Tag Archives: Hot Dog

The Best (And Weirdest) New Fried Foods At the 2015 Iowa and Minnesota State Fairs

“My…heart…tell my family…I died happy…”

~Iowa and Minnesota State Fair Food Critic

fried chicken

Here at America Fun Fact of the Day, we take great pride in the American practice of taking a (usually unhealthy) food and dunking it in bubbling oil until it becomes a borderline public health risk.  And as much as we love fried food, we also love its brother, random unhealthy shit we decided to make for a State Fair.  Most fried food innovations come from our State Fairs, which follows the fairly American logic of “well if we’re going to try to force Americans to get outside and walk around, we should probably entice them with the ability to eat a deep fried version of something they’ve never eaten fried before.”

2015 has been no exception to this rule, with the Iowa and Minnesota state fairs coming out with lists of their brand new, never seen before unhealthy food items that we are so excited to try as an excuse to test out that new defibrillator we just bought.  Oh, and we might as well let you know about some of the more ridiculous ones too.

The Best (Or Weirdest) New Fried Foods At the 2015 Iowa and Minnesota State Fairs

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The Craziest Hot Dogs in Professional Baseball (Minor League Edition)

“You can’t get butts in the seat without a gimmick!”

~Bill Veeck

hot dog

As covered a few days ago, baseball and insane hot dogs go together like serial killers and women who send love letters to various prisons who have a lot of issues they need to work out.  We should tease out that comparison a little bit more, but we’re not going to.  Anyway, the point we think we’re trying to make is that, stadiums like to ply baseball fans with booze and food because while baseball can be boring, if you’re drunk and full, you won’t really mind.  This has led to a recent explosion in creative, intense, and, well, insane hot dogs throughout the baseball world.  And while we’ve talked about hot dogs in Major League Baseball stadiums already, that was really us going easy on the rest of you.  Because Minor League Baseball only sustains itself through the unfulfillable dreams of thousands of minimum wage athletes, and ridiculous ballpark gimmicks.  If you think of it, Minor League baseball has probably done it!  Smash a printer like in the movie Office Space!?  Sure!  Dress a dog as the bat boy?  Why not!  Live amputation on the field?  Jesus Christ, no, what the living hell is wrong with you!?

Anyway, if you thought that the last article we had about crazy hot dogs, well…no that was pretty crazy.  But check this shit out too!

The Craziest Hot Dogs in Professional Baseball (Minor League Edition)

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The Craziest Hot Dogs in Professional Baseball (Major League Edition)

“Take me out to the barf game, take me out to the puke!”

~Your obnoxious seven-year-old nephew who, you have to admit, probably has a bright parody career ahead of him

messy hot dog

America invented most of the world’s best sports.  Football?  That was us.  Basketball?  Sure, it was by a Canadian, but only because he was being paid by the Springfield, Massachusetts YMCA when he came up with it, because Canadian dollars were still printed on tree bark at the time, and we were responsible for all the changes that make it recognizable as a sport today.  Soccer?  Nice try, not a real sport, next question.

But of all the excuses for young men (and women!) to vent out the aggression of youth in a competitive and potentially humiliating environment that has been birthed within these borders, only one sport is iconic enough to be known as our national pastime.  No, not Mixed Martial Arts, that’s a terrible guess, are you high right now?  We’re talking about baseball of course.

You might view baseball as a relic of a simpler age, when men were men, owners were horrific bigots, and amphetamines were just, everywhere, all the time, which would explain why the sport struggles in some markets to maintain its relevancy.  It’s a slow-moving game trying to make its way in a fast-paced world, and say what you will about heart palpitations but taking the majority of the workforce off of Speed in the 80’s didn’t really do much for the pace of the game.  Major League Baseball teams try to combat the issues implicit with asking some 40,000 Americans to sit very still for three or four hours by making a day at the ball game a full entertainment and gastronomical experience.  This involves a gallons of watered down beer and, more recently, absurd, amazing American culinary disasterpieces for us to shove in our faces and slink into our chairs to ride out our food coma contently watching yet another 1-2-3 inning.

Sure, we could go on about crazy nachos served in miniature baseball hats, or giant cups of frozen sugar (okay, so maybe malt cups aren’t exactly a new development) but let’s be real here.  This is America’s sport, we’re going to need to talk about America’s food.  America’s best, most absurdly adaptable, most occasionally unnecessarily expensive food.  Let’s get to it.

The Craziest Hot Dogs in Professional Baseball (Major League Edition)

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The Most Expensive Hot Dogs in the World

“I like my hot dogs like I like my women—concrete physical proof that I lead a shallow, superficial existence.”

~Rich people who spend more than $100 on hot dogs

fancy hot dog

America, let’s take a moment to talk about hot dogs.  They’re great, right?  Pretty much anywhere you go, you’re going to find a great hot dog with its own unique flavor profile and style that hopefully doesn’t involve ketchup because if your hot dog involves ketchup then everyone involved in its preparation and consumption has the taste buds of a six-year-old, but we digress.

Hot dogs are wonderful.  They’re delicious, gloriously unhealthy, satisfying, and most of all…expensive?

