naval Base in New London, Connecticut during World War II.  He originally called his salami, onion, tomato, and cheese sandwich a “grinder” but changed the name to submarine when the sub yard started ordering 500 sandwiches a day.  This one is the least likely to be true, since submarine sandwiches were being advertised in print as early as 1940.

As a result, Boston’s similar World War II claim (“at the beginning of the war, a sandwich using smaller, specially baked baguette that resembled the hull of submarines was made to entice the servicemen stationed at Charlestown Navy Yard) is unrealistic.  The most probable story involves Dominic Conti, an Italian immigrant who moved to New York at the turn of the century.  His relatives claim that Conti started selling traditional Italian sandwiches of his own recipe in his grocery store in Paterson, New Jersey in 1910.  Eight years later, he saw a recovered sunken submarine called Fenian Ram in the Paterson Museum, and decided to name his sandwiches after that.

Of course, it’s also possible that submarine sandwiches were a version of Italian sandwiches that came to New York through immigration at the turn of the century, and that the handful of owners who decided to call it a “submarine” just happened to make better sandwiches, so the name began to stick.  But we should point out that part of the reason why “subs” is the most widely used term for Italian sandwiches is largely through the national popularity of Subway, which opened in Connecticut.  So even if Benedetto Capaldo didn’t invent the sub, we can safely say he popularized it in Connecticut, and that was probably one of the main reasons why we eat at Subway when we’re looking for fast food that’s not McDonald’s during a road trip, as opposed to, say, “Hoagie Hut” or “Grinder Grid.”

(Also, if no one has copyrighted the names “Hoagie Hut” or “Grinder Grid” for sandwich shops, we call dibs.)

The Hero (New York)

The difference between a hero and a sub is that one time in the 1930’s, a New York food writer made a joke about the sandwich being so big that “you’d have to be a hero to eat it all” so New York decided they’d better go with that name instead of something first coined in Connecticut or, worse yet, Jersey.  They’re literally the only people that exclusively call sandwiches “heroes” because they can’t stand that things are invented outside of New York.  The only slight difference is that heroes can come in hot varieties (which only matters if you’re in the “sub sandwiches can only be cold” camp) such as eggplant or chicken Parmesan.  But otherwise, you’re just adding an extra letter to “sub” and comparing Superman with a pile of cured meats you’re going to poop out tomorrow.

Oh, and some also claim that it’s named after the “gyro,” which is a Greek meat dish served in pita that wasn’t introduced to America until the mid 1960s, where it first showed up in Chicago, which is pronounced to sort of sounds like “hero” if you want us to hate you.  We’ll let that “hero sounds like gyro” concept settle in for a bit.

Just keep thinking about it.

Anyway, you can understand why we’d respond to anyone declaring, “Heroes might have been named after the gyro sandwich” with a simple, shut up, you’re stupid, we hate you, are you even listening to yourself, oh god, just shut up right the fuck now.

Bombers (Buffalo, New York)

Full disclosure, finding information bombers is the most horrendously frustrating thing we’ve done in a long time, and we recently did a drinking game where you take five shots of whiskey and you can’t go home until you successfully solve a Rubik’s Cube.  It’s listed in the dictionary as a synonym of a submarine sandwich, we’ve seen it used to describe (generally meaty, warm) sandwiches in Massachusetts and Wisconsin, and according to one survey, it’s only used in central Texas, but no, New York has to have its greedy little mitts on every fucking sandwich origin story they can plausibly get away with.  Which is why you can see a “steak bomb” listed as a type of warm submarine in New England, while most of the faint whispers you can find say that it originated in and around Buffalo.  Not that it’s a common term used in Buffalo.  We reached out to one of our readers in the Buffalo area via twitter direct message to see if he could give us the history of bombers, and this is all we got.

So yeah, fuck you, bombers.  You can find the odd “Buffalo Bomber Sandwich” scattered throughout the nation, which amounts to warm subs with buffalo chicken as the primary ingredient, you can see Man Vs. Food take down an Italian Sausage Bomber in nearby Rochester (which is actually not a sub sandwich at all) but at the end of the day, the bomber seems to be an obscure, rapidly-fading-from-our-lexicon term for submarine sandwiches that New York probably put out into the void just so we could spend more time researching this sandwich and coming up with colorful invectives than we spent researching any other entry in this goddamn list.  This is New York’s way of punishing us for talking so much shit about the state this article, and we understand that.  But also, fuck you and your bombers, Buffalo.

Torpedo (Possibly New York or New Jersey But Jesus Christ, We Honestly Have No Clue)

Oh God, this is almost as bad as bombers.  Which makes sense, we suppose, given that they’re both terms for sandwiches that makes Google think you’re interested in war (not to say we’re not).  Anyway, the fuck if we’ll be able to find out the origin of this term apart from, “Well, a Submarine shoots torpedoes, right?  So, maybe it’s like a smaller submarine?”  That’s obviously bullshit, because torpedoes are actually different from subs in that they’re longer and thinner than most subs, but it’s at least something to pretend is true so we can just try to make sense of this crazy mixed up world we live in.

This article is starting to break us.  Here’s a video of an older man making a torpedo (the sandwich not the weapon).

We at least know how a torpedo is different from a regular sub because Quiznos sells torpedoes, and actually calls them that.  Remember those?  What’s that, you don’t, because every time you’ve lived near a Quiznos it was one of your favorite quick sub chains but it would always invariably close within 18 months?  That sounds about right.  Their torpedoes prove that it’s a type of sub sandwich, and Wikipedia says that they originated in either New York or Jersey and it’s in the dictionary and everything, but apart from that there seems to be no information on how they actually came into existence.  There are advertisements for “torpedo sandwiches” (for thirteen cents) in the Evening Times of Trenton in 1940, and more references in New York in the 1950’s, and then San Diego appears to have embraced the name, but all that we know is that it’s a large submarine sandwich.  That’s long.  And possibly thinner than regular subs.

This is driving us crazy.  Literally insane.  So anyway, here’s a Quiznos commercial where an oven and a sandwich prep guy get ready to have gay sex with each other (for a second time) (the first time burned the guys penis) (no that is literally addressed in the fucking commercial) (just click the link and watch it and see for yourself).                                     

Tunnel (Various New England Areas, But That’s Probably Bullshit, Fuck This Game)

Oh this is some bullshit.  Fuck all of this.  Wikipedia lists this as an actual submarine sandwich, but the rest of the collective internet seems to disagree.  We actually found a random photographer’s website from Tacoma, Washington that showed a “meatball tunnel” that has that name because the bread isn’t cut, it’s just hollowed out and filled with meatballs.  Okay, sure, hollowed out like a tunnel, that sounds like an acceptable enough explan… oh but here’s a “Brooklyn Meatball Tunnel” that doesn’t do any of that shit.  Why did we force ourselves to write about every damn sandwich!?  This is why we’re no longer allowed to accept article pitches while drunk.  We reiterate, fuck this shit.

Spiedies (Greater Binghamton, New York)

Thank God, finally, we’re back to sandwiches that exist on the internet again.  Here we see the only entry (God, we hope) that is named after someone horribly misspelling the nickname of Spiderman (what’s that?  It actually named after the Italian word spiedo, which means spit, or possibly spiedini , which refers to cubes or balls of meat cooked on a skewer?  Eh, we like our explanation better).  The Spiedie, apart from being a word we will never spell correctly on our first try, is a submarine sandwich seen in the Southern Tier of New York that is somewhat broadly enjoyed throughout Central New York that consists of grilled cubes of meat that has been marinated overnight (usually between 24 hours and two weeks) served in a either a submarine roll or soft Italian bread.  It can be stuffed with pork, lamb, veal, venison, or beef, but since 1987 the most popular has been chicken.

The sandwich is simple, and takes the hearty American stance of “Fuck yo vegetables, just gimme meat.”  Meat cubes are marinated and then grilled on a spit, which is then directly transferred to the bun by holding onto the meat with the bread and sliding out the skewer.   Recipes for the marinade vary, but tend to utilize olive oil, vinegar, Italian spices, and mint.  Though the origin of the spiedie is disputed, it’s thought to have been brought to New York by Italian immigrants in the 1920’s, but it wasn’t until 1939 that you could find them popularized after Camillo Iacovelli started selling spiedie’s (which, yes, is pronounced “spideys”) at his restaurant “Augie’s.”

Spiedies, which at the time primarily used lamb for meat, grew in popularity regionally throughout the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, becoming especially popular with hunters who would switch the lamb with venison, and by 1975, Rob Salamida began bottling the sauce used for marinade and selling it.

Though you won’t likely find the spiedie often outside of the state of New York, it does have a fair amount of regional fame.  Hell, Binghampton even hosts an annual Spiedie Fest and Balloon Rally (wait, balloon rally?  Uh, okay) that randomly had LeAnn Rimes perform in 2013 and an Elvis balloon.  Has LeAnn Rimes sang for any of your favorite sandwiches?  Have you even seen an Elvis balloon?  We didn’t think so.  Face.

The Wedge (Yonkers, New York)

The wedge originated in Yonkers, and you really won’t see it outside of Westchester County aside from the occasional reference in The Bronz, Putnam County, or Upstate New York.   While just about everyone hearing about a “wedge sandwich” is envisioning one of those cheap sliced up ham and cheese sandwiches on regular bread you can see goading you into developing food poisoning at a 7-Eleven or gas station, in Yonkers it’s used to describe a sub sandwich where the bread is cut into two halves length-wise, with the meat, cheese, and other ingredients between the two halves.  It’s said to have originated in 1930, when Frank Landi, owner of Landi’s Deli, added the sandwich to his menu.  He named it a “wedge” because it was a shortened form of how his wife pronounced “sandwich.”  Just to be clear, yes, that means that this man’s wife, who as far as we can tell was a grown human female, pronounced the word “sandwich” as “san-wedge.”  We’re being serious here when we ask, was enunciation something that was just invented in the 50s?  Believe us when we tell you that this is not the last time you’re going to see a sandwich that got its name because people didn’t know how to say basic fucking words.

Some make the claim that “it’s just served between two wedges of bread” but that’s almost dumber.  Almost.  Those aren’t wedges, they are sandwich halves.  And now we all know that your wife says “sandwich” super weird.  San-wedge.  Jesus fucking Christ.

Grinders (New England, Especially Western New England)

There are two theories for why New Englanders (except for New “fuck you, we’re calling it a hero because of a mediocre joke that’s older than our parents” Yorkers) call their sandwiches grinders.  Both are stupid.  One is that “grinder” was an Italian-American slang for a dock worker, who preferred the sandwiches.  The other is that, since the bread has a hard crust, you have to grind your teeth to chew it.  Basically, the only thing that we’ve established so far is that, in the early 20^th century, the East Coast named their food items for pretty dumb reasons.  “Oh, when I chew on this hunk of meat, I produce a lot of saliva, so I will call this sandwich a SALIVARY STEAK and you have some backed up earwax, so you’ll hear it as SALISBURY STEAK okay that’s the name we’ll never change it!”  Fuck you.

(Granted, the Salisbury steak was named after an American physician, but if someone told us our bullshit explanation up there, at this point, we’d be forced to believe them, no matter how stupid it sounds.)

Some places say that grinders are cold, while western Massachusetts uses the word to specifically describe a toasted sub.  Some use “grinder” to describe the cold varieties, while calling hot ones “oven grinders.”  Some might say that we should have separate entries for “grinders” and “oven grinders” since there seems to be more regional differentiation between the basic definition of what a grinder is, to which we say, fuck that, we’re mushing them both into this entry.  Things can be two things, you know.

THINGS CAN BE TWO THINGS DAMMIT!

Ahem.  Sorry, lost our composure there.  Anyway, grinders are also pretty much just subs.  Yay us.  Moving on.

Spuckies (Boston) 

There’s nothing particularly noteworthy about the Spuckie that differentiates it from a submarine sandwich.  Like a hero, it’s a basically a sub sandwich that some people refer to with a different name.  In this case, old Italian immigrants living in certain Boston neighborhoods call sandwiches spuckies (or spuckys), most likely because it’s short for “spuccadella,” a particular kind of Italian roll.  The only slight differentiation between a spuckie and a sub is that, traditionally, spuckie rolls were more pointed at the ends, but come on, it’s just an Italian sub that you’ll find at Boston shops that are run by really old Italian dudes.  So, given that only a few neighborhoods in the city refer to it as such, and knowing how Boston is, we’d not really recommend you go around saying, “Eyyy, I’m workin’ here, ya babaganoosh, hows about you get me a spuckie whiles yous at it?” if you find yourself in the area any time soon.  Or actually, do it.  If you’re impulse is to go around like a caricature of wherever you visit, you deserve to find out what’ll happen to you the hard way.

Blimpie (Hoboken, New Jersey)

And we end our foray into New England’s sometimes frustrating (fuck you so hard, bombers, tunnels and torpedoes) Italian sandwiches (excluding Pennsylvania, we’ll get to them later this week).  And what better way to send that off than a fast food chain that actually calls themselves a submarine sandwich anyway and is only added here because Wikipedia told us it’s a separate name for a sub, so apparently we have to include it no matter how stupid, ugly and unloved it is (*glares at bombers and tunnels and torpedoes*).  Oh, sorry, Blimpie, we’re not talking about you there, we don’t mean that (*glares at bombers and tunnels and torpedoes, does ‘slit throat’ gesture with thumb*).

Blimpie first opened in 1964 in Hoboken, so there’s a chance people there call all sub sandwiches Blimpies?  Probably not, though.  Hey, Hoboken readers, if we went up to you and asked where we could get the best Blimpie, would you just be confused ‘cause we were asking what’s the best location of a fast food chain?  Probably, right?

Now, according to the company website, Blimpie was found by Tony Conza, Peter DeCarlo, and Angelo Baldassare who decided on the name “Blimpie” after going through a dictionary before seeing a picture of a blimp and saying, “Huh, that kind of looks like the sandwiches we sell!” because, again, apparently 50% of naming sandwiches is not having a particularly strong grasp on perception or shapes (the other 50% is not knowing how to pronounce goddamn words).

But surprise!  The truth is far more embarrassing, at least according to this New York Times article that says that Tony Conza decided on “blimp” because he thought it sounded like a sandwich.  So, hey, there’s the other 50%.  What kind of crossed mental wires lead to making that connection?  “What’s that?  Blimp?  YOU MEAN A TYPE OF SANDWICH!?”  Though that probably explains why his dog is named “fork,” his children are named “carbine” and “asparagus,” and why he calls the roof of his house a “sky shield.”

Otherwise, Blimpie is a decently standard sub offering, though for some Americans Blimpie was their first exposure to sub sandwiches that have oil on them instead of mayo, so that’s something to tip your hat to at the very least.

And hell, this is going to be more exhausting than we originally anticipated.  With that, we have a shitload of sandwiches to eat, but afterwards, we’ll run you through the various submarine sandwiches of Philadelphia (and the various people who will send us hate mail for daring to claim that a hoagie has anything in common with a sub sandwich).  Until then, enjoy your subs, your heroes, your grinders.  And if you find any bombers, tunnels, or torpedoes you can tell them to go to hell, courtesy of America Fun Fact of the Day.  We’re still bitter.

“Huh, so apparently there IS such a thing as eating too many sandwiches…”

~AFFotD Editor-in-Chief, Johnny Roosevelt, shortly before getting his stomach pumped

As mentioned in our previous post, the simple concept of “a sandwich on a long roll of bread stuffed with cold cuts and condiments” has expanded well beyond our wildest dreams.  While many of these variations are all words for the same thing (the submarine begat the hero begat the grinder begat pointless regional squabbles about lexicon and so forth) these linguistic shifts have also helped create entirely new sandwiches made to be stuffed into submarine or Italian bread and embraced as a regional dish so fervently that even New Yorkers sometimes have to step in and go, “Woah, easy there,  Philadelphia, we get you invented it, but people are allowed to add different things to a fucking cheesesteak.”

Ha, just kidding, they’d never say that, they’re too busy trying to pretend they make the nation’s best hot dogs because…what, they’re sold in carts?  Because it’s easy to go to a cart and have someone scoop out a three day old frank and top it with sauerkraut and mustard and that somehow makes your hot dog “supreme” to, say, every other type of hot dog that at least tries?  Get off your fucking high horse, goddamn you.

Okay, sorry, back on track.  Anyway, for whatever reason, the state of Pennsylvania accounts for like, 40% of all the sandwiches on rolls of the entire East Coast, so we decided to give them their own section in our series on…

The Regional Italian and Submarine Sandwiches of America:  Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania is a proud state, which is a way to say that 85% of sports fans who are objectively assholes about their allegiances live within its 46,000 square mile area.  They took an active role in the founding of our nation, and, for whatever reason, they make a lot of sandwiches.  Also, their residents (especially people living in Philadelphia but especially people living in Philadelphia) will straight up slap you in the stupid face if you try to take these heritage food stuffs away from them.  We’d take them to town over that fact, but to be fair, we’ve written not one, but two different articles about how Chicago pizza is the best pizza in America and if you think differently you’re wrong, you’re wired wrong, you’re broken, there is something wrong with you, something in your past, and it has blackened your soul, and everything you ever believe or say is incorrect, and also we hate you, and also we just stole your identity to punish you because we hate you so much and goddamn it, this is an article about sandwiches, how the fuck have we wasted so many words talking about pizza and hot dogs?

OKAY.

SANDWICHES.

PENNSYLVANIA STYLE.

GO!

Hoagies (Philadelphia Area, parts of New Jersey)

A hoagie is a style of submarine sandwich that originated in the Philadelphia area.  Pretty much everything that makes a submarine is in play with the hoagie, though Philly is unsurprisingly intolerant of many variations.  You’ll typically be told to fuck off if you try to get mustard (or worse, mayo) on your hoagie, and you might have people shout “That’s not a hoagie, that’s a sandwich/sub” if you put any poultry on it.   The standard hoagie is, simply, a sliced roll of bread filled with a base layer of cheese, usually provolone (to prevent the bread from getting soggy), meat (preferably ham, salami, and prosciutto), tomatoes, onions, lettuce, hot or sweet peppers, topped with a dash of oregano-vinegar dressing.

And again, no mayo.  Seriously.  We’re not saying you’ll get killed, we’ll just say that Philly has left people hospitalized for stupider reasons.

The origin of the hoagie is about as complicatedly wishy-washy as that of the submarine sandwich, though like the “well, as stupid as it sounds, people just thought the bread looked like a submarine” aspect of all of the origin stories for subs, just about every explanation of hoagies stem from people calling the sandwich one thing, only to see it brutally melded and morphed into the word “hoagie” because, apparently, people in Philly used to be physically unable to pronounce words correctly (note—many native Philadelphians still can’t.  Don’t trust us?  Next time you’re in the city, just ask ten people to say “Philadelphia” and “water” and write down the responses.  You will, without a doubt, get 2 people pronouncing it correctly, three people pronouncing it “fluffy-uh” and “wudder” and five people punching you really hard in the face for going up to them out of the blue and asking them such a stupid fucking question).

Some claim that a sandwich shop in Chester, Pennsylvania created the hoagie in 1925, and that kids would play hooky from school and buy the cheap sandwiches.  As a result, the sandwiches were called hookeys, which became hokeys which became hoagies in a historical game of telephone.  Still others say that “hoggies” described people who worked at the World War I shipyard on Hog Island who would bring cold cut sandwiches to work during their lunches, and that a variation of the spelling eventually led to the sandwiches being called “hoagies” (because apparently it’s easier to make up a new word than to spell a word correctly).

One of the more plausible theories centers around Al De Palma, a struggling jazz musician who saw some fellow musicians devouring giant sandwiches for lunch one day and exclaimed, “You’d have to be a hog for eating that!”  Once the Great Depression hit, he decided to open a sandwich shop in Philadelphia and called his sandwiches “hoggies” which people kept mispronouncing as “hoagies” to the point that De Palma himself because known as “king of the hoagies,” again, because apparently when people spoke in Pennsylvania in the 1930s they had to fill their mouths with marbles first.  The least plausible basically involves someone actually saying, with a straight face, “A man working at Hog Island had his wife make a sandwich for his coworker, Hogan” which, ugh, seriously you guys?  At least make your origin myths interesting.

