Friday, June 26, 2015

I Survived Pizza Hut's Hot Dog Bites Pizza

Thing like this start out innocently enough. My mom suggests we go pick up my nephew and take him to lunch. Fantastic. Then comes the nightmarish phrase "Wouldn't it be fun..." which was followed by the suggestion of digging into Pizza Hutt's new Hot Dog Bites Crust Pizza. "What do you think?" "Well''..." I replied, "I think it might kill me and I will be very sad I attempted it later tonight...alone..someplace not so brightly lit where I can hang my head in shame and let the memory...pass through me, as it were." GREAT! So it's a plan. And off we went. 

We picked up our boy and after a badly aging nav computer took us on a scenic tour of Dover, New Jersey and a stretch of route 10, we found the ominous red building...beckoning...or perhaps..warning us to run. Almost as if to assure sickness of some sort, we started the meal with waffle fries. Crispy, seasoned and drowning in ketchup, my nephew considered it his duty to get as many in his mouth as possible. After all, I was eating them as well, so I was the enemy of his further chewing.



Soon after, the magnificent paddle arrived and upon it, like a wet mermaid stretched out and glistening in the midday sun, it too would call us forth to destroy us upon the rocky shores of intestinal chaos. A ring of pigs in a blanket surrounding Pizza Hutt's always disappointing thin crust pizza; half pepperoni (for we are adventurous) and half plain (for our boy is not. He doesn't even like bacon. It's insane.)  I'm not going to go into vast details about a taste explosion in my mouth, because I don't write about food, and getting romantic about a lunch like this is like writing a sex scene for Jeb Bush and Caitlyn Jenner; ridiculous....and unsexy. I will say the dogs had a bit of zing to them and would quickly escape their tiny bread cocoon if you bite them the wrong way. The mustard they serve with this, for the purpose of dipping the dogs, seems like the kind of  unremarkable bright yellow mustard that stained your face as a kid..and probably still does as not-so-grown-ups. This, to me, suggests that we are supposed to break off the dogs and stick them in the mustard, leaving the sad pizza to fend for itself with no handle to deliver it into your face hole. That seems like a wasted opportunity. The dogs are now attached to pizza... we must find a way to eat them TOGETHER!!





The best way to achieve this bowel quaking taste combo is to take a bite from the crust side (careful as to not let the piggie escape) and then one from the pizza side. The combo wasn't unpleasant, but it was also unremarkable. I will note the cooking of these items together only transferred the merest trace of flavor from one side to the other. Most notably, the hint of pepperoni in the hot dogs. If they'd used a better quality dog, thick with juices, and the pizza had a sauce that was recognizable as pizza sauce, you'd probably get more of a melding of signature flavors that instantly convince the pallet there is an abomination in your mouth...a distinctly American abomination. Then your stomach can decide what happens next. Instead, we get a baseline "Meh..its not terrible" reaction while we eat slowly, waiting for our body to signal us that this was all a terrible fucking idea.



The above video expresses my expectations of what my night would be like after this most hellish of meals tears its way through my system. 45 minutes in...not a rumble. Four hours later, still in great shape. I am amazed. What this meal lacks in realistic food flavors (and let's face it, I willingly walked into Pizza Hut), it makes up for in not trying to punch it's way out of my stomach like a scene from Aliens....and for that, I am grateful.

No comments :

Post a Comment