*Record scratch!*

No!  Of course they’re not!  If you’re spending more than five dollars for a hot dog, you’re a chump, and if you’re raising your eyebrows and saying, “Five?  Try two bucks, Rockefeller” in response to that five dollar figure, well, we wouldn’t argue with you on that point, we’d just point out that certain hot dogs of the jumbo and foot long variety at some of the best hot dog stands around can just about get away with charging that much.  But to your larger point, yes, we agree with you.  Hot dogs are supposed to be cheap, and delicious.  Cheap.  And delicious.

Unfortunately, well, you know.  Rich people exist.

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Pictured above, a rich person with their pet oil tycoon.

We’re not talking about the standard kind of rich person, who has multiple mansions and cars and personal servants and, like, a McDonald’s in their house like that one scene we all remember from the Richie Rich movie.  No, we’re talking about the kind of rich people who either come from money so old they don’t understand how much things are supposed to actually cost in the real world, or people who are so amazed that they’re rich that they need to do everything in their power to let everyone know, “Hey, look at me, look at how much money I have!” like a seven-year-old boy who just learned how to back-flip into the pool.  “Why aren’t you guys looking I just bought a piece of JFK’s skull!”

We’ve talked about this specific type, and how they’re just, the worst, many times before.  We’ve seen $3.7 million bottles of vodka, whiskeys that cost as much as a house, hell, we’ve even run across all sorts of kinds of food covered in edible gold because fuck it, why not just devour ounce after ounce of pure gold at this point?  At this point we’ve basically accepted that we shouldn’t be surprised when notoriously cheap foods are made expensive for no particular reason.  Just as you’re sure to find someone willing to fork over $12,000 to get a pizza made in your house, you’re going to find thousand dollar hot dogs.

Now, admittedly, there are a lot of hot dogs that cost way more than they should, and a surprising amount of them sold at baseball stadiums.  But we’re not here to shame the people who spend $29 on a hot dog, or $50 on a hot dog.  No, we’re not going getting out of bed to write about any hot dog unless it costs more than $100, because we really want to drive home the absurdity of how much these people are paying for the right to brag about how much they are able to spend on a single goddamn hot dog.

The Most Expensive Hot Dogs in the World

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Regional Hot Dog Styles Of America: Part 4

“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

ChicagoHotDog

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

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Regional Hot Dog Styles Of America: Part 3

“Put chili on it!  PUT CHILI EVERYWHERE!”

~Some of the best hot dogs

chili dog

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

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Regional Hot Dog Styles Of America: Part 2

“Hot dog hot dog, it so yummy, hot dog hot dog, in my tummy.”

~The Brothers Grimm

hot dogs

Since we’re gluttons for punishment (or, honestly, just regular gluttons) we’ve decided to talk to you about every regional hot dog in America.  It turns out, there are a lot of places that claim their own style of hot dogs, and most of them adhere to the philosophy of “just douse it in chili,” which honestly, we fully support.  If you have a tube of unhealthy, delicious meat, covering that with even more delicious, unhealthy meat is pretty much the definition of an American impulse.  And so we continue onward into the sodium-enriched world of American hot dogs.

Regional Hot Dog Styles Of America: Part 2

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Regional Hot Dog Styles Of America: Part 1

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

~AFFotD Official Credo

chicago flag

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

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America’s Hilariously Awful Infomercial Products

“THERE’S GOT TO BE A BETTER WAY!”

~Every infomercial ever

sham wow beating up hookers

Of all the side effects of American consumerism, infomercials are by far one of the strangest to an outside observer.  Apart from selling generally pointless items that will just end up gathering dust in your kitchen, American infomercials themselves exist in a strange alternate universe where everyone has the mental acuity of Forrest Gump but none of the coordination. Everyday tasks are so impossible to the actors, and watching them try to, say, make a salad, is like watching Stephen Hawking try to run a 5K after having his mind swapped with Sean Penn from I Am Sam.

There was, of course, a brief period in 2008 where infomercials were the apex of culture.  The Snuggie had just started first-ironically-and-then-kind-of-unironically warming our households, Billy Mays had yet to snort enough cocaine to make his heart explode, and the Sham Wow guy was just an excitable guy with a lot of hair gel who, as far as we knew at the time, had absolutely no interest in beating up hookers.  It truly was a golden age.  But all of this was just a smokescreen, fooling us into thinking that infomercial products were worth our time for a reason other than pointing and laughing.

The fact of the matter is, for every Snuggie that people actually buy, there’s a magic poop wand that is only purchased by morbidly obese serial killers.  And each and every one of these products are hilarious in their ineptitude.  Since this is America, it seems only fitting that we put them on full display so we can make fun of them to make us feel better about the fact that half of our staff still watches TV on a bean bag.  Because no matter how low we get, we’ll never feel like buying the following products.

America’s Hilariously Awful Infomercial Products

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America’s Strangest, Most Terrifying Hot Dogs

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

~AFFotD Food Critic, John Goodman

 cool dog

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

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

America’s Strangest, Most Terrifying Hot Dogs

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