Of course, not content to have just one type of roll-based sandwich, Philadelphia is also responsible for…

The Zep (Norristown, Pennsylvania)

The zep (short for zeppelin, because apparently anything that is sort of long looks like a goddamn long roll sandwich.  Submarine, blimps, zeppelins, tunnels [FUCKING.  TUNNELS], at this point we’re worried that someday we’ll run out of long things to name Italians sandwiches after and some city will be forced to name their regional variation “the penis.”) is a variation of the hoagie made in Norristown, Pennsylvania.  Unlike, say, the hero, where New York couldn’t stand not naming something so they renamed the sub after a lame joke, the zep actually is unique from the hoagie in a few important ways.

The sandwich contains no lettuce, and only one meat, cut thick, along with provolone cheese, raw onion and tomato, all dressed with oregano, salt, pepper, olive oil, and hot pepper relish.  Classically, the meat used is a cooked salami, and all zeps are put on fresh bread from Conshohocken Bakery, which makes a flatter and wider loaf than seeded rolls primarily used for hoagies.  It’s essentially a simpler version of the hoagie, but it sticks to its guns, and for that we have no problem with them demanding to go by a different name.  We also would very much like to eat one right now, please.

The Philly Cheesesteak (Philadelphia)

While the hoagie was declared the “official sandwich of Philadelphia” in 1992, few can argue that Philly’s most visible contribution to the sandwich landscape is the deliciously unhealthy cheesesteak.  While some people make reference to a “cheesesteak hoagie” as a type of hoagie (and basically a cheesesteak with added lettuce and tomato which, gross, why) these people are either stupid and wrong, or just aren’t very vocal on the internet.  Either way, very few are making the case that a cheesesteak hoagie is in the same genre as a regular hoagie.  Though, cards on the table, we could be wrong, we’ve been without a Philly writer for some time, ever since he exploded when the Eagles lost to the Saints in the playoffs.  And we don’t mean he went on a rampage or anything, he literally exploded.  Guts flying everywhere.  It was gross.

But, as a result, the Philly Cheesesteak stands alone as a unique offering to the submarine-type sandwich field.  While it’s gained popularity outside of Philly, if you order a cheesesteak, you’re getting a Philly cheesesteak, and if you’re in Philly and order it with swiss cheese, a resident of Philadelphia will spit in your cheesesteak.  In a lot of ways going to Philadelphia to order a sandwich is a lot like visiting a totally foreign country—there are so many nuances and strange etiquettes involved that you probably will end up accidentally infuriating your host by, say, using your left hand for a hand shake, or for parroting someone who orders “wiz wit” and then asking for provolone.

Thankfully, while ordering one might be far more complicated than you’d have any right to expect, it’s origin is fairly simple.  In 1930, hot dog vender Pat Olivieri picked up some beef and put it on his grill.  It smelled good, as cooking steak tends to, and a taxi driver stopped and asked for a steak sandwich of his own.  The next day, people clamored to try one themselves, and he Olivieri eventually opened “Pat’s King of Steaks” to sell his cheesesteaks.  They originally did not come with cheese, until one of his managers decided to add provolone.  The cheesesteak grew and expanded throughout the city, and developed its own distinct quirks and niches.  While there is no one “exactly right” way to make a cheesesteak, there are roughly 1,325,301 and a half WRONG YOU’RE WRONG STUPID STUPID JACKASS ways to cook one.

(Though honestly, readers of Philadelphia, can you explain to us your violent, vitriolic hatred of mayonnaise?  It’s egg yolk and vinegar, combined to be deliciously unhealthy.  It’s great, seriously.  So why the hell do you act like it’s made out of used tampons and sulfuric acid the instant someone has the inkling to put it on a slice of bread?  What did mayo do to you as a child?  It’s okay, you can tell us.  This is a safe place.)

The classic cheesesteak now takes thinly sliced rib-eye or top round steak, browned and scrambled into smaller pieces on a griddle with a flat spatula.  Slices (or sprays) of cheese are placed over the meat to let it melt (Cheez Whiz, provolone, and American cheese are the three deemed appropriate, and we’re pretty sure people have died in arguments about which is better).  Sautéed onions are typically added, though some allow for peppers, mushrooms, salt and pepper.  Wikipedia says mayo, hot sauce, and ketchup are common additions, but we’re pretty sure that if we told you to put that on your cheesesteak we’d be found floating lifeless in Delaware Bay tomorrow.

Finally, every single person from Philly who complains about the grave injustices done upon the Philly cheesesteak in the hands of non-natives screams from the heavens that the bread is one of the most important aspects.  It has to be Amoroso, though some might try to get away with Vilotti-Pisanelli rolls, which is fine (as angry Philly residents flood the comments shouting “IT!  IS!  NOT!  FINE!”).  The bread has to have a chew, the meat has to be lean and thinly sliced, and the cheese has to be melty and gooey.  Cheez Whiz tends to be the most popular, though it’s often viewed as the cheese of choice for tourists and drunks (we can vouch, there are few things better in this world than a wiz wit while you’re hammered at two in the mourning).  Generally, provolone and American cheese are both viewed as equally acceptable, just so long as there’s so much of it that your blood type becomes “dairy” for five minutes after finishing a full cheesesteak.  Anything else is just added bonus (though some insist that onions are essential) so long as you have good steak, good cheese, and good bread.

So that’s the Philly cheesesteak.  Did we mention we don’t any writers from Philly?  Hell, our editor-in-chief hasn’t ever even been.  We asked him before writing this if he had any insight to the rich culinary heritage of the state of Pennsylvania and he was just like, “I mean, I saw the first five seasons of It’s Always Sunny?”

Huh, will you look at that.  There’s a mob outside our offices.  Oh, that’s nice, they brought torches and gasoline, they must have known we were a bit chilly and…

Oh.

Let’s try to get the rest of this entry done before the smoke gets too thick, shall we?

Roast Pork (Philadelphia)

Similar to the cheesesteak is the pork roast, by which we mean to say that the only the two have in common are thinly sliced meat, Italian bread, provolone, and the fact that we’re able to make broad generalizations about each that are patently untrue and that we only write because we enjoy seeing people get pissed off over food.

Anyway, the roast pork sandwich is considered by some to be the best of the three big Philly subs, though it is far less famous.  It consists of sliced roast pork with provolone and broccoli rabe on a hoagie roll.  Since broccoli rabe has a slightly bitter flavor, the pork has to be well flavored and of good quality so not to be overwhelmed.  DiNic’s, Tony Luke’s, and John’s Roast Pork are the three big players in the roast pork game.  John’s Roast Pork claims to have originated the roast pork sandwich in 1930, and DiNic’s claims to have started selling roast pork in 1950.  Tony Luke’s seems to have been the last to join the game, as their website is less about the history of the establishment and more a full page ad about their owner who, judging by his facial hair, was a stand-in for Tony Wonder.

Anyway, when tourists go to Philly they hardly ever think to order a roast pork, and for that they are bad and should feel bad.  Because Philly’s roast pork sandwich is divine.                                                                     

Barb Mills (North Central Penn, Jersey Shore)

WIKIPEDIA YOU GODDAMN SON OF A BITCH!  YOU TOLD US THAT IN THE 1950s AND 1960s THERE WAS A SANDWICH IN PENNSYLVANIA CALLED A BARB MILLS THAT WAS A BAKED SANDWICH WITH HAM AND PROVOLONE CHEESE AND SO FUCKING HELP US THAT TOTALLY DOESN’T EXIST THE MORE WE LOOK FOR ITS MERE EXISTENCE THE MORE WE JUST SEE PICTURES OF FRIENDLY LOOKING GRANDMOTHERS’ FACEBOOK ACCOUNTS YOU GODDAMN SON OF A BITCH!

Sorry, sorry, just after the pain we suffered researching bombers, tunnels, and torpedoes we just…this was too much for us.  This sandwich might have existed, once, but it has gone the way of the dodo bird, or of certain SNL sketches from the early 90’s that you wish you could watch online but you can’t because they’ve never been digitized and are now lost to time.  #RIPTimMeadows.  Let’s move on, we only have one more sandwich to go.

Cosmo (Williamsport, Pennsylvania)

This one, thank God, exists in the folds of the internet, but barely.  We found one article that let us know anything about it (it looks like you pretty much have to go to Williamsport to find people the exclusively call sub sandwiches “cosmos”) which also mentions, wouldn’t you fucking know it, bombers.  Anyway, here is a Cosmo.

It actually does have some distinct differences from the sub/hoagie market.  It’s an open faced, toasted sandwich that’s filled with cheese.  While just cheese is a pretty common way of going about it, you can then add a handful meat toppings (Canadian bacon or ham are the two most prominent) which is then topped with lettuce, tomatoes, onion, and hot pepper relish.

And with that we come to an end on the Pennsylvania submarine sandwiches (shut up, they’re subs) of America.  That’s sixteen sandwiches we’ve covered, one sweet old lady who will be surprised to see her name linked with so many “fucks” online (BUT SERIOUSLY WIKIPEDIA?  BARB MILLS?  WE FUCKING HATE YOU!)   (not you, actual lady named barb mills, we hate Wikipedia for lying to us about a sandwich named after you).

We’re halfway through our submarine sandwiches of America tour, because goddamn, we sure do make a lot of sandwiches don’t we?

“New Orleans, please, guide us back into the welcoming arms of sandwiches that actually exist and aren’t goddamn sarneys.”

~Recently Adopted AFFotD Credo

Throughout the course of about 9,000 word and 21 sandwiches (so far) we’ve learned a lot about the diversity of America’s lunches.  In trying to discover every type of submarine sandwich, or sandwich on a long roll that can somewhat remotely resemble a sub, we’ve lusted after the Philly cheesesteak, we’ve saluted the simplicity of the sub or hoagie or not hero because we arbitrarily decided that we hated New York’s reason for naming it a hero.  We’ve existentially pondered the creation of the French dip, and we’ve lost most of our collective minds at all the goddamn sandwiches that seem to have been named by like, the only three fucking people that use that particular term to describe sandwiches.  Tunnels?  Who calls their sandwich tunnels, huh?  That’s stupid, they’re stupid, and they should at least post a blog or something about who first started calling them tunnels so our staff can finally have a peaceful night of sleep.  Now, we just toss and turn.  “But what the fuck is a bomber?  What the fuck is a bomber.”

We’re tired.  We’re hungover.  We haven’t shaved for days.  But hey, we have a lot of delicious southern long roll sandwiches to talk about, and practically all of them exist!  Yay for that!

The Regional Italian and Submarine Sandwiches of America: The South

It’s been a long road, filled with delicious sandwiches and a truly confusing browser history (non-porn sub-category).  We’ve traveled the nation together, gained a good fifteen pounds (that’s called “sticking to your New Year’s resolution, everybody) and have personally destroyed the homes of fifteen people who think that “sarney” is the correct term for a sub sandwich.  But we’re in the clear now…well, almost.

Now, a lot of these sandwiches are ones you know.  Po’ boy.  Cubans.  As far as we can tell there’s only one awkward entry that will be impossible to write anything about it, and guess what, it’s “Rocket” which probably isn’t even from the South but we don’t fucking care, we’re going to just rip it off like a band-aid.

Rocket (Texas or Cheyenne, Wyoming)

So, a lot of us didn’t know that apparently “rocket” is also what people call “arugula” which is actually surprising since arugula sounds foreigin.  Hell, we should call arugula “rocket.”  We’re gonna start doing that right now.  Or, right after we finish mashing our faces into our keyboard because we know next to nothing about Rockets as a sandwich other than the fact that they first showed up in Texas in the 1950’s, and that mayyyybe people in Cheyenne at one time referred to subs as rockets.

Can we just link to a Massachusetts shop that sells subs as rockets, accept that they first showed up in Texas, and move on?  They’re…just normal fucking subs, you guys.  Please, free us from this terror.

Cuban Sandwich (Florida)

Oh thank God.  We’re free.  We’re free to talk about delicious sandwiches that exist in the real world, that we can see, taste, touch, smell, find Wikipedia pages for.  Oh happy days.  Despite its name, the Cuban is an American creation, originally created in cafes catering to Cuban immigrant workers in the Key West and Ybor City.  The origin of the Cuban sandwich is somewhat muddled, but the migration of Cubans escaping Spanish rule in the late 1800s and early 1900s largely spurred its evolution into an American treasure.  Originally, an earlier version of the sandwich was a common lunch for workers in cigar factories in both Cuba and Key West.  When the cigar industry shifted to Tampa in the 1880s, the sandwich started to appear in workers’ cafes around Tampa, from which it spread to Key West and Miami.

In 1896, La Joven Francesca Bakery was founded in Tampa to bake Cuban bread, a unique white bread roll that includes small amounts of fat in the baking process.  This bread is the backbone of the Cuban sandwich, and as the sandwich continued to be consumed by blue collar Cuban workers until The Silver Ring Café opened in Tampa in 1947 as the first Cuban sandwich shop.

The sandwich itself is simple, yet delicious (though some debate exists as to what constitutes a “true” Cuban sandwich).  A 8-12 inch section of Cuban bread is lightly buttered or brushed with olive oil on the crust and is cut in half.  Yellow mustard is added to the bun, followed by roast pork, glazed ham, Swiss cheese, and dill pickle, all in layers.  Then, you have the option to press that fucker in a plancha (basically a Panini press without grooved surfaces) and compress that sucker until the cheese has melted.  Slice diagonally and you’ve got yourself some magic.

There are some disputes as to what else to add to the sandwich.  AS a general rule, Tampa Cubans tend to add salami to the mix (possibly due to an influence from Italian workers in the city), while mayo, lettuce, and onion are available, but typically frowned upon.  Tampa and Miami have long been mired in a dick measuring contest about who makes the “right” Cuban.  In Tampa, the press is optional, the salami is mandatory, and if you want mayo, lettuce, or tomatoes than bully to you, pal.  In Miami, there’s no salami, the sandwich has to be pressed, and lettuce, tomato, and mayo aren’t even options.  While it seems somewhat silly to have such a contentious relationship over, you know, a ham and Swiss sandwich, if you’ve had one, you’d understand.

The Peacemaker aka La Mediatrice aka the Oyster Loaf (Louisiana)

While this sandwich is essentially the same as the Po’ boy, which will be the next sandwich on this list (spoilers) we have to stay true to the spirit of this sandwich series and talk about the origin of each separate term for a sandwich.  In the 1800s, a sandwich of fried oysters on French loaves was known as an oyster loaf in New Orleans and San Francisco, while also going by  the names of “peacemaker” and “La Mediatrice.”  The recipe for the sandwich first appeared in 1838, making it one of the oldest long roll sandwiches in American history.

The oyster loaf was nicknamed “La Mediatrice” meaning “the peacemaker” due to the 19^th century anecdote that husbands would return from a late night of drinking the next morning with a piping hot oyster loaf to pacify their angry spouses.  While we still use the term “oyster loaf” today (not so much with La Mediatrice) it’s usually as a subset of the general genre of po’ boys.  There are some slight differences between an oyster loaf and a fried oyster po’ boy, of course, though oyster loaves tend to be longer and more densely filled than their apostrophe craving cousins.

Po’Boy (Louisiana)

While an oyster loaf can only be filled with oysters (shocking, we know), po’ boys in general are a traditional Louisiana sandwich consisting of meat (roast beef generally) or fried seafood (most people skew towards that option).  They’re served on baguette-like New Orleans French bread with a crisp crust and fluffy center, which is one of the key differences between a po’ boy and a sub.

The sandwich version is served hot, with fried shrimp and oysters, but you can also get po’ boys stuffed with soft shell crab, catfish (usually fried), crawfish, Louisiana hot sausage, fried chicken breast, roast beef smothered in gravy, or French fries (also smothered in gravy).  Lettuce, tomatoes, pickles, “hot” (coarse-grained Creole) or “regular” (American yellow) mustard, and mayonnaise are then added, with onions being optional (though the mustard also only appears on the non-seafood po’ boys).

The generally accepted history of the po’ boy as a standalone sandwich type, freeing itself from the limiting shackles of the peacemaker, cetners around Benny and Clovis Martin, former streetcar conductors who founded a restaurant and, during a four-month strike against a streetcar company, served their former colleagues free sandwiches.  These strikers would be referred to as “poor boys” and the name stuck.  And because, again, no one knows how to pronounce words, it was naturally shortened to “po’ boy” by the Louisiana dialect.  Of all the Cajun food to come out of Louisiana, the po’ boy is one of the more simple yet delicious fares, available in restaurants, pre-packaged in convenience stores, and it’s one of the few sub sandwiches that stays true to the American tradition of “when in doubt, fry the shit out of your food.”  And we love them for that.

And with that, we’ve reached the end of our nation’s tour of long rolled sandwiches.  It’s been a grueling few weeks.  Relationships have crumbled.  Whiskey stocks have been depleted.  Writers have quit, screaming and tearing out their hair while leaving our offices in the kind of psychic break that one only can experience when the true weight of their insignificance in the universe has been imparted on them.  But (some of us) have made it through.  We’ve survived.

And now we’re really hungry for a sandwich.

“I rather do enjoy the taste of cookies, I find them quite divine.”

~Cookie Monster

We love chocolate chip cookies.  You love chocolate chip cookies.  The person right next to you in the heavy winter coat and fingerless gloves loves chocolate chip cookies so much they’re eating one right now, which, Jesus Christ, how did they get into your office?  How did security even let that happen?  What’s the point in having a keycard if any random vagrant can just sneak in to eat baked goods messily over your own keyboard?  Why do their gloves not have fingertips anyway, it does so much less to warm your fingers than regular gloves, they don’t need to use smart phones, and you’d have to imagine if anything fingerless gloves cost more than full ones?  Man, all this thinking has really worn you out, you’d better recharge with a chocolate chip cookie and a tall glass of milk.

Chocolate chip cookies, just like everything else that is delicious and makes life worth living, is an American invention, adding yet again to the list of dishes that are actually more American than apple pie.  And since you’re in the middle of a New-Year-resolution-shame diet while reading this, what better way to make you abandon your foolishness and intake a days’ worth of empty calories by emptying a Chips Ahoy! box than to show numerous pictures of deliciousness while regaling you with the storied history of an American treasure.  The chocolate chip cookie.

A History of the Chocolate Chip Cookie

Cookies have constantly been evolving, ever since sugar was introduced to the baking process by 7^th century Persians who taught us that “sweetness” was a concept that existed, and was wonderful.  Of course, chocolate took another thousand years or so join the equation, but since Newton’s fifth law clearly states, “Chocolate makes everything better,” the two were soon wed.  As cookies came over to the colonies and became a national dessert of the young United States, it was just a matter of time before our love of chocolate cookies, our occasional stinginess, and our profound misunderstanding of chemistry would combine to create the perfect storm that is the chocolate chip cookie.

While many credit penicillin for being history’s greatest accident because of that whole “saving millions upon millions of lives” thing, chocolate chip cookies have to be a close second.  In 1930, Ruth Graves Wakefield owned the Whitman, Massachusetts restaurant the Toll House Inn.  According to Nestlé, on one fateful day, she was making chocolate cookies and, having run out of baker’s chocolate, swapped in broken up chunks of Nestlé semi-sweet chocolate, thinking it would melt and mix into the batter.  When they didn’t, because we live in a society with rules and standard laws of physics, we were left with the chocolate chip cookie.  Wakefield sold the recipe for a lifetime supply of chocolate chips from Nestlé, who to this day still print Wakefield’s recipe on the back of every bag of their chocolate chips in North America.

Accounts of this momentous moment of creation differ, of course.  One time head chef of the Toll House Inn, George Boucher, acclaimed that the vibrations of a large electric mixer accidentally dropped bars of Nestlé chocolate stored on a shelf above the mixer, causing the chocolate to fall into the dough and break into small chunks during the mixing process.  Boucher then told Wakefield that they might as well finish baking the cookies instead of exerting the effort to pick out the individual bits of chocolate, which you might recognize as the same rationale utilized by people who dislike peas eating chicken pot pies.  This theory has credence, because it would make sense that Wakefield, an accomplished chef and cookbook author, would have a basic understanding of the baking properties of chocolate, and also because this way we can tell ourselves that the invention of chocolate chip cookies was divinely ordained, which makes more sense than “someone running out of bakers chocolate and a successful restaurateur didn’t know how chocolate works, this message brought to you by Nestlé, go buy Nestlé.”

