Those who are kind enough to follow my writing know that I’m no stranger to eating bizarre food combinations. What started as a sandwich column on Cracked.com was followed up by another gross food from TV piece. Shortly after, I teamed up with my friends from the video game site LoadScreen, and alas, disgusting video game foods were created and shoved into my poor mouth.
It’s definitely time for Nerdbot to take one for the team. Today, I present you with 7 strange foods from TV shows, taste tested!
Let’s rock.
Red Dwarf: The Sugar Puff Sandwich
Ingredients:
Golden Puffs
Bread
The Sugar Puff Sandwich appeared in the British space comedy Red Dwarf, a favorite of the main character Dave Lister. There are three documented episodes where they appear according to the show’s Wikia page. (The Inquisitor, Quarantine, and Legion) I did some research to find out what Sugar Puffs are, and it turns out they’re just Honey Smacks (or Golden Puffs if you’re thrifty and disgusting like me and buy generic).
Just opening the bag of cereal was nauseating. Within seconds I was questioning my decision to make this sandwich. I quickly learned that cereal sandwiches are very deceptive.
Off the bat, this thing was nearly impossible to pick up. The sandwich was lumpy and all of my golden glory kept trying to escape, a great metaphor for this challenge all together. I took a bite and immediately hated everything in the world. This sandwich tasted like an old lunchbox. It was so horrible that I was almost delighted by how disgusting it was. It made my entire kitchen stink. Abundantly disgusting is the best way I can describe this awful crunch stink.
Red Dwarf: Hitler’s Banana and Crisps Sandwich
Ingredients
Bananas
Potato Chips
Bread
Hitler’s Banana and Crisps sandwich is another creation from the Red Dwarf crew. In a season 3 episode called Time Sliders, the guys go back in time, inevitably messing with the time line. Lister has a run in with Hitler, shouts “He’s a nutter!” and steals his briefcase. It contains pair of fluffy handcuffs, a diary, a package containing a bomb, and a Banana and Crisps sandwich. So, for the sake of this article, we’ll focus on the sandwich. How bad can it really be, right? If it’s good enough for a dictator, it should be good enough for the rest of us!
“Horrifically disgusting” were the first words that popped into my head after taking a bite of this sludge. The bananas were slippery, squishy, and just too sweet. The contrast of the potato chips was just such an unpleasant texture. I have to admit; I was actually looking forward to this sandwich. I really thought the sweet and salty combo were going to rock my face in the right direction, but the conflicting textures just killed any complementary flavors that might have been.
Red Dwarf: The Triple Fried Egg Chili Chutney Sandwich
Ingredients
Four fried eggs
Major Grey’s Mango Chutney
Heinz Chili Sauce
Bread (3 slices)
Time to hop back onto the Red Dwarf for this treat. In the episode “Thanks for the Memory”, Dave Lister and his hologram friend (and my personal Red Dwarf favorite character ever) Arnold Rimmer are hung over after a night of drinking. Lister declares the Triple Fried Egg Chili Chutney Sandwich to be an excellent hangover cure and orders one from the ship’s computer. Rimmer takes a bite, expecting to be disgusted. Instead he’s amazed that these ingredients that don’t seem like they’d go together somehow work.
This sandwich was fun to build. At first, I wasn’t even sure what they meant by “chili”. Roasted Poblano peppers? Chunky meat sauce? Neither- according to the official Red Dwarf website, it’s chili sauce. Like the Heinz stuff. As for “chutney”, that’s pretty vague, but the British seem fond of Major Grey’s Mango Chutney. It was at my local Sprouts, so that’s what happened.
Now one thing to note here- I’ve never eaten runny eggs in my entire life. I admit it, they freak me out. I worked up my courage, fried those suckers up and built a triple layered sandwich for the hangover gods. I knew I had to act fast, because they even say in the show that you have to eat it fast before the eggs make the bread soggy. Already, the sandwich guts were running all over the place.
