Hotdog maker review – ‘it steams pig parts and ruins bread rolls’

The Hot Dog Maker by Jocca (£65.99, Wayfair.co.uk) is a steaming chamber and hot shaft. Frankfurters are heated in the first, while a bun is toasted on the latter.

Why?

How else to crack this complex dish of pigs’ lips in a bap?

Well?

To my mind, the hotdog is the bastard cousin of the burger. The meat-to-bread ratio tips too far towards the bun, and they’re made with frankfurters, the most disgusting food known to man. Does anyone enjoy their flaccid smoothness, laced with gristle and offputtingly pink? Eating a frankfurter is like licking Cristiano Ronaldo. It mystifies me that Frankfurt – birthplace of Goethe, financial powerhouse, site of two botanical gardens – would want eternal association with mechanically recovered meat paste. It’s not champagne, is it?

Still, this week we’re unfortunately looking at Jocca’s Hot Dog Maker, a device that warms franks and buns. It’s pretty simplistic. I drop some clammy pork fingers into the part of the device appetisingly called “the receiver”. This sits above a pool of hot water, steaming the weiners. Meanwhile, the bun (I’m using brioche – who am I kidding?) is impaled on a terrifying steel lance. This works tremendously badly – the blunt shaft offers too gentle a heat, and squashes the bun’s innards as it pushes through them, resulting in a hollow, compacted bread prophylactic. It’s all so unavoidably suggestive.

Inside the steam-filled receiver, the dogs struggle to stand, like down-and-outs in a drunk tank; it’s a melancholy scene. I pop Droopy Frank into his bread tube as if packing a musket, and chow down. As expected, it’s foul, with an aftertaste longer than the half-life of plutonium, and probably worse for your health. I’d rather eat actual dog. What kind of bad-choice monsters buy this? The same people who prefer the lower bunk bed, Pepsi, Global Hypercolour T-shirts?

If you must eat this dish at home, a grill would be better in every way; steaming tubular pig parts and ruining bread rolls is a masochism that shouldn’t be encouraged. Back to the kennels for this not-so-hotdog.

Redeeming features?

The box boasts the strapline “funny cooking”, which strikes me as optimistic on both counts.

Counter, drawer, back of the cupboard?

Dogs die in hot cars; open the window and chuck this out. 0/5

sourced: the guardian international