No matter the origin, this beautiful accident soon took the nation by storm, because, as we’ve previously established, chocolate chip cookies are so good you wouldn’t quite gnaw your arm off to eat one, but you’d strongly consider it if you were hungry enough.  In 1936, Wakefield released her cookbook, Toll House Tried and True Recipes, and people couldn’t get enough of the “Toll House Chocolate Crunch Cookie.”  Shortly thereafter, Americans were involved in a minor military exercise with half of the known world (we think it was called “world war one and a half or something”).  When soldiers from Massachusetts were sent care packages from back home, they often included chocolate chip cookies, because parents are intuitive and wonderful people that always know the perfect things to send to their children.  As these were passed around to soldiers from other parts of the United States, the previously regional chocolate chip cookie exploded into a national phenomenon.

These cookies alone are responsible for the death of hundreds of Nazi soldiers

Today, the chocolate chip cookie reigns supreme, enslaving our taste buds and demanding that we consume no other sweetened good.  Actually, that’s not true at all, everyone loves cookies and there’s plenty of room for every variation imaginable.  We don’t know why we lied to you there, and we’re sorry.  But we’re not sorry for making you crave chocolate chip cookies as much as you do right now.  That feeling is natural, and you should embrace it.

Yes.  Eat the chocolate chip cookies.  Eat all of them.  Leave no prisoners behind.

“We will eat enough hot dogs that our blood type will become ‘Nitrates’ and then we will eat some more.”

~AFFotD Official Credo

Recently, we at AFFotD painstakingly researched over 25 different long rolled sandwiches in America over the course of 11,000 words and four articles.  We learned a lot during that delicious (though at times, excruciating) journey—mainly that it takes most wives and husbands about four hours of listening to a writer drunkenly talk about sub sandwiches before they take the kids and go spend a week at their parents’ place.  While it’s all well and good to spend your time writing about submarine sandwiches and Italian beefs, when you try to list every type of sandwich in existence you end up scrapping the bottom of the internet to find anything at all that explains why “sarney” is in the dictionary as a type of sandwich, or why whiskey doesn’t always chase the demons away.  After we ran ourselves ragged trying to write about every sandwich, we were pleased with our results, but swore an oath that we would never again take on such a daunting, impossible task.  Unfortunately, we then celebrated the publication of the series by getting really drunk again and thinking of another article suggestion, and since we were hungry, we decided to talk about every kind of regional hot dog in America.

God…goddamn it.  We just will never learn.

Anyway, it’s time to delve into the magical tube of nitrates that is the hot dog in all of its wondrous (and occasionally not-so-wondrous) incarnations.   Hold onto your hats, America, here’s another multi-part, nation-sprawling series on unhealthy foods.

Regional Hot Dog Styles Of America: Part 1 of 4

We have a long history of waxing poetic about the brilliant simple deliciousness that is the hot dog.  We’ve delved deeply into its 19^th century origins, we’ve saluted the brave Americans who partake in the Nathan’s hot dog eating competition, hell, we’ve even told you about the most terrifying things Americans have done to hot dogs (only applicable to hot dogs intended for oral consumption).  Hot dogs are an engrained culinary icon throughout America, and everywhere you go you can find your taste buds assaulted with a new and original preparation for your conical nitrates.

Of course, some hot dog styles are better than others.  Chicago hot dogs are better than New York hot dogs (deal with it), there are about a million different places that put chili on a hot dog and call it their own, but none can ever stand to the might of the Coney Island dog, and Connecticut loves their hot dogs more than almost any other state, but for whatever reason has never decided to come up with their own unique style for serving them.  No, instead they adopt a “put whatever the fuck you want on your hot dog” policy which is both right, and wrong, and ultimately who cares, just eat your penis shaped meat tube and prepare for the eventual food coma.

With that in mind, we now begin our list of America’s regional hot dogs (unscientifically ranked from worst to best).

DISHONORABLY EXCLUDED

Corn Dog (Texas)

While there is a hot dog called the Texas Dog (we’ll get to that later) it wasn’t invented in Texas.  We guess the state must have taken it personally, since they decided instead to invent their own hot dog which is in no way a hot dog.  Oh sure, a corn dog employs a hot dog as its primary ingredient, and when we say, “Fuck corn dogs, they’re some bullshit” many of you start frothing at the mouth with anger (still others of you unfortunately are frothing at the mouth with rabies).  But really, all that’s going on here is someone took a hot dog, removed the bun (and, by definition, the remote possibility of toppings) and replaced it with a suffocating layer of friend cornmeal batter so as to take a food that we invented so you can eat it with your hands and make it so you can suddenly, magically, eat it with your hands.  As if to save us from having to burn that single extra calorie necessary to laboriously tilt our heads slightly while eating a normal hot dog.

German Texan sausage-makers were credited with introducing a (initially stick-less) version of this state fair treat that, don’t kid yourselves, always slightly disappoints you when you get one because it never tastes as good as you remember it tasting.  However, by 1927, a patent was being filed describing some version of hot dogs (literally “hey, if I put a hot dog or other stuff on a stick, and then batter it, and then fry it, can I say I invented that or?”) and while a few locations claim to have invented it, with the Texas State Fair first started introducing “Corny Dogs” between 1938 and 1942 and Minnesota’s Pronto Pup appearing in 1941, we can feel pretty safe in saying that this simple use of a wiener (you’re allowed to giggle at that) has roots in Texas.

Not that they should really care.  At the end of the day, this “take a hot dog, put it on a stick, dip it in batter, and fry it in such a way that no matter what there’s always a chunk of batter attached to the stick right where the sausage ended that you will never be able to eat because it is apparently made out of adamantium” approach to eating while walking doesn’t count as a type of hot dog.  We deem thee unworthy.  Disqualified.

Cheese Coney (Cincinnati, Ohio)

Michigan’s Coney Dog is one of the most important and delicious hot dogs styles in existence.  More than a mere chili dog, it’s an overladen sonnet dedicated to the beautiful dance between stages of beef, with natural-casing beef hot dogs cohabitating with all-meat beanless chili, living in sin and sacrificing them to your ever expanding stomach.  We’ll talk about Coney Island hot dogs in due time, but we didn’t want there to be any confusion on our stance on them in the meantime.  They’re wonderful.

The Cheese Coney is not a Coney Island hot dog covered in enough cheese that you can hardly see the dog.  Again we love Coneys.  We love cheese.  We’d get behind that.  No, a Cheese Coney is the work of nightmares, a cruel prank perpetuated by Cincinnati to ensure that unsuspecting hot dog aficionados driving through Ohio will say, “Oh, would that be a Coney Island hot dog with cheese on top?  Why, I don’t mind if I do!” before cutting out their tongue in a fit of allspice and chocolate tainted rage where they temporarily forget that horrendous flavors eventually do fade away on their own.

Cheese Coneys are made with a milder pork and beef hot dog  than you see in typical Coneys (or really, most good hot dogs).  This is because they don’t want to detract from the primary ingredient.  So right off the bat, we’re eating a hot dog that’s not focused on how good hot dogs are, but rather something that serves as a cheap base layer for a more important primary ingredient.  No matter where you lie on the philosophical spectrum of “should a single topping be considered more important than the hot dog itself” you’d at least expect the primary ingredient of a Cheese Coney to be something rich and divine, something to be accentuated with the hot dog to create an amazing rush of flavors.  Is it a hot dog doused in some fine, rich, flavorful cheese, allowing each bite to ooze gruyere or aged cheddar as you slowly become a hunk of cheese and contently retire to a farm?  Well…no.   No, unfortunately not.  Yes, the hot dog is topped in cheese, and onions, and chili, but the chili is the star.

And the chili is a monster.

Cincinnati chili has famously been referred to as “Diarrhea sludge” and Ohio wants you to eat that on your hot dog.  It is a thin, sauce-like chili that is made nauseatingly sweet through the addition of cinnamon, cloves, allspice, or chocolate, the latter ingredient proving to be the most important to emphasize because that means that if you fed Cincinnati chili to your pet dog, it would most likely die, and that is the most astute metaphor we have ever encountered.  You can load as much chopped onions and grated cheese as you’d want on top of all that, it won’t change the fact that you’re eating a lower quality hot dog to make sure that you really taste the awfulness of Cincinnati chili.  We’re pretty sure this is the same culinary philosophy that led to the cement mixer shot.  This is the worst thing to happen to the hot dog since Colombia decided that the best way to eat a hot dog was to cover it in mayo, ketchup, potato chips, and pineapple.

New York-Style Hot Dog (New York)

Yes, that’s right.  The second worst hot dog variation is the New York style hot dog.  Yes, New Yorkers, shout your outrage, express your hate, your active disdain is what powers our offices.

Wait, what’s that?  Hot dogs are the one thing that New York has a distinctive “style” about that, at the end of the day, they don’t really give a shit about?  Well huh.  Now, if we started talking shit about Gray’s Papaya, we’d probably have our heads bitten off, but unlike pizza and bagels where New York will violently insist “You can never make these better than New York because blah blah blah our water used in the dough is made of rainbows and cocaine blah blah blah” the typical New York style hot dog is best known for being cheap and readily available “well, it’s there” snack for anyone who wants to shell out a buck to watch a recently emigrated Pakistani fish out a sausage from the lukewarm dirty hot dog water of his cart, stick it in a hopefully-not-yet-stale bun, and slather it with mustard, sauerkraut and, maybe, red onion sauce if you want to elevate your dog into “making us feel kind of bad for putting it low on this list.”

After seeing our open disdain for the Cheese Coney, you might assume that we hate New York style hot dogs if we’re putting them next on our list, which isn’t true.  New York-style hot dogs are just perfectly “fine.”  Nothing more, nothing less.  The New York style hot dog doesn’t really break the mold.  Just like your friend who took a full time job at Starbucks after graduating from college because “hey, they offer health insurance,” the New York style hot dog doesn’t have any real ambitions to do anything more than the bare minimum.

Hot dogs found their way to America via New York, and while you can find delicious hot dogs in the city (thanks largely in part to the high quality of Nathans Famous all beef dogs) the best hot dogs in the city aren’t “New York-style” dogs at all.  They tend to come from places like Crif Dogs, which offers distinctly non-New York-style but extremely delicious options (most of which involving a bacon-wrapped hot dog) such as the Chihuahua (bacon wrapped dog with avocados and sour cream) or the good morning (bacon wrapped dog smothered in cheese with a fried egg).  All of those are delicious, but none of them are a “New York hot dog”, which unfortunately is maddeningly basic.  Which doesn’t mean we wouldn’t eat one (a hot dog is a hot dog, which is a wonderful thing, so long as you don’t douse it in Cincinnati chili) it just means that just about every other regional hot dog just, tries harder.

Don’t be mad, New York, you’re energy is better spent bragging about your pizza and bagels.  Stick to your strengths.

Red Snappers (Maine)

In a similar vein of “hot dogs are delicious, but these don’t do enough to separate themselves from the fray” we find Maine’s Red Snappers.  Many hot dogs (read as: the only good ones) use a natural casing for their tubes of meat, which sounds gross when you’re nine years old and think “eww eww that’s made out of guts, I am not yet of the emotional age where I can separate what things are made of from how they actually taste” but which are what give your hot dog that satisfying “snap” when you bite into them to be greeted by a flood of delicious scrap meats turned delicious through salts and nitrates.  The Red Snappers of Maine, as you would expect from their name, are bright red hot dogs inside these natural casings.  And when we say “bright red” we mean “artificially dyed to look like Satan’s eyes, that kind of red.”  They’re steamed, served on a slightly toasted split-top bun, and typically topped with your choice of relish, onion, mustard or (gulp) ketchup.

(Go to hell if you put ketchup on your Red Snapper, if you’re going to use a condiment, put mustard on like a goddamn adult.)

Legend has it that the snappers red color first was introduced by butchers to mask the gray coloration of the old meat used to produce their hot dogs, which is both kind of gross and kind of ingenious, since hot dogs are literally one of the only kinds of meat where age is just a concept.  It doesn’t matter how old a hot dog is, it’ll always be delicious, desirable and beloved well past it’s assumed expiration date.  Hot dogs are sort of like Sandra Bullock in that way.  While a lot of the novelty of the dog comes from them being slightly smaller and baboon-ass red, those who can find them (which is pretty much limited to people in Maine) swear by them, so good for you Maine (but seriously, leave ketchup out of this).

White Hot (Rochester, New York)

On the other end of the color spectrum comes the White hot dog, or white hot (or “porky”) that originated in Upstate New York.  Much like the red hots, there’s not much going on in the way of toppings—you can add mustard, hot sauce, and onions, but all of that is optional.  No, the white hot proves to be distinct from the rest of the regional hot dogs through its color and preparation.  A combination of pork, beef, and veal, the white hot is not smoked or cured like just about every other hot dog in America, leaving you with a white wiener (heh) hence the name.

The white hot originated in Rochester in the 1920s among the city’s German community, originally made from fillers and cheaper meats as a more affordable alternative to the more expensive red hots, the sausage company Zweigle’s started making them in 1925 after securing a contract to sell them at the Red Wing Stadium, and since then, the white hot has become the official dog of the Buffalo Bills and Buffalo Sabres, meaning that white hot dogs represent two professional sports franchises that have managed exactly zero championships since 1970, so hey, they’ve got that going for them.  White hots:  eaten by New York’s only losers since 1925.

We might not be the best at coming up with slogans.

That’s as good of a point as any to end this section, as every hot dog after this point distinguishes itself primarily through the use of toppings (as opposed to degrading itself through the use of toppings [cough Cheese Coney cough]).  So grab yourself your favorite local hot dog and drink enough whiskey so that by the time you finally wake up its been several days and the second part is up, and stay tuned.

“Put chili on it!  PUT CHILI EVERYWHERE!”

~Some of the best hot dogs

We’ve been chugging along with our hot dog series here, which has been surprisingly much less traumatic than our sandwich series.  Most regional hot dog styles exist, and even if we can’t come up with a good origin story, we can at least tell you, “this hot dog has these ingredients.  People eat them to feel happy.”  And that makes us happy.  And it makes all of us fat.  Oink oink oink, let’s eat some more hot dogs.

Um.  Okay so maybe it’s warping our minds a little bit.  But no matter.  More hot dogs to shove into the expanding maw that is your stomach!

Regional Hot Dog Styles Of America: Part 3

A hot dog is a canvas, and America is the artist.  The beauty of the hot dog and bun is that you can make wildly differing flavor profiles just by mixing up your ingredients.  You can make it rich and meaty by adding chili, you can make it complex and satisfying by dragging it through the garden, Chicago style, or you can announce to the world that you have the culinary palate of a three year old who just burned his mouth on a slice of plain cheese pizza that was far too hot by putting ketchup on your fucking hot dog.

Don’t put ketchup on your hot dog.

So, we continue onward with the following regional hot dog styles that are delicious and thankfully ketchup free.  And remember, the farther along the list you go, the better the hot dogs become.

Texas Wiener (New Jersey and Altoona, Pennsylvania)

The Texas hot dog, aka the Texas chili dog, aka the Texas wiener (tee hee) is, essentially, an onion chili dog that originated in, of course, the East Coast.  Wait.  What?

Seriously?

Um.  Okay then.  While some claim that the concept of a regional hot dog topped with either chili con carne or hot sauce was invented some time before 1920 in Paterson, New Jersey, Altoona, Pennsylvania claims that the first “Texas Hot Wieners” were created by Peter “George” Koufougeorgas in 1918.  Either way, Texas dogs vary slightly from region to region (hence the leeway between it having either chili or hot sauce) but everywhere you can find them (which pretty much only applies to Pennsylvania, Jersey, and a few random hot dot shops in places with no specific regional hot dog preference, like Connecticut) you can agree on one thing.  They have nothing to do with Texas, it’s sort of weird that an East Coast hot dog would name itself after Texas, since, while Texans do tend to take credit for having invented chili con carne, the chili or hot sauce used in Texas wieners have more of a Greek influence, due to Greek immigrants being largely responsible for the invention of the style (what’s that?  “Koufougeorgas” is a Greek last name?  Shocking!)

Now, we love chili dogs, but there are a surprising amount of specific types of chili topped wieners throughout this nation.  Texas wieners lose out to some of their chunkier brethren just because “chili, onions, and mustard” is pretty basic, and the following hot dogs definitely bring more to the table as far as the chili dog game is concerned.

The Scrambled Dog (Columbus, Georgia)

Holy hell, look at that glorious monstrosity.  If hot dogs had lungs and could breathe, we would have to imagine that the method of preparation for the Columbus, Georgia’s Scrambled Dog involves a lot of sobbing as you hold the dog down at the bottom of a bathtub of chili while muttering, “Don’t fight this, don’t fight it, it’ll be over sooner if you just let this happen, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry for what I’ve done.”  While you might assume from the name that the Scrambled Dog comes with eggs or something that’s actually scrambled, when you order one you instead will find a specific type of chili dog that has been served at Dinglewood Pharmacy in Columbus since the 1940’s.  Lieutenant Stevens (his actual name, not a rank) is credited for having perfected the Scrambled Dog while working at Dinglewood (which, despite being a pharmacy, has its own kitchen and is primarily an eatery).  Stevens started working at Dinglewood at the age of 14,  where he began tinkering with the recipe of the previously existing “Scrambled Dog.”  He’s never taken another job, and has been making Scrambled Dogs for more than 69 years.

A simple yet delicious hot dog, it’s built by taking a bun and putting it on an elongated dish or bowl shaped roughly like a hot dog bun, but deeper and longer.  Two hot dogs are added, and the whole plate is doused with chili.  That’s then topped with mustard, onions, pickles, and everything is sprinkled with oyster crackers.  Anyone can make a scrambled dog on their own using any kind of chili they’d prefer, but Lieutenant Steven’s secret chili recipe is widely regarded as the best.

Of course, this being America, and chili being delicious and unhealthy, the Scrambled Dog is only one of many types of hot dog that slathers meat stew to enhance its flavor.  We have arguably even better offerings from regional hot dogs like…

Carolina-Style Hot Dog/ Slaw Dog (North Carolina, Georgia, West Virginia)

“Carolina-style” toppings originated in North Carolina, specifically the Coastal Plain and Piedmont regions of the state, and refer to any hot dog or hamburger that is topped with chili, onions, and coleslaw (with the option to include mustard).  One of the first places to sell an advertised Carolina hot dog was Merrit’s Burger House in Wilmington, which started selling Carolina hot dogs in 1958, but this particular combination of toppings has also come to fruition in Georgia, with Atlanta taking particular pride in their “Slaw dogs” while the first all-the-way dogs with slaw as a topping popped up in West Virginia as early as the 1930s with one stand (Skeenies in Charleston) claiming to have first put coleslaw on their chili dog in the 1920’s.

The only difference between the Carolina/West Virginia/Slaw dog and every other chili dog is that coleslaw is added.  That might seem to be a detriment, but you forget that coleslaw what Americans invented to make salad unhealthy, and putting it on a chili dog suddenly seems spectacularly American.

There are still a few chili dogs to address, but since we decided to rate these hot dogs based on how much we like them, we’re going to save them for our next installment, where we finally count down the four best regional hot dogs in America.  But no matter which hot dog wins out, the real winners are our stomachs.  Also cardiologists who work on retainer.

“Goddamn it, I knew Chicago would win.  Those bastards.”

~The, like, four New Yorkers who actually were upset that the New York-style hot dog was so low on this list

When we began our trek through America’s regional hot dogs, we were legitimately worried.  We had just finished writing about 11,000 words talking about long bread sandwiches, and it literally tore families apart and drove half of our staff to insanity.  And we were going to immediately follow that nightmare up with a systematic breakdown of hot dog styles?  Did we have a death wish outside of our normal “eating and drinking so much that interventions pretty much have become a part of our weekly schedule” death wish?

As it turns out, the task wasn’t quite so daunting.  Most hot dog styles follow a pretty basic blueprint.  Talking about the different regional kinds of, say, chili dogs requires about as much research as talking about various pizza toppings.  New Jersey wanted to put chili on their hot dog.  Georgia puts their chili dog in a bowl.  Pennsylvania likes to name things from Pennsylvania after Texas.  It’s not exactly academic research, but it is hot dogs, so it’s still worth our attention our affection.  And these four hot dogs remaining are the ones we love the most.  So let’s dig in.

Regional Hot Dog Styles Of America: Part 4

The last four hot dog varieties finally see us breaking away from more basic patterns.  The first round of hot dogs took sausages with fairly simple toppings.  Round two started getting a little more inventive.  Round three showed the awesomeness of chili.  And Coney Cheeses reminded us how much we hate Cincinnati chili.  And now, the final part of this series takes us to the pinnacle of hot dog awesomeness.

Yes, we snuck a few other chili dogs in here, but one of them is the mother of all chili dogs.  And yes, a hot dog that technically originated in Mexico made it this far, but holy shit it’s so good and it’s more of a Phoenix thing anyway.  And sure, it’s entirely probably that one of the entries here made it this high because they have a hilarious name.  And of course, there’s the Chicago, the sweet Chicago hot dog to take us home, which was pretty much a foregone conclusion as soon as we listed the New York hot dog so low.  But now we get to tell you about these four delicious seiners.  We’re already hungry.

Sonoran Hot Dog (Tucson and Phoenix Arizona)

Found in Tucson, Arizona and downtown Phoenix, the Sonoran has roots in Hermosillo, the capital of Sonora, Mexico, but hell, we stole it and we’re going to claim it for ourselves.  After all, it’s a bacon wrapped hot dog that’s doused with beans, grilled and fresh onions, tomatoes, mayonnaise, cream sauce, mustard, jalapeño salsa, served in a bread roll and holy shit just look at that, it’s delicious and taunting you because you know that it has to be next to impossible to fit in your mouth.

While you can find impressive Sonorans as far away as Chicago or New York, it’s primarily served in food carts in Mexico and by the hot dog purveyors of Tucson and Phoenix, and it’s relatively newer to the scene compared to some of the more established hot dog varietals.  The first hot dog was introduced to Mexico in 1943 when some Americans hoping to score a quick buck decided to bring hot dogs over to their bullring concession stand, correctly assuming that every nationality can appreciate the deliciousness of hot dogs.  It also helped that eating a hot dog while watching bulls repeatedly getting slaughtered was pretty much the 1940 Mexican equivalent of sipping a Merlot while overlooking the vineyard that grew the grapes that became your wine.  The first bacon-wrapped hot dog made it’s rounds in 1956, and slowly evolved until the 1960’s brought the Sonoran as we now know it over the border to Arizona.  The news of the Sonoran was met with the understandable American reaction of, “Wait, someone else is wrapping hot dogs with bacon and covering them with a whole mess of unhealthy ingredients?  We’ve got to steal this for ourselves.”

And steal it we did.  In Tucson, you can find hundreds of Sonoran venders, some of which have evolved from simple street carts to full-fledged restaurants, and Phoenix doesn’t exactly sleep on the hot dog style either.  Because, this is America dammit, and if you give us a mayonnaise, cream, and bean covered bacon wrapped hot dog, we will eat it, and we will like it, and AFFotD will just blatantly lie and say, “Oh, yeah, uh, we invented that, in America, 100%, don’t listen to those crazy neighbors of ours to the south.  America.  Innovation.  Obesity.  Woo.”

Hot Wiener a.k.a. New York System (Road Island)

We’ve written about the hot wiener before, because it has a hilarious name, and it also was determined to be the most American part of Road Island in our American States of America series.  And yes, it’s similar to many of the chili dogs we put lower on this list.  But, and this is a really important question here, did any of them have a name that could make a teenager or the staff of a heavy drinking America fact website who never emotionally progressed farther than their teenage years giggle?  We didn’t think so.

(Also, full disclosure, very few things have made us more anxious than doing a Google image search for “hot wieners” on a public computer.)

The Hot Wiener (heh) is also known as the New York System wiener, partly because they’re sold largely at “New York System” restaurants, but largely because New York just had to have another kind of hot dog named after it.  There are several places that claim to have invented the style, with Olneyville New York System in Providence claiming to be the true originator of the style, opening in 1946 after moving from their Original New York System that they opened in 1927 to sell the wieners.  While there are references of “New York System” hot dogs appearing in the early 1900s, and Sparky’s Coney Island System also claims to have invented the Hot Wiener as far back as 1915, Olneyville is the best known, with their specific hot dog sauce viewed as the standard hot wiener sauce (heh).

Not much differentiates a hot wiener from a chili dog, apart from the specific quality of the chili/sauce used, as well as the make of the dogs.  The frankfurters are smaller and thinner than most regional sausages (thus encouraging you to inhale multiple dogs in one sitting—most tend to order them three at a time) and are made of veal and pork with a natural casing, served in a steamed bun, topped with celery salt (trust us, do not skip the celery salt), yellow mustard, chopped onions, and their seasoned meat sauce that, while looking almost exactly like your standard beanless chili, actually has its own unique and distinctive taste.  The meat sauce seasons the beef with a combination of cumin, paprika, chili powder, and allspice, which makes a savory, delicious, and unhealthy combination with the wieners that lead many to name Rhode Island as a sanctuary for delicious hot dogs.

Oh, and if you still question us ranking this so high, we will politely guide you to New York System t-shirt showing a plate of three hot wieners with the slogan “Hangover helper” and would kindly point to our banner to remind you what country this is.

Coney Island Hot Dog (Michigan)

Coney Island hot dogs are wonderful, but also frustrating as hell when it comes to breaking down the genealogy.  We were going to write a separate entry for the Michigan hot dog, which is the term used to describe a steamed hot dog topped with a meaty sauce and chopped onions, which is widely popular in New York and Canada, except for the fact that the Coney Island hot dog, which did not originate in Coney Island, is also called a “Michigan” throughout the state of New York.

A quick word on the Michigan hot dog, and why it’s strange that it has a separate Wikipedia entry than the Coney Island hot dog, despite the fact that Michigan hot dogs are Coney Island hot dogs.  The original “Michigan sauce” used on a Michigan hot dog was created by George Todoroff in Jackson, Michigan, in 1914.  He made the sauce as a Coney Island hot dog topping, so let’s just agree that it’s weird and frustrating that this hot dog invented in Michigan is named after Michigan in New York and Canada, but is named after New York in Michigan.  Confused yet?  Good.

A Coney Island Hot Dog takes an all-beef, natural-casing hot dog and tops it with a special meaty beanless chili, diced white onions, and a stripe or two of yellow mustard.  It originated in Michigan (some say in Detroit, others say by Todoroff in Jackson) in the early 1900s, and took its name from the fact that the first hot dogs originated in Coney Island.  There are several variations of the Coney, depending on where in the state you get it, but it remains the truest form of chili dog.  While we’ve given certain regional hot dogs a hard time for their simplicity (lookin’ at you, New York) and we’ve displayed numerous chili dog variations that are far more complex than the Coney Island Hot Dog, Coney’s simplicity is actually its strong suit.  You have the wondrous meaty burst of beef covered by beef, with none of that runny Cincinnati chili bullshit.  When you think of a chili dog, you think of a Coney, because they did it first, and we honestly believe they still do it best.

Speaking of those variations, if you find yourself in Jackson, the hot dog will be covered by ground beef, onions, and spices (again, the fact that the “chili” tends to just be “heavily and wonderfully seasoned ground beef” is another point in Coney Island Hot Dog’s favor).  Detroit style has a smoother, creamier consistency to the chili, utilizing Hungarian spices, while the Flint style hot dog takes cow heart and grounds it to the consistence of fine-ground beef, because holy shit Flint is terrifying and maybe you should start somewhere else if you’re going to try a Coney Island Hot Dog.

Of course, as much as the Coney might try, it’ll never be able to upset the best hot dog in the Midwest, which just happens to be the best in America.  That’s right, it was just a matter of time until we brought up…

Chicago-Style Hot Dog (Chicago)

While many might scoff at “a hot dog with a fucking salad on top of it” (looking at you, the four New Yorkers who have too much pride in your street cart dogs tonged out of dirty lukewarm rain water) being the number one hot dog in America ahead of many worthy, meat-soaked entries, you have to face the fact that most hot dog connoisseur list the Chicago-stye hot dog as the pinnacle of hot dog achievement.  In a word, it’s perfection.  The warm, steamed all-beef Vienna Beef hot dog with natural casings (though we won’t fault you for getting a grilled “chardog”) on a steam-warmed, high-gluten S. Rosen’s Mary Ann poppy seed bun contrasts with the cold mustard, onions, neon green relish, fresh tomato slices, pickle spear and sport peppers, while the whole operation is then topped with a healthy sprinkle of celery salt which intermingles with all the cornucopia of flavors flawlessly.  Oh, and also, if you put ketchup on a Chicago-style hot dog, your hands are cut off so that you no longer will have the means to eat a ruined hot dog.

Don’t put ketchup on your hot dog.

The Chicago-style hot dog in its present incarnation started with the Vienna Beef company, which sold its first hot dogs during the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago by Jewish founders who only used beef in order to keep Kosher (it also helped that beef hot dogs are vastly superior to their pork brethren).  While hot dogs in various forms permeated throughout the city after that point, it wasn’t until 1929 when Fluky’s put together the “Depression Sandwich” (because you know, this was during the Great Depression, and it was a cheap way to get a hot dog with a lot of free extra stuff on top of it) which used almost all of the exact toppings as the currently accepted Chicago-style dog (the only difference being an unfortunate lack of celery salt, and the unnecessary addition of lettuce).  While Fluky’s no longer exists outside of a stand inside a Wal-Mart (the original location has been replaced by a hot dog stand painfully named “U Lucky Dawg), Chicago currently has more hot dog restaurants than Wendy’s, McDonald’s and Burger Kings combined.

Some of the most famous Chicago Hot Dog makers don’t prepare a red hot with all the Chicago toppings (Gene & Jude’s has been topping hot dogs with mustard, onions, relish, a sport pepper, and fresh cut French fries since 1946 while Portillo’s, one of the biggest Chicago hot dog chains, puts cucumber on a dog with everything on it) but that doesn’t matter when thousands of delicious hot dog stands exist throughout the city, ready to inject you with a savory, satisfying hot dog experience.

And what an experience it is.  The best hot dog experience that anyone has to offer.  There’s a reason why no one bothers to open New York-style hot dog stands outside of the city, while Chicago Vienna Beef Hot Dogs dragged through the garden are so demanded you can get them in Seattle, San Antonio, New York, and even fucking London.  It is America’s hot dog ambassador to the rest of the world, and we can’t think of a better way to spread American hot dogs throughout the world.

So as we come to the end of our four part series on regional hot dogs, the important thing to remember is that, no matter what, hot dogs are delicious.  So indulge yourself with some nitrate-rich deliciousness while tipping your hat to American ingenuity.  Only, you know, make sure not to put any ketchup on there.  Or so help us God.

No.  Ketchup.

“Pizza pizza, you so yummy, pizza pizza, OH GOD GET IT OUT OF ME, OH GOD WHAT DID I JUST INJEST?”

~Consumers of the following pizzas

We know that other countries out there like to ruin pizza for the rest of us.  Scotland’s out there making Haggis pizza, Pizza Hut’s international office is apparently being run by a chef who recently suffered a horrific brain injury, and Japanese pizza is, well, you know.  Japan.  When faced with the horrors of snail pizza or whatever the living fuck cream corn potato pizza is, it’s comforting to come back to America and feast on the various ways we’ve perfected the pizza pie.  Sure, some parts of the nation have kind of shat the bed as far as their take on the dish, but in general, America makes a simple, hearty, delicious pizza.  At least we don’t have people actively trying to ruin it for everyone else, right?

…Right?

Oh, goddamn it.

Goddamn it.

Here goes nothing.

America’s Grossest Pizzas

America does pizza better than any other country in the world.  “Oh, what about Italy huh?  They invented the stuff, this is typical boorish American elitism,” you might reply if you’re a horrible wet blanket that people actively avoid talking to at parties, but our attractive, interesting readers who are kind to dogs and are constantly fending off potential suitors will agree about America’s pizza superiority without a moment’s hesitation.  Not only do we make the best pizza, America seems to be the only country that knows how special pizza is.  We eat it at fancy restaurants, we order it at bars, and we managed to take the cold harshness of winter and turn it into a socially acceptable use of the sentence, “You know, I’m thinking of ordering a pizza, downing a six pack, and watching Top Gun and Road House on Netflix tonight.”

If we’ve learned anything from Star Wars it’s that our nation’s men have an unsettling fixation on metal lingerie and slug people every good side comes with a dark side.  Luke Skywalker had Darth Vader.  M&Ms have whatever the fuck M&Ms were thinking here.  Oreos have the sound of our interns sobbing as we force fed them candy corn flavored Oreos.  And unfortunately, America has the following.

Chicken and Waffles Pizza

When you first introduce chicken and waffles as a concept, your mind races with a myriad of thoughts.  All of these knee-jerk reactions, however, are positive.  At the very worst, you’ll think something along the lines of, “Oh hey, this is pretty tasty, I didn’t expect this go together as well as it does.”  On the other end of the spectrum, you’re the one person who takes a single bite combining syrup, waffles, and fried chicken who will slowly set their plate down, stare out into the void, mumble, “It’s perfection.  There are no more adventures left in this world,” before slowly walking out to sea.  Basically, everyone loves chicken and waffles, and if someone ever claims that they don’t, stare closely at their neck for several minutes.  Eventually they’ll have to break form to breath, and that’s when you’ll see their gills.

Now, chicken and waffles already breaks the mold as far as culinary expectations.  It’s sweat, it’s savory, it’s starchy, and it’s complete.  You don’t need to do anything to chicken and waffles, and trying to expand the dish seems foolish.  As foolish as, say, putting it on top of a goddamn pizza.

Enter Boulder, Colorado’s Boss Lady Pizza, stage left.  Their menu offers white pies (with a Crème Fraiche base), red pies (marinara), BBQ pies (take a guess), and pesto pies (seriously, it’s not that hard to figure out) but it’s their “breakfast-friendly” pizza that leaves us terrified.  Apparently ignoring the outcry against chicken and waffle’s name being sullied in the name of potato chips, they offer a pizza topped with breaded chicken (with you so far), waffles (ehhh), maple syrup (but…it’s pizza.  Why are you putting this on pizza?), mozzarella (please stop, we want to get off this ride) with Crème Fraiche as the sauce, because everything is terrible, and all beauty someday fades.  We’re just hypothesizing here, but if you ever manage to eat Crème Fraiche, cheese, syrup, chicken, waffles, and pizza crust, all in the same bite, it’s too late, you’re already dead, your stomach just said, “I’ve put up with a lot, especially with your tendency to order hamburgers alongside egg rolls when you’re drunk, but that’s it, I’m out of here” before tearing itself out of your body.

Spaghetti Pizza

At this point, there will be people who think they know more about eating gross pizza while whiskey drunk than we do.  They do not, but they will be steadfast in this belief, and will say things like, “These guys probably haven’t even tried these pizzas!  I’ve had spaghetti pizza before, and it was good!  And putting chicken and waffles on pizza doesn’t sound too bad either, I’d like to try that.”  You can see him, there in the comments, drafting his response.  He is wrong, and he is sober, and he is the enemy.  Do not trust him.

We’re not saying that Angelo’s Pizza Steak and Spaghetti, with two locations in Texas, is also the enemy, but we are saying that they serve as a cautionary example of a restaurant that thinks covering your pizza with spaghetti sounds like a good idea.  It is not a good idea.  It is a gross idea.  Considering the tens of thousands of restaurants out there that serve spaghetti and pizza, it’s telling that only a depraved handful have decided to combine the two ingredients.  Statistically, this does not make them trendsetters, this makes them the cast of Third Rock From the Sun after opening a pizzeria and combining foods in a wacky manner for their menu because they don’t understand how hu-man taste buds work.  At its very best, a pizza covered in spaghetti will taste like…well, not much.  At the very worst, the consistency of squirming noodles encased by cheese and tomato sauce will remind you of those boring Halloween parties you went to as a kid where your mom had you all close your eyes and stick your hand into a bowl of cold noodles after saying that you were touching brains.

Pastrami, pickles, and mustard

Dear pizza makers of America.  Sandwiches are delicious.  Pizza is delicious.  Pizza and sandwiches are very different things, so please stop trying to turn sandwiches into pizza.  We’re looking at you, Rose City Pizza in Rosemead, California.

The Bronx Pastrami Pie at Rose City takes a pizza crust and adds Mozzarella cheese before losing their goddamn minds and adding pastrami, pickles, and mustard.  Why would they do this to us?  The true shame here is that a pizza topped with pastrami would probably be pretty good.  We’d order that, we’d eat that, we’d not write it up in an article about shitty pizza.  But whoever came up with this startlingly awkward combination of pizza toppings didn’t know when to quit.  Pretend this pizza slice was a game of blackjack.  We imagine this is how the hand went down.

Dealer:  Dealer stays with a slice of cheese pizza.  Player is dealt a crust.

Rose City Pizza:  Hit me!

Dealer:  Player has cheese pizza with pastrami, player wins…

Rose City Pizza:  Hit me again!

Dealer:  Player has pastrami cheese pizza with pickles, player has busted.

Rose City Pizza:  Hit me one more time!

Dealer:  Player has pastrami cheese pizza with pickles and mustard.  God weeps.

We’re not sure if they named it the “Bronx Pastrami Pie” because they felt that a pastrami sandwich was something they associated with that particular borough, or if they were just trying to brainwash everyone on the West Coast into assuming that New York makes terrible pizza that involves putting fucking condiments on top of their slices, but either way they’ve created something foul and evil and unleashed it us all.  The only good thing to come out of this pizza’s existence is that it enabled us to invent pizza blackjack as a game, so we’re basically all going to become millionaires now.

Bone Marrow, Rapini, and Horseradish Pizza

We live in a gourmet culture, or we did live in a gourmet culture until the economy went to hell, and then a percentage of us kept living a gourmet culture, while the rest of us found ways to make Ramen noodles taste like something other than a disposed segment of a Hot Wheels track you found in your parents’ basement when you visited over the holidays.  Inherently, these two segments of society have completely different opinions of pizza.  There are the regular Joes for whom pizza is a lifeblood.  It’s essential, it’s delicious, and it’s greasy and comforting.  They buy deep dish pizzas so they can feast like kings for a week, they order New York style slices because it’s right there and oh so worth the two dollars, they see a Little Ceasers Hot N Ready and go, “Well, I’m not quite that desperate, but let’s revisit this when I’ve gotten myself good anddrunk.”  Then there are those who scour the Michelin Guide to find out where they should go to spend a hundred dollars on an edible zen garden who can’t pronounce the word “pizza” (they try to put three syllables in there which, come on, really?  How?  Why?) and think it’s a good idea to put fancy things on this sacred dish.  Caviar?  Sure!  Lobster?  Fuck you, poor people!  Bone marrow?  Apparently so, thanks to the bone marrow, rapini, and horseradish pizza from San Francisco’s Flour + Water.

You can quibble with rapini and horseradish all you want, we could go either way on the issue.  On one hand, rapini (or broccoli rabe if you prefer) is slightly bitter in taste, which is definitely a flavor profile we’d prefer to avoid on our pizzas.  On the other, rapini is delicious on the Philly pork roast sandwich, so there’s a possibility that it could be good on pizza.  But then you have to deal with fresh horseradish, which is definitely a flavor that is hated by 50% of the population, loved by 25% of the population, tolerated by 25% of the population, and is awful as a pizza topping for 100% of everyone who has ever existed.

But nothing can compare to the terror that is smothering a pizza in bone marrow in the name of haute cuisine.  When you order this pizza, you basically just killed an animal, ignored all of the perfectly delicious and toppings-appropriate meat its carcass left behind, dug out the bones (again, while ignoring the mounds of meat just begging you to cook it and mound it atop a meat lover’s pizza), snapped them in half, and smeared what you found inside over a pizza that now has to be thrown away because, eww, some monster just took your pizza and covered it with broccoli rabe, horseradish, and animal bone gunk.   What a waste.

Squid Ink Pizza with Octopus Salami Pizza

You are liars, Bibiana Restaurant.  You make falsehoods with your words.  Octopus salami does not exist.  Salami is not made out of fish, no matter how eerily close to human intelligence that fish might be.  Salami is made out of…um… well it’s made out of meat, we damn well know that.  Pork probably, right?  Or beef?  But either way, we know damn well that it’s not octopus.  Of course that’s not the only thing we find unsettling about this limited-time, one-week-only pizza from Bibiana Restaurant in Washington, D.C.  While all the other entries on this list have managed to avoid doing anything unspeakable to the pizza crust, Bibiana said fuck that noise, and doused the dough with squid ink until it turned as black as the head chef’s pizza-destroying soul.  Full disclosure- we weren’t even going to include anything like “squid ink pizza” or “pizza with sliced octopus” on this list originally.  Not because we didn’t think it was gross (squid ink and octopus with pasta?  Delicious.  Squid ink and octopus with pizza?  Life is ruined) but because we didn’t think there were any American chefs out there crazy enough to think it was a good idea.  That’s because ruining pizza with an abundance of out-of-left-field seafood toppings is what Japan does to pizza, not us.

Dammit, America, we’re better than this.  Stop ruining pizza.  And for the love of God, stop putting random hunks of seafood that’ll ruin the pizzas consistency on there just for the fuck of it.

Eel Pizza

Goddamn it we said stop doing that! 

Now, if it seems that these last few pizzas are the kinds of dishes (seafood that’s outside of mainstream America’s comfort zone added to pizza weather it’s a complimentary flavor or not) that seem more in line with Japan’s culinary what-the-fuckery than American misguided enthusiasm to create new and exotic dishes, you’d be correct in this case, since the American restaurant we found that decided that eel pizza is a good idea (it is not) is Café Sharaku, an Asian fusion establishment in Fort Lauderdale.  So in this case, we choose to believe that the chef just misguidedly thought to himself, “Americans like pizza, the Japanese like eel, if we combine the two…fusion!”  And this is very true.  In the same sense that people tolerate Jeff Goldblum, and people tolerate flies, but when you put them together you got this.  Though, to be fair, we are talking about Florida here, America’s favorite crazy uncle.  Hell, this probably isn’t even the most ridiculous pizza in the state, right?

Python Pizza (With Alligator and Frog Legs)

Oh Florida, we knew we could count on you.  Also, Jesus Christ Florida!  Who hurt you as a child?

As some of you may remember, Florida had a period last year where they encouraged their residents to stomp around the Everglades to kill as many pythons as they could.  Surprisingly, there was an actual conservationist reason behind the hunt, since the Burmese python is a non-native species that decimates plant and animal populations in the wetlands.  Not surprisingly, because this was Florida, they decided to call it “PYTHON CHALLENGE 2013” and handed out prizes for the most pythons captured and all-in-all tried their very hardest to be even more ridiculous than the residents of Springfield during the “Whacking Day” episode of the Simpsons.

In the spirit of embracing batshit insanity as required by the Florida state motto of, “Attendite me, et non videbitis me quaeris quid retro possum facere vobis vado et venio ad respice ad me deferretur,” which of course translates to, “Look at me look at me I can do it backwards why aren’t you LOOKING I am going to do it and you will miss it come on LOOK AT ME,” Evan’s Neighborhood Pizza in Fort Meyers decided to release a python-topped pizza.  They weren’t content to stick with “a snake that few people know the taste of” as a topping (no, seriously, we Googled “What does python meat taste like” and we basically ended up on a website that said, “We don’t know, but we can tell you how a dinosaur would taste!”).  So they put frog legs and alligator meat on the fucker as well.

That’s right, they cut the meat out of massive, giant snakes, put it on top of a pizza, sat back and thought, “You know, sure there’s chunks of a massive predator on this, but it doesn’t quite have that ‘Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here’ look yet.  How about we add alligator meat, and if that doesn’t scare anyone off, we’ll just take half a dozen frog legs and leave them scattered about the pizza like a Frogger Civil War battlefield.”  Ladies and gentlemen, The Sunshine State!

Buffalo Testicle Pizza

That picture is actually not from an American source—that is a bull testicle pizza as made by Ljubomir Erovic, the Serbian author of a cookbook that only includes recipes that have testicles as an ingredient.  But fear not, there have been American restaurants that have served the balls of animals on top of a pizza.  And by fear not, we mean be completely afraid, we can’t believe anyone would do such a terrible thing to a pizza.

Blowtoad in Richmond, Virginia unfortunately closed at the end of 2012 after less than a year in business.  But this Carytown pizza joint made its mark by selling the grossest pizza in America, but in such a way that we’re actually sincerely upset that it’s closed.  Because not only did place buffalo testicles on one of their pizzas, they called it “Bleu Ball.”  And while the name alone would be enough to make us go, “Oh, you crazy sons of bitches, we’re not even mad at you for putting balls on a pizza, you got moxie,” they upped the ante by simply listing the ingredients as “Swinging steak, bleu cheese, and charred onions.”

We have a feeling you might know where this is headed.

That’s right.  It took them all of a month before the local news decided to do a feature on a woman who ordered the pizza only to find out afterwards that she just ate buffalo balls.  Which we think is the funniest thing we’ve ever heard.  It’s funny enough for us to be completely content with the fact that ball pizza has existed on American soil, and might even continue to exist now (looking at you, Colorado).  Because if you’re going to ruin pizza, it might as well feel like a prank.

And so there you have it, America.  The grossest pizzas that we as a nation have managed to encounter.  Some of you might think of more disgusting pizzas, and wonder why they were excluded.  In that case, it’s simply that they were so awful we had to remove their existence from our minds.  Still others of you might think why we’re insulting some of these pizzas when they appear to be perfectly delicious.  To you we say that you’re wrong, and you should feel bad for saying that, and don’t you dare eve question us again.  Now why don’t all of us just relax, grab a case of beer, and see how many slices of stuffed crust pizza we can fit into our gullets before the pain becomes unbearable.

Because that’s how Americans eat pizza.

“Yes, this burger is pretty tasty, but what it really needs is someone to shave flakes of yellow rock on it to make it obnoxiously expensive.”

~Obnoxious people

For a species that used to feed itself by throwing pointy sticks at charging animals and playing a constant game of “will this berry make me puke until I die” we sure do spend a lot of our efforts making food as fancy as possible.  Normally, that’s not a bad thing, it’s led to fascinating and delicious culinary experiences for those daring individuals with a worldly palate who are willing to try anything and everything at least once.  It’s what drives America to create burgers like these, and why gummy bear bratwursts are a thing that you can actually buy.  However, it also can lead to pretentious food additions that only exist to as a way for people with more disposable income than shame to spend ungodly sums of money on future-poop just to show they can.

The most obnoxious development in culinary excess doesn’t involve molecular gastronomy, expensive “trendy” gimmicks, or even kale.  No, the worst thing to happen to haute cuisine is gold.  Tasteless flakes of gold added to your food so your small intestine can digest the daily wage of the person whose job it was to mine the precious metal that you so callously shucked into your oral cavity.  While certain societies used to eat gold in the past, this was because we had reached the level of scientific enlightenment of “assuming eating gold would restore your youth” which of course is to say, we weren’t all that bright.

The most affordable and least obnoxious addition of gold to our stomachs of course comes in the form of booze (most notably, Goldschläger).  Goldschläger, better known as “gold-flecked cinnamon frat juice,” and similar liquors initially put gold flakes into booze for medicinal reasons because, again, it was the 1600s, let’s give everyone a break.  Now, the gold remains as a gimmick, but when the total amount of gold involved in a bottle of booze ends up being about half a dollar worth of the stuff and ends up finding its way into a shot called “Liquid Cocaine” we doubt anyone drinking Goldschläger is putting on any airs.

The same can’t be said for these following dishes, some of which cost more than your monthly rent, and all of whom are ordered by people who deserve to be immediately punched in the face by their waiter.  So let’s dive in.

Five Ordinary Foods Made Needlessly Expensive With Edible Gold

Covering food with gold ranks as the most unnecessary addition to anything this side of casting James Belushi for a cameo in a movie.  As far as we can tell, gold and air are the only two completely flavorless, odorless substances that chefs purposely add to food, and gold still manages to be even more pointless because air actually can be used to help create delicious things (what’s up, whipped cream).  Now, if you look at the eggroll above, some of you might remember it as the Emperor’s Eggroll from our article on the spiciest meals in America.  This is a dish that was created to torture people in a way that only 7.1 million Scoville units can.  Now, for reasons unbeknownst to us, that dish also included edible gold.  We can think of two possible reasons why they added gold- either they felt that adding gold would be the only way a dish that’s so spicy that no one has ever managed to eat more than three bites of it could be even more wasteful, or they are trying to condition America into associating gold-covered foods with meals that will actively hurt them.   “You want gold on your food?  Well this is what happens.  Pain.”  We’re going to assume it’s the latter, because we desperately want it to be true.

Unfortunately, these following dishes don’t cause any notable gastronomic distress (that we’re aware of).

There Are Dozens Of Gold Covered Burgers

The hamburger is one of America’s greatest gifts to the world.  It’s wonderful in its most simple form, while still leaving itself open for infinite adaptations.  While that often results in savory, pretzel roll works of art, it can also occasionally lead to comically and needlessly expensive variations, as we’ve covered in the past.  The first time someone decided to take a hamburger, a food that fast food restaurants still frequently sell for less than a dollar, and put gold on it, eyebrows might have been raised.  “Lol, a $175 hamburger?  With gold?  What’s next, twitter as a news source?” a 2008 article asked.  By 2012, the story stopped being, “Zomg, gold!” and started to focus on how obnoxiously expensive these burgers were.

If you’re going to try to make a “shocking” menu item by putting gold on an otherwise ordinary food, you should at least aim to be somewhat creative.  Hell, you could sprinkle gold on a Hot Pocket and come off as more original and ironic.  At this point, you’d have a harder time finding a burger with caviar as a topping than a gold plated burger,  and they sell that shit in Japanese Wendy’s.  And yes, we realize that so many people put gold on their burgers that we are left complaining that gold-laden hamburgers are “boring” and “unoriginal.” We’re not happy about it, either.

Gold Covered Popcorn

“Hi honey, happy anniversary, I just spent $250 bucks for us to have some popcorn covered in gold flakes and…wait, what are you doing?  You’re packing your things?  You’re leaving me?”

We’re not saying that conversation has actually happened, but we sort of hope it has.  Berco’s Popcorn in Chicago charges $250 for their “Billion Dollar Popcorn,” meaning that there are people who have spent more money on a tin of popcorn than you’ve spent to upgrade to the latest iPhone.  Billed as “The Most Expensive Popcorn in the World,” the Billion Dollar Popcorn uses organic sugar, Vermont Creamery butter, Nielson Massey Bourbon Vanilla, and salt from the Danish island of Laeso, harvested using 1000 year old methods and painstakingly purchased just for this product.  The product description spends most of its time describing this salt, without a single word about what separates the popcorn itself from any other type of kernel popping corn, all while hoping we, as consumers, would be so mesmerized by the lengths Berco’s went through to procure this special Danish salt that no one would stop to say, “Wait, it’s…just salt.  Salt is salt, who cares where it’s from” before heading over to one of the many Garrett popcorn shops, to spend that $250 burning a hole in your pocket earmarked for “obnoxious popcorn purchase” to buy, oh, 13 gallons of high-end popcorn.

Oh right, and then they sprinkle gold on it, because if you’re not going to tricked into spending a quarter of a grand on a tin of corn bits that were placed in boiling oil until they exploded because of some fancy salt, maybe an edible symbol of your increasingly wasted wealth will seal the deal for you.  And when you finally finish that last, stale, kernel, because even if you’re trying to ration your obscenely expensive popcorn that stuff still only has about a week of freshness, you will look down at the Cheetos-like dusting of gold flakes that remain and wonder to yourself…do you abandon your dignity and pour the shavings into your greedy gullet, knowing that all you will be tasting is the spare fleck of fancy Danish salt and the slightly tinny nothingness of precious metal crumbs?  Or is it somehow more appropriate to dismissively throw the gold away?  Not only is this the only popcorn product that costs more than most people earn in a full day of work, but it’s the first popcorn product that actively encourages an existential crisis about the definition of wealth as soon as you finish it.

Gold Covered Cupcake(s)

When you manage to make some absurd gold-adorned food that gets even the Today show to gush, “We’re so over it” you must have hit a new low as far as “pointlessly wasting gold to justify trying to call something the ‘most expensive’ in the world” goes.  When that turns into some sort of douchebag arms race of, “I can make my cupcake more expensive than yours” than we might have to rethink whether or not we’ve earned the right to consider ourselves the planet’s dominant species.

First, 2012 gave us the Golden Phoenix, a $1,000 golden cupcake from Bloomsburys in Dubai that tries very hard to justify every single stereotype we have regarding Dubai’s comically unsustainable concept of the idealized lifestyle of excess.  According to a unnecessarily dramatically scored video showing the making of the Golden Phoenix, Amedei Prcelana chocolate and Ugandan vanilla beans are baked into a cupcake, which is then encircled with 23-carat edible gold sheets that manage to make the cupcake look dryer than that British comedian who tried to explain cricket to us that one time.  Chocolate décor, dusted in gold, is then added, along with gold-dust sprinkled organic chocolate-covered strawberries.  Finally, they add a gold bowl with cream, and a gold spoon with chocolate.  In case you didn’t notice, they really wanted you to get your gold’s worth with this cupcake.

Thankfully for society as a whole, when this dish was announced by Bloomsbury founder Shafeena Yusuff Ali, there was some backlash from the Dubai twitter population.  Unfortunately, those responses included, “caviar isn’t 1 of the ingredients” so, you know, again, we have plenty of time to wonder if maybe dolphins don’t have their shit together better than us.

This doesn’t even hold the title of the world’s most expensive gold-covered cupcake, since a $1,227.70 cupcake was made for London’s National Cupcake Week, made with gold leaf, a gold wrapper, and jams made of peach and champagne.  It was displayed in September of 2013 in a glass box alongside a rope and a bouncer because of course it was.  In case you haven’t guessed, adding edible gold to an absurdly overpriced food item is pretty much the closest thing mediocre chefs have to a dick measuring contest.

Gold Covered Chocolate Sundae

Of course, those two cupcakes aren’t anywhere near being the most expensive deserts out there, not when you have the owner of New York’s Serendipity 3 (they’re also responsible for one of the gold-covered hamburgers) blending 28 cocoas with five grams of edible gold to make the “Frrozen Haute Chocolate” sundae as a not-too-subtle way to say that you can go to college all you want, but someone is going to spend your first year’s salary as a data administrator to order a misspelled dessert, and why don’t you just try going into crime instead, fuck it, society is broken.

It comes served in a goblet lined with edible gold, an 18-karat gold bracelet with 1 carat of white diamonds on the bottom, and is topped with whipped cream covered in gold and a side of La Madeline au Truffle from Knipschidt Chocolatier.  That truffle, by the way, sells for $2,600 a pound, and you once spent an entire night attempting to disprove a certain section of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, and your professor said it was the most singular thing he had ever read, and you can’t remember the last time you’ve even had $2,600 in your checking account, and you no longer wonder why arsonists have the urge to burn down buildings.

$20,000 sundae.  Burn it down.  Burn it all down.

Ahem.  Anyway.

Gold Covered Milkshake

You remember that time that you met “award-winning” mixologist Adrianne Biggs while she was working at the Powder Room in Hollywood, California, and you made some joke about Pulp Fiction making a big deal about a $5 milk shake, and she was all, “Ha, yeah that was funny.  You know what, I think I’m going to make a five hundred dollar milkshake with edible gold and a Swarovski Crystal Nirvana ring” and you were like, “Oh har har, Adrianne, stop joking around,” and she said, “No, I’m totally serious” and then everything went red and you haven’t gone back to the West Coast ever since?

Enter the Velvet Goldmine, a combination of dark-chocolate ganache, Bacardi Reserva Lilmitada, D’USSE VSOP Cognac, organic honey, lavender vanilla ice cream and Ghirardelli chocolate-caramel fudge topped with whipped cream and gold flakes, accompanied by premium truffles, the aforementioned Swarovski ring (to keep!) and a Waterford crystal goblet that you can take home with you (for an extra hundred bucks!).  While we are legally bound to acknowledge that this drink can at least get you a little drunk, we’re equally bound to again link to the Powder Room’s website to point out how impressively cheap it looks for a place trying to take half a G from you for an ice cream headache.  Seriously, click here, and hover your mouse over the Velvet Goldmine.  We just spent five minutes trying to describe the awkwardness of the “description that gets clipped at the top and the bottom” and the “awkward black space with the unformatted drink titles” of this whole thing.  Of course, all of these absurd gold-assisted creations don’t quite stack up to the sheer inanity of…

Gold Covered TV Dinner

At $545, this gold sprinkled TV dinner isn’t even close to the most expensive item on the menu.  It is, however, a TV Dinner that costs more money than many people make in a week.  It is a $545 meal that you’re going to end up microwaving (“Hey there, I actually reheat stuff in the oven” oh no you don’t, who’s got the time to use an oven for a damn TV dinner, huh?).  This microwave dinner, assembled by British chef Charlie Bingham, who specializes in take home meals, offers a single serving of lobster, scallops,a turbot fish pie, salmon and oysters, topped with beluga caviar and 24 karat gold crumbles, all of which is delivered to the rich Londoner who would rather not leave his house to needlessly spend money in a locked box handcuffed to a professional security guard.

Sure, Bingham tries to justify the costs through the tried and true method of “buying the most obscure, expensive, exclusive products that, ultimately, taste pretty similar to cheaper versions.”  Over and over and over.  The turbot in the fish pie is poached in vintage champagne, while the salmon involved is Balik salmon from the Norwegian fjords, which sets you back a cool $406 per kilo.  Oysters (interestingly enough, given that oysters taste and expense varies drastically from region to region, these are just “regular ol’ oysters”) and a lobster tail are added, while the hand-dived king scallops are cooked in El Mil Del Poaig, a Spanish olive oil that uses olives from a 2500 year old tree and can cost up to $1,600 a liter.  Then it’s all sprinkled with gold, and sent for you, the absolutely most obnoxious rich person in London, to set aside, put in your freezer, and reheat whenever you feel like eating gourmet ingredients that’s been cooked, left to fester for weeks, and then reheated into a rubbery mess.  This is slightly less expensive than paying someone to slave over a gourmet feast for a full day only to light it on fire in front of them as you cackle, “No one will eat your food, you worthless piece of slime” but it also takes the joy of the human interaction out of the whole proceeding.

And let’s not forget that gold.  That’s the whole purpose of this enterprise in absurdity, but this is our favorite (read as: stupidest) use of gold to “class up” an obnoxiously priced food, because it totally ignores the fact that they made this product to be reheated.  So that means, you can either microwave gold (which will end about as badly for your microwave as you’d expect) or you’ll put it in the oven so that your gold can melt and then solidify into hard shells around your expensive re-heated food.  So you’re actually making it harder to eat this by adding gold to it.  So, you know, good job, Bingham, glad you thought that out while you were picking out your thousand dollar olive oil.

The fact that people buy this should anger you, or at least elicit an extreme eye roll.  It sure does for us.  Now if you’ll excuse, we’re going to get up some hot pockets in our microwave that hasn’t been cleaned in three years, and then down our sorrows with a nice cheap bottle of Rebel Yell.

“The only thing that can make beer even better is the knowledge that a living creature died so I can drink it.”

~American Beer Drinkers

Beer is wonderful.  We love beer.  You love beer.  Everyone loves beer.  Well, except for Sharon, but seriously, Sharon is the worst.  Like, every time she opens her mouth, just, ugh.  Sharon.  Fuck Sharon.  But horray beer (Horray beer!)  As a nation, America spends an obscene-yet-appropriate amount of time, money, and effort into making new, exciting, and dangerously alcoholic beers for us to punish our livers with.  If we spent the energy we exert on beer innovation on, say, space travel, we probably would have settled colonies on dozens of planets by now.  But are planets delicious, refreshing, and able to get you absolutely trashed?  No, of course they can’t, they’re just stupid hunks of rock.  They’re practically the opposite of beer, so why should we give them the time of day?  That’s right, we shouldn’t, we’ve got a new session beer to try.  We’ve got our priorities straight, is what we’re trying to say.

Seeing as the beer brewing business favors the bold and encourages risk taking, as well as being largely stocked with red-blooded American heroes, it should come as no surprise that there are a dearth of beers that include honest-to-God animal parts in the brewing process.  Because we like our beer like we like our women: swirling in a vat surrounded by chunks of creatures that once had a fully functioning nervous system.  Um, wait.  Let’s try that again…

Meatbeer:  12 Beers Brewed With Animal Meat

On November 30^th, 1487, Albert IV, Duke of Bavaria announced the Reinheitsgebot, or “Bavarian Purity Law.”  It declared that beer can only be made using water, barley, and hops.  Not surprisingly, this 500 year old law now comes off as quaintly outdated, considering you have German breweries tossing some weed in their beers just fucking because.  We know that hops, barley, yeast and water are essential ingredients to make sure beer has proper “wreck your shit” alcoholic properties, but there are thousands of delicious and exciting beers that dare questions like, “Beer is good, but how would it taste if we tossed a banana in there?”  And of those thousands of beer, a few dozen decide to go with the “once living animals” route of beer addition to create a genre of beers that we will from here on out  refer to as “Meatbeer” (copyright pending).

But before we delve into the diverse ocean that is beers brewed with animal meat, we have to mention one beer that was disqualified from the ranks of Meatbeers, with prejudice.

DISHONORABLE MENTION- Sankt Gallen Brewery: Un, Kono Kuro (Elephant Poop)

Chances are, regular readers of this site have already guessed what we have to say about this before we even tell you what country decided to make a beer using coffee beans that were pooped out by elephants, but, once again, goddamn it Japan you’re doing it wrong!  Sankt Gallen Brewery’s Un, Kono Kuro doesn’t count as Meatbeer since it wasn’t brewed with any meat, but it also doesn’t count as Meatbeer because it’s fucking insane and involves putting poop in your fucking beer.  Poop.  In your beer.  Well, fine, technically it’s partially-digested coffee beans carefully picked out of elephant poop, but you get the point.  We’re not sure what we’re more disappointed about, the fact that this beer sold out in Japan in less than a day, or that it’s not the only beer that uses “coffee beans pooped out by an animal” as an ingredient.  For shame, Japan.  For shame.

God, that entry left a bad taste in our mouth (pun intended).  Let’s move on and get onto the actual Meatbeers.  And what better way to start than a beer with a name that makes us giggle like schoolgirls, because, heh, cock.

Willimantic Brewing Company:  “Hand Pulled” Cock Ale (A Whole Goddamn Chicken)  (Heh, Cock)

Heh, heh.  Cock ale.  Heh.  Hand pulled.  Heh.

But seriously, apart from being a questionable Google images search term, cock ales (heh heh we seriously will never stop giggling at that name, judge us if you must) were arguably the first beers to be brewed using dead animals, gaining popularity in England during the 17^th and 18^th centuries.  There are many printed recipes for cock ales dating as far back as 1669, each with hilarious instructions like “take a Cock and boil him well.”  Cock ales (tee hee) historically incorporate a full chicken (mashed up to break all the bones), raisins, and a variety of spices.  While there are no available commercial cock ales (heh) out on the market (Willimantic Brewing Company in Connecticut is the closest we can find since they at the very least have been known to offer their version of a cock ale before) it’s apparently a very popular recipe among home brewers that also might be serial killers.  You know, what with that whole “taking a whole chicken and breaking every one of its bones before tossing it into a vat of fermenting beer” thing.

Either way, even if it might be next to impossible to find, if you come away from this article learning one thing, let it be that cock ales are an actual kind of beer that’s been around for hundreds of years, and also, tee hee, we said cock.  Heh heh.

Brugghús Steðja: Hvalur Þorrabjór Steðja (Whale Bones and Meat)

When it was announced that a the Icelandic brewery Steðji (incorrectly referred to as “Steojar” by just about every hand-wringing article covering the story) was brewing a beer with whale meat and ground up whale bone for Þorrablót, which is either a midwinter Icelandic festival or a series of wingdings, the internet just about lost their shit.  “Whales are gentle creatures and intelligent and wah wah,” conservation groups said, and the backlash was enough to get the drink banned by West Iceland Health Authorities who decided that the (1 kg per 2000 liters of beer) whale remains did not meet (pun intended) the food regulations of the country.  Shortly thereafter, the ban was overturned and this limited edition beer currently is being sold within the nation of Iceland. Here’s a video of someone drinking it.

It’s pretty unlikely that we’ll be seeing this in America any time soon (what with procuring whale meat being hella illegal here) but hey, you gotta love something whose mere existence makes vegans mad enough to rip a leaf off a tree or whatever the fuck their equivalent of a “homicidal rage” is.  Hah,vegans are the worst.  They’re almost as bad as Sharon.  Sharon.

Uncommon Brewers: Bacon Brown Ale (Bacon)

Rogue Ales: Voodoo Doughnut Maple Bacon Ale (Bacon)

Brooklyn Brewery:  Reinschweinsgebot (Bacon)

Numerous Others

It’s fairly common to find a beer brewed with bacon as a limited or one-time offerings by various nanobreweries throughout America, because it’s 2014 and people have been writing articles about how “the bacon craze will end any minute now” for the past three goddamn years.  In fact, we’ve even talked about the Voodoo Doughnut Maple Bacon Ale and the Reinschweinsgebot in previous articles, because of course if you put bacon in a beer you’re going to have a website whose banner has a grizzly bear holding a shotgun in front of an American flag take some fucking notice.  The beautiful thing about bacon beer is that it’s the least fucking necessary thing you could do to a beer—most smoked beers and Rauchbiers, which use malted barley dried over an open flame, have a spicy, meaty taste that actually can taste more like bacon than many beers that actually put bacon in the wort.  The only reason anyone really makes a bacon Meatbeer is so they can unveil it and say, “Look, this beer has bacon in it, you won’t care how it tastes you bastards are going to drink it no matter how it tastes because it’s beer and it’s bacon and it’s oink oink oink soo-WEE soo-WEE drink your swill fatties!”

Are we going to bemoan the fact that brewing beer with bacon is arguably just a complete waste of bacon?  Hell no!  Something died for your beer, dammit, embrace your position on the top of this planet’s food chain.  It’s the American thing to do.

Dozens of Oyster Stouts (Oysters)

Most craft beer drinkers don’t even blink at stouts that are brewed with oysters, a practice that’s likely been around since 1929, because you can find oyster stouts at pretty much any liquor store with a decent beer selection.  Breweries such as Flying Dog, Three Floyds, and Harpoon are among the dozens of reputable and respected microbreweries that use oysters and their shells to make a smooth, slightly sweet stout.  We’ve all been to enough Guinness and oyster events to know that the two go make pretty comfortable bedfellows, and while you might encounter a fair amount of people who say, “Wait, so there’s actually oysters in this?  Huh, I thought it was just a name,” it’s really nothing much to brag about as far as “exotic, unusual beers” go.  Of course, they are delicious, and they do take living creatures and huck them into a frothing maw of stewing grains and hops, so they warrant a spot on this list, even if they’re not going to shock anyone as much as, say, the similarly named, but completely different ingredient of…

Wynkoop Brewing Company: Rocky Mountain Oyster Stout (Bull Testicles)

We’ve covered this one before, but you can’t just brew a beer with the severed balls of a bull and expect us to accept it and move on to the next topic.  It’s testicles!  In beer!  Terrifyingly large and veiny testicles.  In beer.  It all started in 2012 when the Colorado brewpub Wynkoop posted a video on YouTube announcing the release a stout with Rocky Mountain Oysters on April 1^st of that year because obviously it was an April Fools’ joke.  The head of the brewery gathered his employees and said, “So, I was thinking, why don’t we do an April Fools’ prank to drum up some free publicity?  Hell, Google does joke videos every year, and look at how successful they are!  Anyway, since we’re in Colorado, what if we said that, instead of a regular old oyster stout, we’d make one with Rocky Mountain oysters.  Get it?  Ha, I’m sure everyone will have a good laugh about that.”

Because we don’t live in a sane or rational society, the responses to the video were split between, “Oh, good April Fools’ joke, you guys got me” and “I can’t wait to try it!”  So many people clamored for this joke product that they eventually tossed up their hands in defeat and said, “Jesus Christ, fine, we’ll put bull testicles into the beer, you goddamn lunatics, are you happy now?  Look what you made us do.”

The beer has strong notes of malt, chocolate, and molasses while users have, with a completely straight face, pointed out that it has “a subtle saltiness” to go along with “a hint of nuttiness.”  Okay folks, that’s it.  Society, you’re going on timeout for a little bit.  Shut it down.  Shut it all down.  Sit in the corner and think about what you’ve done.

Conwy Brewery: The Sunday Toast (Juices From Slow-Roasted Lamb)

In order to properly celebrate Saint David’s Day, the feast day of the patron saint of Wales, on March 1^st this year, Conwy Brewery decided to make a Victorian-style Porter with the juices from a slow-roasted lamb.  We can sort of piece together the logic behind this decision—it’s for a feast day, and the pastoral lamb has importance in Christianity, and apparently the addition of the lamb juice makes the beer actually smell like a Sunday roast.  We would probably prefer the beer to be brewed with actual lamb meat, if for no other reason than “lamb juice” as an abstract concept sounds terrifying and disgusting, but hey, we’re not here to judge the Welsh company squeezing the liquid out of a roasting baby sheep to put in their alcohol specially brewed for a religious holiday, we’re just here to spread their gospel.

Samuel Adams: Burke In The Bottle (Beef Heart)

If we learned anything from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom it’s that the only way to gain the strength of your enemies is to eat their heart (or rip it out of their chest or something, it’s honestly been a while since we’ve seen the movie).  Samuel Adams took that lesson to heart (ha, puns) when they collaborated with celebrity chef David Burke for a special beer only to be served in Burke’s restaurants that was brewed using sliced beef heart.  They essentially made a version of Sam Adams’ Oktoberfest where they added beef hearts that had been grilled and sliced by Burke to the wort at the end of the brewing process, leaving a slightly mineral and salty aftertaste.

The announcement of this beer (which, keep in mind, was never available for sale commercially outside of a handful of restaurants) caused a small flourish of protests from vegetarian groups, including a change.org petition with 800 supporters because internet.  As for us? We clearly support putting the hearts of innocent cows into beer, especially since the aftertaste of the beer tastes a little strange when not paired with beer, meaning that this is a beer that encourages you to eat meat while drinking meat.  Our only issue is that since it came out in 2010, we can’t find any press release for it referring to the beer as “hearty,” “bloody good,” or any other obnoxious heart-related pun.  Missed opportunity, Sam Adams.  You’re breaking our hearts (yesss).  We were so pumped (boom) to squeeze (we’ll take it) some life (okay we’re pushing it a little here) out of puns for this beer.  Instead we had to be the ones to bleed that dry (okay we’re done now).

Right Brain Brewery: Mangalista Pig Porter (Pig head and bones)

Earth Eagle Brewings:  Porter Cochon (Smoked Pig Head)

We’ve never really done this before but we’re about at the point in this article where we feel that we have to include a completely different lead quotation, so just humor us for a second.

“Honestly, what’s the point of making beer if you can’t cram a severed head into a bubbling cauldron?”

 ~Fucking Psychopaths, Holy Shit

Earth Eagle Brewings is a brew pub in New Hampshire whose founders actually posted a story about making a cock ale (heh) on their website.  Right Brain Brewery is a Michigan brewery that apparently got its name from a bad high school creative writing teacher.  What do these two establishments have in common?  Well, they both looked into the empty, lifeless eyes of a decapitated pig and thought, “You know what, We should totally chuck this vile thing into this porter we’re brewing right now.”  Then the visions they were speaking to opened their mouths and let out a howl that encapsulated all of the agony, sadness, and disappointment in the world in one single, horrible, never-wavering note, and when everyone came out of their fever dream, their warehouse was filled with a pig’s head porter and dozens of headless swine corpses.

Earth Eagle Brewings sells themselves as makers of old and rare beers, as seen by their devotion to brewing gruit (hop-less ales), which is why they previously have featured the Porter Cochon, a beer that took green bullet hops, lavender and, of course, four smoked pig heads from pigs that grew up eating spent grains from the brewery, which implies that the brewers had a somewhat personal relationship with these pigs, which kind of makes us uncomfortable.  The only thing that would be more unsettling about how specific that description is would be if they listed the names of all the pigs that had been killed to make that beer (because you know that these guys named the pigs).  “Starting in January, we will be offering a batch of Porter Cochon that was made due to the sacrifice of Twisty, Wiggles, Lord Oinkington Esquire, and Lester.  They were a close knit group of friends who never stopped believing in the power of whimsy.  Each bottle’s label will be a picture of the four of them as piglets playing in the mud.  You did this.  Look at what you made us do, you monsters.”  Then everyone just starts sobbing.

Less distressing (ha ha, just kidding it’s even worse because they put bones in it too because we’re pretty sure they’re just trying to make their brewery haunted) is Right Brain’s Mangalista Pig Porter which apparently won a Gold Medal at a beer competition (the competition was also haunted) and can only be purchased once a year during an event which, holy shit, is happening in a few days hurry guys we have to go to Michigan and buy the pig head and bones beer and feel guilty every time we watch Babe: Pig In The City!   They don’t really explain why the bones are a necessary part of this whole thing, since they don’t even care about the pig parts in the brewing process ever since they won an award for the fucking thing.  They can shrug off any criticism like an actor that wins an Oscar and starts taking awful parts in embarrassing movies.  “Listen, if Halle Berry doesn’t have to explain Catwoman, we don’t have to explain why we brewed a beer with a pig head and bones.  Scoreboard, bitches!”

That said, we’d still drink both the beers, just to piss off vegans.  And Sharon.

Dock Street Brewing Company:  Dock Street Walker (Goat Brains)

The Walking Dead can pretty much get away with anything at this point.  They’ve killed off beloved characters, spent almost an entire season doing nothing in a boring farm, and have fired not one but two showrunners, and they still get more people tuning in each week than Sunday Night Football.  So nice try, Philadelphia’s Dock Street Brewing Company, but even if you make an American Pale Stout with smoked goat brains for a viewing of The Walking Dead’s season finale it’s not going to make anyone clamor for the show to get cancelled.  Actually, there wasn’t any backlash towards this beer at all from any animal rights groups, and most reviewers of the beer actually liked it.  This is either a sign that The Walking Dead is unstoppable and who are we to try to stop their inevitable domination of every aspect of our nation’s culture, or that once we reached a point where people could casually toss pig heads into beer and get gold medals for their efforts that vegetarians protesting a beer for putting cooked beef heart in a beer in comparison starts to look adorably quaint.  Or, most likely, we’ve finally discovered a glitch in the vegans software, and when they read “goat brains” and “beer” in the same sentence it causes their systems to reboot and they hunt down the nearest cow and begin devouring it live like a goddamn Chupacabra.

No one knows for sure, all we know is that America is clearly at a crossroads.  As time goes by, Meatbeers will become increasingly common and popular, and microbreweries will have to come up with increasingly insane animal parts to separate themselves from the fold.  A T-bone steak-brewed ale?  You’ll have to do better than that!  A beer made with horse meat?  Bring it on!  A lambs-eye stout?  We don’t even care anymore we’ve stopped feeling so long ago all that is left is a void that we fill with alcohol!

This is the new world order, America.  So grab yourself a Meatbeer when you’re next presented with the opportunity and enjoy it with a protein-rich buzz at least.

“I think my heart attack is having a heart attack.”

~Oh God, Ordering Seconds Was A Horrible Idea

Many foreigners visiting America find themselves surprised at the amount of relatively fit and attractive people they can see on the street.  In their mind, the typical American is fat, trudging around in clogs with grease stains on their shirt, probably eating a whole pizza right out of the box while they’re walking to the gun store.  Instead, they find that Americans come in all shapes and sizes, and as much as restaurant portions seem larger than they’re used to, and the bread tastes much sweeter than anticipated, America’s culture of excess is largely confined to a very small but visible minority of people and restaurateurs who are fucking insane and are hellbent on cramming as many calories into your maw as is humanly possible before your heart explodes and showers the room with bacon bits like some Lovecraftian horror version of a piñata.

Naturally, our job is to help spread the gospel of this brave minority, these innovators who find ways to put a week’s worth of calories on a plate in front of you, these soldiers of fortune who push us to new limits, pushing our faces down into greasy heaps saying “eat your slop little piggies eat your slop!”  And while we do our best to make each meal as unhealthy as possible using a variety of methods, one of the most time-honored and respected approaches involves the creation of hamburgers so excessive and absurd that the mere sight of them is enough to drive nutritionists to commit hara-kiri.

But we’re no amateurs.  Sure, we could tell you about people who go to fast food restaurants and construct their own caloric monstrosities, or we could point out various chain restaurants’ burgers that double your daily allotment of fat,  but that’s child’s play.  If you really want to grab our attention, you’ve got to make something so obscene that even our own staff would have to take pause before diving in.  But dive in we shall, because this is America, and we’ve always wondered if heart attacks really are as painful as they make it look on TV.

The Ten Most Caloric Burgers In The World

Some people think it’s irresponsible to eat your entire daily recommendation of calories with one hamburger, and we’d agree.  If you’re going to half-ass it, why don’t you just convert to veganism and save us all the trouble.  No, we’re going to need at least two times that to deem a burger to be acceptable to make our list of absurd burgers.  At least.  So we’ve gone on worldwide search (that’s right, we even went to the United Kingdom for a few of these) to find the ten hamburgers that revel in excess, while still being something you could actually theoretically sit down and eat in one sitting (so none of this “novelty three hundred pound hamburger” bullshit).  Because you only live once, so get on with it, those arteries aren’t going to clog themselves.

10:  The Mega Mel Burger (4,556 calories)

Just outside of Houston, Mel’s Country Café has been selling country comfort foods since 1977 with an emphasis on large, meaty burgers.  While their standard burger pushes the limits of dietary sensibility with a full pound of meat, a half-pound of bacon, and three slices of American cheese, the Mega Mel defies everything we know about the capacity of stomachs.  For a mere twenty-five dollars, you are given two hours to devour this stacked burger consisting of a pound and a half of meat, a full pound of bacon, and a quarter pound of American cheese without help, and without losing the ability to walk or keep your food in your stomach.  If you complete this daunting task, you’re given a t-shirt, and the knowledge that you just put over 4,500 calories into your body while leaving your stomach utterly unable to distinguish between reward and punishment.

The burger apparently also comes with unnecessarily large helpings of tomatoes, lettuce, and sliced pickles, all of which rest on a bed of lettuce.  Since you have to eat everything on the plate to complete the challenge, that means that these vegetables are literally empty calories getting in the way of your ability to cram meat, bacon and cheese into your body before the obesity-aided diabetes sets in and the doctors have to take your foot.  Each year they announce the patron to finish the challenge the fastest, with last year’s challenge being a woman who ate this monstrosity in just twenty minutes while looking nothing like what you’d expect someone who would eat this monstrosity in just twenty minutes would look like.  Well done, Texas.  Well done.

9:  The Fifth Third Burger (4,889)

Minor League baseball gets to combine all the excitement of watching nine men stand around idly for 95% of a three hour span while taking out all those pesky nuisances of the big leagues like “famous players” and “being personally vested in your team’s season.”  While you’d assume the prospect of watching a 20 year old college dropout inevitably fail to achieve his dreams for less than $10,000 a year would be enough to fill the seats day in and day out, Minor League franchises sadly must rely on outrageous publicity stunts and promotions to fill their stadiums whose bleachers tend to consist of a hill that you can have a picnic on.  So that might explain why the West Michigan Whitecaps, a single-A affiliate of the Detroit Tigers, decided to make the 4,800 calorie-plus Fifth Third Burger, which takes five 1/3 pound burger patties covered in five slices of American cheese, salsa, nacho cheese, Fritos, as well as lettuce, tomatoes, and sour cream, all of which is doused in nearly a whole cup of chili and placed on an 8-inch sesame bun made with a full pound of dough.

While this twenty dollar burger contains more than twice your recommended daily allotment of calories, it also manages to pack in 209% of your daily value of Vitamin C.  So hey, once your fat cells gain sentience and take over your body from the inside, they’ll at least inherit a nice healthy immune system along with everything else.

8:  The Titanic (5,000 calories)

We take our first trek across the sea Oscar’s Diner in Telford, England (which apparently isn’t really worth checking out).  This American-themed burger bar makes us feel both proud and a little insulted that foreigners assume this is typical American fare, since apparently the United Kingdom is under the impression that Americans eat two and a half pound burgers all the time.  Which we clearly don’t.  Only on special occasions or after bad break ups.

The Titanic piles up two one-pound burger patties, two 4 ounce chicken breasts and six slices of bacon to go along with four onion rings, two potato waffles (potato waffles?  So, not a waffle fry?  Is this a British thing?  Oh it is?  Okay moving on) all of which is topped with mozzarella cheese, lettuce, pickles, onions, tomatoes and mayonnaise.  As of early 2011, about 100 people had ordered the 15 squiggly line (£?) item, with about 20 managing to finish the whole thing with one person who may or may not have replaced their insides with a garbage disposal unit managing to scarf the whole thing down in just seven minutes.  Though honestly, we don’t know why they opted for the whole “two chicken breasts” thing, when if they committed to the beef more they could have topped the next burger on our list.

7:  The 55 Challenge (over 5,000 calories)

Originally the Andy’s Big “A” Challenge originating in Goldsboro, North Carolina in 1991, the challenge initially involved eating six burger patties with four toppings, a side of fries, and a 24 ounce soft drink in under 30 minutes for it to be free (otherwise, you’re paying roughly 25 dollars).  After franchising and changing their name from Andy’s Burgers Shakes & Fries to Hwy 55, they began the 55 Challenge, which is the same exact thing, dishing out an artery clogging 55 ounces of freshly grilled meat with each challenge.  Unlike the Titanic, this meat-centric concoction sets a time limit, but that hasn’t stopped hundreds from conquering the beast at their various locations, with the fastest time being two minutes and 43 seconds by someone by the name of “Furious Pete Czerwinski” who by all accounts might be a miniature black hole that has put on a human disguise to crush obscene amounts of meat into a gravitational singularity.

Either way, there is no documented calorie count for this burger that we could find, but considering that 55 ounces of plain hamburger sets you back around 4800 calories, we’d have to imagine that when cheese and toppings are taken into consideration, this sucker packs more of a punch than this list’s previous entry, especially since the mere thought of trying to rush to finish this burger in half an hour is enough to put us into a food coma.

6:  The State Champion Burger (approximately 5,500 calories)

Much like the highway 55, the caloric count of the State Champion Burger offered up by Diggers Diner in Brush Colorado, appears to be unavailable, they at least list enough ingredients listed for us to make an educated guess.  Between the three pounds of ground beef, a pound-and-a-half bun, eight slices of cheese, and a slew of tomato, pickles, and lettuce, the entire product weighs over five pounds and has had only a small handful of customers successfully complete the $29.99 item.  Naturally, this burger comes with a side of fries, since America as a nation doesn’t remember the last time it was able to see it’s penis while it showered, but it’s not even the biggest “individual burger patty” on this list.  That title belongs to…

5:  The Sarge Burger (approximately 5,600 calories)

The Pig’n-Chik of Sherwood, Arkansas, just outside of Little Rock, offers up the Sarge Burger with a similar caveat as Hwy 55′s.  For $25 dollars, you get a four pound burger with a one pound bun dressed however you like, because the first natural and appropriately American reaction to seeing a burger so massive it can double as a barbell is to figure out what additional toppings you’re going to want on top of it.  If you manage to finish this single massive patty, which takes about fifteen minutes to put together, in thirty minutes or less the meal is free, though only a handful of people have been able to accomplish that task.

Both the Sarge and State Champion don’t necessarily have anything “exotic” or “crazy” going on besides that whole “a very large burger that technically is small enough that people can in theory eat it” (a 105 pound actress, for example, was able to take down the Sarge) thing, but at the same time, who are we to turn our noses up at thousands of calories worth of hamburgers just because there isn’t bacon or massive globs of butter involved?  That said, we’re about to go back across the pond to the dirty idea-stealing British and we start getting back into burgers that are more complicated than “enough meat to feed a family, on a bun.”

4:  The Ulti-Meatum (10,000 calories)

We know, you’re looking at that picture up there, an you have a lot of questions.  “What the fuck is that.”  “Is this a burger or the results of an alien autopsy?”  “Is there a face in there?  Is it smiling?  Can food feel emotions?  Oh God, what if they can?  Oh sweet Jesus.”

Woah there, calm down.  Your food stopped feeling things once we electrocuted the cow in front of all its best cow friends, let’s move on.

This is the Ulti-Meatum, a burger within a burger available at Mister Easters in Preston (for those of you firing up your google maps and looking anxiously for small Iowan towns, we’ll save you the trouble, it’s in England).  While England created it, they stole the idea from America (or rather, a cartoon show from America, but still counts).  The Ulti-Meatum claims to have 10,000 calories while somehow totally missing the opportunity to claim that it is the Inception of hamburgers.  Two buns, cheese, tomato and lettuce surround a top and bottom burger layer, with both sandwiching a cheese-covered burger patty (which, in turn, engulfs another hamburger, cheese, and full bun).  The burger is free if you’re able to finish it in one sitting, or you can pay 20 British-Squiggly-Money-Lines to get each segment cooked up separately so you can assemble every part yourself, which means that it’s actively cheap enough that most people who eat the whole thing by themselves are probably doing it less because they’re worried about spending 20 pounds-or-didgeridoos-or-whatever and more because they’re just too lazy to pile all these toppings together.  Which really is the most wonderfully American mindset of them all.

3:  Quadruple Bypass (12,410 calories)

Sanctioned by Guinness as the world’s most calorific burger, clocking in at around six times your daily allotment of calories, the Quadruple Bypass burger from Las Vegas’s Heart Attack Grill has been featured previously on affotd as one of the America’s messiest burgers.  This “increasingly uncomfortable to praise because the restaurant keeps having unofficial mascots who die distressingly young” ode to excess combines four ½ pound beef patties, twenty slices of bacon, eight slices of American cheese, a special sauce, and lettuce/tomatoes/onion/boring-ass-vegetables-that-honestly-do-impart-a-necessary-crispness-to-the-burger.  Oh, and the bun is coated in lard, and if you’re reading this and your chest is starting to get heavy, you might want to take a break before finishing this article.  Go look at pictures of salad or something online.  Sit on a hammock and have that fantasy where you throw the game winning touchdown in the Super Bowl so your brain is fooled into thinking you’re exercising.  Drive your Rascal Scooter and steer with your knees but move your arms like you’re doing swimming strokes.  We’ve only got two more burgers left, at which point you should be good and convinced that cattle are playing the long con and are waiting to take over as the dominant species after humanity’s final cardiac arrest.

2:  Over De Flames Burger (13,000 calories)

The Over De Flames burger, served by the British restaurant-within-a-Norwich-bar that bore the burger’s name until it’s closure probably doesn’t’ belong on this list.  It’s comically huge, but no mere mortal managed to eat the whole thing.  It was 13,000 calories of “Come on, I fucking dare you” placing six and a half pounds of burger (space over two patties) covered in 40 slices of cheese smashed between a specially made bun, and anyone who managed to eat it in one sitting would be awarded 200 Squiggle-Moneys (those unable to finish it had to dish out 30).    Sundeep De, pictured above, was inspired to make the burger by watching America’s Man vs. Food, because if there’s one thing we’ve established, it’s that the United Kingdom loves to make insane hamburgers, but only as a way to excitedly tap America on its shoulder and say, “Hey, hey, look what I did!  Look what I made!  Do you like it?”

Why would we include this burger as opposed to, say, one of those 777 pound burgers we make in America as a novelty item?  Honestly, we just assume that if they took that overseas and asked Americans if they could down it in one sitting, we’d probably respond, “What’s the time limit” before Furious Pete shows up and casts the whole thing into the orchestrated chaos of the universe that is his stomach.  USA!  USA!

1:  The Judgment Day Burger (15,000 calories)

In The Judgment Day, we find yet another British burger *ducks to avoid series of knives and angry curse words* okay fine, a Scottish burger that also was inspired by Man Vs. Food and which has yet to be defeated (because an American probably hasn’t had a proper go of it it).  We’re not sure how they came up with 15,000 calories, since there’s only one pound of Aberdeen Angus steak burger involved, but it helps that it’s topped with three chicken breast burgers (what is it with the United Kingdom and their “using chicken burgers instead of beef” fascination?), six rashers of bacon, three fried eggs, a double serving of French fries, onion rings, a shitload of cheese, and a homemade chili to finish everything off.  Sold for 25 Brit-Squiggles by Spinnaker Café in Oban, Scotland, this one burger at least gets the spirit of competitive eating right, since it’s only free for anyone who can get through it in 45 minutes.

This is the point at the end of the article that we should inform you that all of these burgers are incredibly unhealthy, and if you have heart problems, or honestly hope to someday avoid heart problems, you should just stick to a healthy diet of lean protein and paoghieapgva;ph phipg a

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*panting*

Sorry about that, everyone.  One of our damn lawyers started typing while we had our backs turned.  He’s tied to a chair now being force-fed bacon grease while screaming, “Think of the liability, damn you!”  No we will not think of our liability, Jake, now eat your bacon sludge before we get the whiskey funnel.  And for the rest of you, your charge is clear.  Head over to England and eat their giant burgers, just to prove that it can be done.  We believe in you.  That which does not kill you makes you stronger.  (Jake just shouted something about how heart attacks actually make you much weaker in a variety of ways, but shut up Jake).

“Listen, KFC, we need to talk.  You guys might need to…start cooling your shit.”

~Concerned Americans

We as a society have an incredibly short memory when it comes to change.  We freak the fuck out whenever Facebook alters it’s news feed only to completely forget about our reaction the next time they change the layout and we again, collectively, lose our shit.  That ability to accept the occasional big change while glossing over the small ones is completely natural, but it does mean that every so often we need to take a step back and look to see if we’ve gone too far.  Similarly to how you can watch eight seasons of a TV show and not realize how much the actors have aged until you revisit the first episode, we might not realize how far off the rails some of our favorite American establishments have gone until we take a step back and compare it to Japan.

Which brings us to our inaugural edition of our latest running article—The State of Our Union.  We will take an iconic American establishment and look at it with fresh, new eyes, to put in perspective if it truly is American, or if we’ve created a monster.  First up, we have a beloved institution that has been in existence since 1930—KFC, the artist formerly known as Kentucky Fried Chicken.

The State of Our Union:  KFC

Harland Sanders opened the first KFC in Corbin, Kentucky, where it was a standalone restaurant until the 1950s, when Sanders realized the franchise potential behind his famous fried chicken recipe.  pressure fried hunks of chicken are coated with eleven herbs and spices to make the colonel’s Original Recipe fried chicken, which represented the first time a restaurateur attempted to establish a fast food eatery around something other than hamburgers.  Soon enough, with business booming, he was able to expand and franchise.

He opened his first franchised location in 1952 in Utah, a prime location that, wait seriously, Salt Lake City got a KFC before any other non-Kentucky state in America?  That…for real?  Granted, there’s no reason to assume that Mormons shouldn’t be allowed to eat fried chicken, but then again we’re still trying to figure out why they’re not allowed to drink Coca-Cola.  But yeah.  Huh.  Utah.

Now we all know “Colonel Sanders” as the face of Kentucky Fried Chicken, but as he entered his 70s he couldn’t keep up with the work of running a major, nation-wide chain, and he sold the company in 1962, at which point it immediately went about expanding around the world years (and in many cases, decades) before its fast food competitors even imagined an international market.  As a result, KFC has become an international symbol of America’s brilliance and culinary prowess (or at least, ability to take a moderately healthy animal and make it facefuckingly bad for you).

Now before we look at the menu for KFC and discuss its pros (fried chicken is delicious!) and its cons (the double down objectively tastes like shame and Crisco!) we must mention their latest publicity stunt which delves way too far on the crazy side of things.

The KFC Corsage

Yes, KFC is selling corsages, and yes, it’s popular enough that it’s selling out, and yes, maybe Americans need to learn to stop spending their money on limited-time-only  shit that’s stupid for ironic purposes.  Seriously, everyone needs to calm the fuck down.  KFC decided to partner with Nanz & Kraft Florists in Louisville to make 100 corsages for $20 that come with a $5 KFC gift check to be used to “customize” your corsage (read as- buy a piece of fucking chicken and stick it on your wrist).  The first batch was so popular that it sold out almost immediately, and a second batch had to be made.  Which means that at least 200 people went to prom and come home with grease stains all over their expensive dresses.

Listen, we love fried chicken, and we love absurdity, but this is the point where you have to stop and think about the consequences of your actions.  Prom’s last a long time, and you spend a lot of time dancing.  And have you ever ordered from KFC and had to drive home, say, 30 minutes before eating it, do you remember the greasy, sloughed-off-skin consistency?  Sure, you ate it, and it was delicious (well, it was fine, as far as fast food goes), but could you imagine that lump of trans fats and disintegrating breading sitting for an extra three hours, all while placed on top of your wrist while you’re trying to get lucky?  You’re going to perennially smell like fried chicken grease which means you might share a comradery with your school’s 300 pound janitor, but that’s about it.  This is too much.  You’ve done gone too far, KFC.  You’ve done did it.

The Rest of the KFC Menu

KFC used to stick to fried chicken in a bucket.  End of transaction.  You could get white, you could get dark, you would get fat, it’s a very simple and American contract.  The process has since gotten more complicated, with mixed results.  While Original Recipe remains a big seller, and Extra Crispy seems to be the same but, you know, crispier, KFC also offers Kentucky Grilled Chicken for the more health-conscious fast food eatahhahaha we almost said that with a straight face, why are you going to KFC to eat grilled chicken, you goddamn maniac?  We feel that the only people who’d actually order a grilled chicken breast at a place called “Kentucky Fried Chicken” (“actually they changed the name to just KFC because” oh shut up we don’t care) is if you’re an actual alien mimicking human form but not yet used to the customs of our species, or if you’re someone who gets very nervous in public, and menus make you anxious, and you just randomly pointed at a menu item and sighed in disappointment when you realized what you accidentally ordered.

The rest of the chicken side of the KFC menu are pretty commonsense expansions of an all-chicken establishment.  Hot Wings, Original Recipe Bites, and Extra Crispy Tenders are all acceptable variations of chicken for the people who think they’re too good to just eat a family sized bucket of fried chicken with two sides by themselves as they sob uncontrollably and burn their gym contract, muttering to themselves, “There’s no turning back, this is life now.”

And then we get to the Go Cups.

KFC, you’re starting to lose us here.  We’re saying this because we’re concerned about you.  We’re saying this because you seem to be… well, you’ve been different lately.  You used to be about buckets of chicken and small Styrofoam containers of sides.  Now you’re taking chicken tenders and hot wings or, Christ, is that a chicken slider, and mashing them in tiny little cups with a handful of potato wedges because you’re trying to convince us that this is somehow a more convenient method of eating than a goddamn drumstick?   This is sad, and weird, and wholly unnecessary, no matter how many tiny gifs you try to make to convince us otherwise.

This brings us into the sandwiches.  We get why you’d need to bring sandwiches into play, but we still question the kind of person who feels compelled to order that.  For most of us, KFC is enough of a sometimes food that if we end up there, we might as well get the fried chicken because, well, that’s what they’re there for.  But if you’re going here to get a sandwich with some name like the Doublicious, which apparently is a chicken sandwich topped with Monterey Jack, bacon, and sauce on a Hawaiiin bun, or the Chicken Littles, which are smaller, more basic mayo-chicken-pickle combos, you’re either someone who doesn’t really like fried chicken but wants a chicken sandwich, or you’re someone who goes to KFC so much that you have to mix things up a little bit so you don’t get bored.  We’re not saying that the thought of people out there who list KFC as their default go-to restaurant depresses us a little bit, but we are saying that we started drinking now and it sure as hell isn’t for celebratory reasons.

Objectively, we should love the KFC Double Down.  True story, one of our staff writers was once in Europe, and was talking to two teenagers about how great America is (answer—so great) and he got to describing the KFC Double Down, saying, “Well, so it’s like a chicken, cheese, and bacon sandwich, only instead of bread, you have, uh, two pieces of bacon,” and the Europeans just sort of looked at him for a while before saying, “That is the most grossly American thing we have ever heard of.”  And it’s true!  Only in America can a multi-billion dollar corporation say, “Fuck bread, have some meat with your meat piggies,  OINK OINK OINK” and have no one bat a fucking eye.  “What’s that?  Two greasy pieces of chicken smushed together with some bacon, cheese, and weird sauce in the middle?  That’s fine, we’ll eat it, but move out of the way we’re in line to get a doughnut made out of a croissant, or maybe a taco made out of Doritos.”   That’s amazing, but again, the more you look at the sandwich, the more you realize it’s a cheap marketing gimmick that doesn’t really set out to do what it aims to.

If you want to embrace the Double Down as the ultimate in “Ugh, Americans eat disgusting unhealthy fatty foods” you’ll be disappointed by its 540 calories and 32 grams of fat, the former being about a quarter of your daily allotment, and the second, well, okay that one is pretty bad, good job KFC.  And as far as absurdity goes, as much as they bill it as a sandwich that replaces bread with meat, if you actually went ahead and deconstructed the Double Down, replacing the meat again with bread, you’d have the saddest sandwich you’ve ever seen.  Two halves of a bacon strip on top of a piece of cheese with some sauce ladled on there?  That’s not how America does sandwiches.

And finally, how does it taste?  We won’t claim our experience to be universal, but we found that it was greasy, salty, but ultimately underwhelming.  It doesn’t fill you up nearly as much as it should, so you don’t even get a sense of accomplishment reserved for your standard “American eating way too much food” experience.  It just leaves you feeling a little bit hungry, with a general thought process of, “Well, I guess I somewhat enjoyed that experience, on a visceral level, but now I feel a little dirty knowing I can’t say I’ve never done this.”  Sort of like ordering a prostitute.

Some people get a craving for KFC specifically for their sides, memories of family meals with 12 piece buckets and their choice of mashed potatoes and gravy, mac & cheese, coleslaw, biscuits, potato edges, or maybe corn or greenbeans if something is wrong with you and you don’t know how to be unhealthy correctly.  Sure, you can find better versions of all of these dishes at any home-style restaurant, but there’s a specific KFCness to them that nostalgia or your blood sodium levels crashing down to normal levels sometimes make your body crave.  There’s nothing wrong with that, and in fact, we enjoy helping ourselves to KFC’s mashed potatoes and gravy every now and again, which are especially delicious when drunk.

But then we get something like the KFC Famous Bowls, which have only existed for some five years, and which have always been referred to as being Famous.  They were most definitely not famous before they existed, and they’re arguably not even famous now, but we suppose KFC had to do something to distract you from the general concept of, “We’re going to fuck a bunch of chicken into some of our sides and you’re going to eat it out of a bowl and like it, you understand?” that is the impetus of this dish.  The Famous Bowls take a half-bowl of mashed potatoes and crams some sweet corn and chicken chunks in there, at which point they douse it with gravy and cover the crime scene with shredded cheese to make a dish that says, “Look at me, I’m the kind of person that cares not to have my food separated, please, put a bunch of shit in a trough for me and let me go to town, I’ve lost any ounce of self-respect long ago.”

For those keeping track, this has 140 calories more than the Double Down, and yet no one has ever complained about the health implications of a dish that is, essentially, a snowball made out of compacted KFC menu items.  Awesome.

KFC also sells a pot pie, and they offer cake and cookies as a dessert.  That’s fine, we have no problem with that.

So, where does that leave us?  Looking back at KFC, we find serviceable chicken with a rich American history that maybe, just maybe, needs to work on simplifying their shit a little bit.  They’re great at what they started off doing, but now are trying trick shots when they don’t need to.  We don’t really need a Double Down sandwich.  Hell, we don’t really need any KFC sandwich.  And we sure as fuck don’t need any Famous Bowls, which aren’t even crazy enough into shocking us into ordering them on a dare like the Double Down is.

So KFC.  Keep it simple.  You’ll still be American.

CURRENT STATE OF KFC:  In Danger of Entering Japanese Territory             

“If Benjamin were an ice cream flavor, he’d be pralines and dick.”

~Garth Algar

Every summer American childhood memory revolves around delicious treats that cool you down while giving you a hell of a sugar rush.  “You scream, I scream, we all scream for…” we all would shout in our formative years to have it interrupted by our father’s saying, “Shut up with your damn singing and get your father another fucking beer.  Oh Jesus, you’re crying again?  Man the fuck up, here, take this five dollar bill and get something from the ice cream truck, maybe that’ll get you out of my goddamn hair for one fucking minute.”  Ah, memories.

Here’s a fun test for you Americans at reading at home (or at work ) (or while pooping, whatever, we don’t judge).  Go to ten strangers and ask if they like ice cream.  You will probably get six people saying, “Um, yeah?” three people saying, “Who the fuck are you” and one person who goes, “No I do not like ice cream.”  Well congratulations, you’ve found the parasite, the host is dead, there’s nothing for you to do but to set him on fire and contain the pathogen.  So, 9 out of 9 Americans love ice cream, meaning that ice cream is infallible, much like pizza or Oreos.

Oh what’s that?  You clicked the above links and saw that it lead to gross examples of those aforementioned delicious treats?  Oh, you didn’t click on them because that seemed time consuming and you’re just skimming through this anyway?  Shut up, just, okay?  Just pretend you did.  Anyway, we’re going to talk about Americans that fuck up ice cream.

America’s 10 Grossest Ice Cream Flavors

It’s no secret that gross ice cream flavors exist out there, and we largely have Japan to blame.  And sure, you’re not going to find anything as insane as foie gras and caviar ice cream outside of France.  But that doesn’t mean that we’ve not overstepped our bounds in the category of frozen dairy product flavors.  While none of the following flavors are common enough to even break through the ranks of Baskin-Robbin’s 36 flavors, they are common enough to, well, exist as a sin against American desserts everywhere.

Anyway, below are a list of ten ice cream flavors available in America that you’d better not even fucking think about putting near a slice of apple pie.

Durian Ice Cream

Some of you might be unfamiliar with the giant, spikey fruit that’s most popular in southeast Asia, and we don’t blame you, since if we had the ability to go through life without knowing about the existence of a giant fruit that smells like “rotten onions, turpentine, and raw sewage” we’d be happier in our day-to-day lives, and probably would drink less.  Some people think that the so called “King of fruits” is a nuanced delicacy, but then again some people think that the Boston marathon bomber would make a good boyfriend, so we should probably take any opinion that anyone has ever had with a grain of salt.  When you have a fruit that is so pungent that it’s actively banned from various southeast Asian hotels, it’s probably not a great idea to combine it with milk and turn it into a frozen dessert for general consumption.

Yet here we have Chinatown Ice Cream Factory in New York, offering durian (with the helpful addition of “stinky fruit” listed under it on the menu, just so you know what you’re getting yourself into) as one of their “regular” flavors.  They do sell “exotic” flavors too, and if durian is considered normal, wait till you see what kind of crazy shit they come up with for their exotic flavors.  Such as, chocolate, chocolate chip, coffee, strawberry…wait, are you fucking serious, Chinatown Ice Cream Factory?

Okay, that’s it, this is clearly the ice cream company of crazy people.  Enjoy your stinky rotting fruit, you insane bastards.

Garlic Ice Cream

Ice cream is typically sweet.  This isn’t a radical concept—it’s a dessert with a shit-ton of sugar, which is why the main flavors you get tend to be sweet things like chocolate or strawberry or, fuck it all, Nutella.   When we sit down to a nice bowl of vanilla ice cream because we’re in some hypothetical dimension where we lack any sense of adventure of innovation, we never think to ourselves, you know what, this sugary milky substance is delicious, but it could really use some garlic because we want to ward away vampires and it’s not like we have to worry about kissing anyone in the near future if we’re the kind of person who makes life choices like putting garlic on top of ice cream.

But yet, somehow,  of all the items on this list, Garlic flavored ice cream not only has its own Wikipedia page, but there’s a goddamn Garlic Festival that serves it every year.  Because of course there is.

Potato Ice Cream

Mashed potatoes sort of look like ice cream, right?  So why not combine the two!  That crazy person logic comes to us courtesy of the folks responsible for shilling Idaho potatoes, who managed to take enough of a break from howling the pain of a thousand lies to sit down and create a recipe for grilled potato ice cream, which appears to be a standard ice cream recipe, only with potato skins added in order to give just a hint of potato flavor as the perfect way to remind you, “Oh god, dumping sugar and eggs on a baked potato sounds objectively awful, why am I doing this to myself, I went through all the effort to make ice cream in my home, and I put potatoes in there instead of strawberries or really any other ingredient that doesn’t lead to an existential crisis of faith where I wonder what kind of God would allow for this flavor combination to exist.”

And then you shovel the mush into your mouth with a blank expression on your face.  And when you finish, you look at your empty bowl, mutter, “I’m so sorry,” and weep.

Um, we mean…yay ice cream!

Sauerkraut Ice Cream

We couldn’t find a good enough picture of actual sauerkraut ice cream, so we just wanted to show you a bunch of sauerkraut to remind you what it is, and to give your brain time to register the terror at the thought of turning that into an iced cream dessert.  This is fermented cabbage.  That is sour.  Because it’s filled with lactic acid.  And then someone turned that shit into ice cream on at least one occasion.  In the 2000 Sauerkraut, 25 gallons of sauerkraut ice cream was made, of which 23 were sold.   On one hand, thank God they didn’t sell out, because we were given a talisman by a mysterious gypsy a bit ago, and “25 gallons of foul, fermented cabbage ice cream sells out” was one of the impending signs of the Apocalypse, but on the other hand, come on y’all, are you serious?  How the hell did 23 people over the course of a day come to the decision to buy a gallon of sauerkraut ice cream to take home?  Had they just run out of their favorite ice cream flavor, which we can only assume to be used needles and Band-Aids?  The fuck is wrong with you guys?

And yes, there are recipes online to make this flavor of ice cream yourselves.  We’re beginning to think, with all the “make it at home” awful ice cream recipes out there, we might need to start restricting the sale of ice cream makers.  It’s too much power for some people to handle, clearly.

Popcorn Ice Cream

Goddamn it, no.  We’re not going to entertain the concept of buttered popcorn in ice cream form—we still live in a society where wrong-headed people actually try to convince the world of the lie that buttered popcorn Jelly Belly are delicious.  They are not delicious.  They taste like sugar mixed with butter and sadness and the taste takes three days to leave your mouth, and why would you make that even worse by taking that flavor and presenting it in a form that can give you brain freeze?

No.  You go to hell, buttered popcorn flavored ice cream.

Basil Ice Cream

This doesn’t infuriate us, or even necessarily seem objectively “bad” it just seems…well, pointless.  Available at The Bent Spoon in Princeton, New Jersey, the flavor seems inoffensive enough, but do you really need ice cream flavors made out of random leafy herbs?   We’ll begrudgingly say that this is the one item on this list that we’d at least try without feeling badly about ourselves, but come on guys.  Cool it with the savory ice cream flavors.

Bone Marrow with Smoked Cherries Ice Cream

Oh mother of God.  Yes, this is a real flavor. Salt & Straw, with three locations in Portland, Oregon, made the common mistake of conflating “interesting, unusual, exciting” flavors with “putting bone marrow into ice cream like some sort of fucking monster” and gave us this terrifying treat.  Bone.  Marrow.  And smoked cherries.  The company boasts high butterfat content and low sweetness levels, in order to “let the flavors shine through” which means that this ice cream tastes even more like bone marrow than you initially imagined.

Look at it.  Look at what you did, Portland.  Now say you’re sorry.  We didn’t deserve this.

Lox

See, that right there is some Japan shit.  Fish was not meant to be pulverized and turned into ice cream, not on American soil goddamn it.  Someone forgot to mention that to Max & Mina’s in Flushing, New York, because lo and behold they’ve made an ice cream that tastes like “a bunch of lox in vanilla ice cream.”  That’s great, that’s just fucking great, because when you see a bowl of ice cream, your first thought is to smother it with as much smoked salmon as you can get your hands on.  We’re deep in the madness at this point, people.  There’s no turning back.

Lobster Ice Cream

Now this is just cruel.  We love lobster, immortal sea demons that they are, and this probably one of the greatest injustices we’ve seen the culinary treat face.  Ben & Bill’s Chocolate Emporium, based out in Maine, takes a buttered-flavored ice cream, which, strike one, and folds in pounds of chopped and buttered lobster meat into the ice cream, which, strike two, three, four, five, and so on.  Now, we’re just getting sad.

Cheese Ice Cream

We’re less astonished and saddened by the fact that someone made the decision to take perfectly good cheese and ruin it by trying to turn it into a frozen sugary dessert than we are with the fact that there are multiple cheese ice cream recipes to choose from, be it blue cheese or cheddar or Parmesan.   While cheese at least is dairy much like, you know, cream is, outside of goat cheese (which actually makes a very good ice cream, since goat cheese is delicious when mixed with sweet things) the whole concept of taking cheddar cheese (or blue cheese or what have you) and turning it into an ice cream dish still leaves us unsettled, sort of like trying to convince yourself that the terrorist’s daughter on 24: Live Another Dayis hot while looking into her Chucky Doll eyes.  You can try all you can to convince us that it’s good, but we’re still going to look at these ice creams as soulless experiments gone horribly wrong.

So let’s just, ignore these foolish forays into “interesting” ice cream, and just stick with what works.  Peanut butter cups.  Rocky road.  Most anything by Ben & Jerry’s.  Take advantage of your summer by consuming as much frozen cream as you can, just, you know, try to avoid anything with bone marrow in it.

“Why can’t I have you?  But I need you so.”

~American Taste Buds

Doritos are one of the better snack gifts we’ve given to the world.  Since 1964, when we first decided that we could probably get rid of our leftover tortillas by cutting them into triangles, frying them, and smothering them with fake cheese, Doritos has been there for every Super Bowl party and for every 2:30 AM stoned 7-Eleven run.  Even when Japan tried ruining Doritos, which came as a surprise to no one, they forever stood out as delicious, cheesy (or cool-ranchy) ways to get saturated fats into our bodies and flavor powder permanently tattooed onto our fingertips.

Japanese meddling notwithstanding, Doritos has never been content to stand by with just a handful of flavors.  In fact, they’ve released nearly a hundred different flavors throughout the years.  And despite the existence of “ketchup” or “sonic sour cream” flavors on that lengthy list of Doritos flavors that have been released and then rightfully vanquished to that warehouse where they put the Ark of the Covenant, some of these flavors actually sound delicious.  But they’re gone.  No matter how much we want to try them, we never can.

Here are some delicious Doritos flavors that the Frito-Lay company foolishly decided were mistakes.

Discontinued Doritos Flavors Too Beautiful For This World

Before you worry, no, the Doritos Locos Tacos flavored Doritos are not on this list.  That’s some meta bullshit Frito-Lays released to capitalize on the craze born from Taco Bell’s “as disgusting as this is it’s actually kind of great” awkward conversation thrust upon the world known as the Taco Bell Doritos Locos.  This is a stupid flavor, and they knew it was stupid when they released it, but they wanted to see how many of us were stupid and wanted to buy this stupid thing.  Stupid stupid stupid.

These next Doritos flavors, however, were not stupid.  They were smart.  Smart and sexy.  Smart and sexy and we want them and are sad that we can’t.  Bring them back, Doritos!  That website with the grizzly bear in the logo demands it of you!

3D’s Jalapeño & Cheddar

Welcome to the most Buzzfeed-baiting entry in this article.  The Doritos 3D’s line of snacks, which can best be described as “Doritos-meets-Bugles,” was so 90’s we don’t even have to make a joke about it, we can just link you to the youtube video of the actual Doritos 3D commercial where Ali Landry does flips in a Laundromat while Sean Hayes from Will and Grace watches, dumbfounded.  Seriously, the only way that Doritos 3D’s could be any more 90’s is if each bag came with a set of pogs, with slammers that alternated between playing “Who Let the Dogs Out” and shouting “Whassaaaaaaaaap.”

But damn were they tasty.  The logic is sound as hell—Doritos are delicious.  Bugles are delicious.  If you give these to a kid, he will fast realize that he can gnaw out the bottom of the triangle and jam a few fingers in there and play with it like a fucking finger puppet because that’s what we did when we were 10 years old and “tablets” or “faster-than-dial-up internet speeds” weren’t a thing yet.   Doritos had a serious of flavors, including their standard Nacho and Ranch flavors, but Jalapeño Cheddar was a new combination with just enough of a kick to compensate for the fact that the flavor on this particular type of chip ended up being a little milder on these chips, compared to their 2-D brethren.

But at the end of the day, we miss Doritos 3D’s.  Sure, many of us don’t even give the admittedly gimmicky product a second thought, but we can guarantee that if they came back on the market tomorrow, everyone between the age of 23 and 33 would be freaking the fuck out trying to get themselves a bag of this delicious air-pocket-filled treat.  Damn it, we miss you, Doritos 3D’s.  Come back.

Taco Supreme

Yes, before we had tacos made out of Doritos, or Doritos made to taste like tacos made out of Doritos, we had Doritos that tasted like tacos.  And you know what?  They were surprisingly good.  Way better than a flavor of Doritos specifically made to shill both Taco Bell as well as the re-release of the original Star Wars trilogy had any right to be.  Good enough to have a petition demanding that Doritos bring back the flavor.  Okay, fine, yes, it’s only got three signatures, but still!  A petition, people!

Doritos Taco Supreme worked despite itself for pretty much the same reason why the Doritos Locos Tacos work—if you like the general flavor of tacos, adding a cheesy tortilla flavor to that can only be a good thing.  And if you don’t like the general flavor of tacos, we’ve done it, we’ve finally found you, Lentar 1039, the last of the Soviet Kill-Bots, now do as we demand and reach to the back of your head to press your self-destruct button.

Megawhat Chili Cheese

We honestly weren’t able to find a lot about Doritos’ short-lived “Megawhat?” campaign, but what we did find was, well, basically our writers getting drunk and making fun of the stupid fucking name.  It appears they released several new flavors of Doritos, and decided to make a gimmicky contest where you, the eater, can come up with a name of the new flavor.  There are only two ways that can go, if you think about it—either it very clearly tastes like the thing it’s supposed to taste like, so you’re just going to name it what it tastes like (“huh, this chili-cheese flavored Doritos tastes a lot like a Doritos, with chili-cheese flavor to it.  Wait!  We can call it Chili Cheese Doritos!  Eureka!  Eur-fucking-eka!”), or no one has a fucking clue what the flavor is, so everyone has to write in and be like, “I think it tastes like…despondency?  Yes, I think it tastes like despondency.”

We’re going to err on the side of trusting Doritos here, and assume that this particular flavor actually did taste like a chili cheese flavored chip, and not some sort of terrifying flavor that, try as you might, you can’t identify, which just terrifies you and claws at your insides until it slowly drives you insane.  Granted, that might be a lot of faith to put into a company that tried to make a ham and cheese flavored chip (that unfortunately is not a joke) but they’re also owned by the company that made chili cheese flavored Fritos, and those are fucking delicious.  We’d absolutely eat a Dorito doused in the same flavor-powder-chemical-magic that’s on those.  Man, now we really want a bag of chili cheese Fritos.

Fiery Habañero

This objectively is a delicious tortilla chip.  As in, when we say “there’s a Facebook group demanding that this flavor be brought back” we’re not actually using some flimsy result from a Google search to try to artificially inflate our argument, we’re saying that there’s an actual group with almost 1,900 members clamoring to bring back some Habañero Doritos.  Fiery Habañero Doritos’ lack of success was not because of the flavor (because habañero peppers are delicious) or a clash of flavors (who wouldn’t want to eat spicy Doritos, other than people who eat boring food and people with ulcers?).  It was simply that this beautiful, wonderful chip was ahead of its time.

We’ve mentioned previously that spicy food has become exponentially more popular in our collective culinary enterprises, but back in 2005, when these chips came out, we were only just starting to embrace spicy Cheetos as the magical, finger-staining gift that it was.  We weren’t talking about habañeros, or scotch bonnet peppers, or ghost chilies.  We were living food lives, tittering that, “Golly, you’re flavoring it like a jalapeño pepper?  Goodness to Betsy, how can my taste buds survive?”  But we’re past those dark days, America.  We love our spicy food like we like our women—making us cry, don’t you see Sharon, I love you, I’m sorry I can be open with my feelings now just please taek meapaepghiap agpeh aehipgstop it iapghoepaghpeag you don’t’ dpagheapgadon’t deny my love apgheipaoghap ghepaigaep oh god OH NO DON’T TAKE ME AWAyhwsph

Woah, sorry there, that was, well, the page loaded strangely.  We didn’t just drag one of our writers kicking and weeping out of the room and assign the rest of this piece to a different writer, telling him to make a joke about the whole thing so that people will think that the joke site just made another funny.  Funny funny jokes.  Yay funny fun times.

Anyway, the point being, a Habañero Doritos is a magical thing, and we need it back in our lives.  Until then, we’ll have to be content with the Doritos Habañero flavored “Dinamita”, which is a Doritos rolled up into a tube (so, basically, their attempt to make a knock-off version of Takis).

Guacamole

This flavor just makes common sense, and the fact that this was on the market and didn’t immediately change the Doritos choosing conversation from “cheddar or cool ranch” to “cheddar, cool ranch, or guacamole, oh, who am I kidding, let’s get all three, fat people die happier” means that we failed the Frito-Lay corporation as a society at some point in time.  These were discontinued around 2006, meaning that we really shat the bed as far as Doritos flavors in two consecutive years, if you go back to the Habañero fiasco of 2005.

Why would sales for Guacamole Doritos be lax enough to warrant discontinuing the flavor?  We, as a species, as a collective writhing mess of shared experiences and customs, love guacamole.  It’s delicious, and everyone who doesn’t pay an extra two dollars to get a teaspoon worth of guacamole on their massive Chipotle burrito is rightly condemned as “doing it wrong” by every other customer in the establishment.  And Doritos, in their very heart and soul, are little more than a flavored tortilla chip.  So why deal with the middle man?  Even if it only tastes slightly like avocado and salt, that’s better than 90% of chips out on the market!  We’d just rather eat a Guacamole Doritos than another fucking bag of vinegar and pucker face or whatever the fuck they flavor those fancy bags of chips you see in delis with.  And yes, this one has a Facebook group demanding it be brought back as well.  Because ya done goofed, America.  Ya done goofed.

Salsa! And Salsa Verde!

This is the same concept as the previous entry, but with a flavor that is even safer to assume that people will eat.  There are some people that don’t like guacamole, and occasionally they manage to even make it to adulthood without being banished from their town and forced to forage in the woods, befriending wolves who ultimately will betray them as soon as food grows scarce in the winter.  But salsa is the most popular condiment in America!  Well, apparently mayonnaise is, but if you had read that last sentence and seen a link embedded there, you would have taken us for our word on it.  You probably wouldn’t have clicked it, but still would have taken it for face value and believed in your heart of hearts that we were telling you the truth.  Actually, fuck it, we can actually find a few sites that say that salsa is the top dog amongst condiments in the US, here’s a link and everything, we are Gods we create our own truths.

Basically, everyone likes salsa, or at least tolerates it enough to have no qualms eating it in Doritos form.  So the fact that Doritos released a Salsa and Salsa Verde flavor, and then decided to pull it off the shelves, is inconceivable to us.  Did they not know how to market it, or did they only make it available in stores whose clientele aren’t allowed to chew their own food, so they have to mash it up in a blender with some water so they could drink it like a Doritos smoothy, because eww, a Salsa Doritos smoothie sounds disgusting, but Salsa Doritos sound amazing, and why are you leaving these important decisions up to such a tiny and specific portion of the population?  You monsters, give us our Salsa chips back!

Give us all of these back!  We demand more Doritos!