With my hands shaking, I smashed my face into it. While I’m not sure I’m converted to runny eggs, it’s funny that this sandwich was my first run-in with them. The flavors worked- sweet and tangy, savory and rich, if not a little insane together. A lovely hangover cure, I’m sure.
Friends: Joey’s Shower Sandwich
Ingredients
Bologna
Bread
Filthy Shower Water
I recalled an episode of Friends where Joey is taking a shower. Phoebe says something to him and he pokes his head out, bologna sandwich in hand. It’s not the first time 90s television told me that eating in the shower is an awesome thing. Remember Kramer and the shower salad? Well, after taking my sandwich into the shower and flooding it with calcified crusted city water, I can officially say I’m a little bit closer to vomiting.
All romanticized notions of eating in the shower are down the drain. The bread absorbed the water in microseconds, leaving me with a bloated, water logged sandwich corpse that tastes like what eating the LA River must be like.
Bob’s Burgers: The Child Molester
Ingredients:
Burger
Candy
The very first episode of Bob’s Burgers brought forth this menu-board creation, written by Bob’s youngest daughter Louise. Since “candy” falls under so many categories, I decided to use Nerds and Crispy M&Ms for their photogenic qualities. As you can see, I made the right choice.
Add a lollipop skewer on top and your sexy burger treat is ready for some heavy mouth plunging.
All things considered, this burger wasn’t so bad. But like every funny burger combination that doesn’t contain Cracker Jack (which I tasted in that Cracked article and it was AMAZING), this one was underwhelming. Basically, a textural fail- the crispy and crunch candies disrupted the mouth feel of the sandwich. Surprisingly, the sweetness didn’t take anything away from the burger. I’d be curious to try it again with a different candy combination. And best yet, after eating it I don’t have any urges to diddle children, nor did any pedo-creeps come knocking at my door. So, by that criteria, the experiment was a success. But overall…yuck.
Adventure Time: The Time Sandwich
Ingredients
Cream cheese
Dill
Pickles (from Prismo)
Diced boiled eggs
Bird (from the window)
Sliced cucumbers
Sliced Roma tomatoes
Sweet yellow onions
Meat prepared sous-vide with rosemary and thyme
Bacon
Tears (for salt)
A lobster’s soul
Well, I didn’t have any Prismo pickles. But I did have Boar’s Head, which are the most expensive ones my local Sprouts offers. I’ve got to say, composing this sandwich was like being back in school. It was total homework. And a lot of thinking. Who has time for that? I just wanted to eat this sucker.
Fortunately, a destroyed bird carcass found its way into my window. And meat cooked sous vide? Handled it- I’m a professional. Let that meat sack simmer. But the twist was that lobster’s soul. Assuming that lobsters have souls, how was I going to capture one and stuff it into a sandwich? Is there a Cracker Jack app for that? I had to take a step back and think about how one captures a soul and I found it the solution. Through a photograph! A printed one specifically.
So, with my lobster soul in hand, I was able to stack this sandwich. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to bite through the soul. I guess lobster souls are made of cow hide or something. I did my best, but I had to take liberties and remove the soul.
And the sandwich itself? It was good. Next time I’ll try it with a bird that still alive for an extra challenge. Straight forward ingredients, not many twists and turns. And the toasted baguette only cut up my mouth a little. But anything to scrape out the remaining specks of Shaggy’s Super Sandwich (part of the same experiment) was welcome, even if it meant bleeding happened.
The Walking Dead: Carol’s Apocalypse Cookies
Ingredients:
Acorn Flour
Beets
Applesauce
Canola Oil
Baking Soda
Baking Powder
Salt
Cinnamon
Ginger
Finally, it’s time for dessert and the apocalypse is upon us! And when Carol’s nonsensical beet and acorn cookies from The Walking Dead came to my attention, I knew they would be the perfect end to our sickening and disastrous food experiment. And as my fun luck would have it, there’s an acorn tree right outside of my house!
But I wasn’t sure if I should trust said acorns. They’re not all round and cute like an illustration out of a Beatrix Potter book, but they’re long…and skinny…and smell like a boozey almond. Not sure if I was ready to go to the Emergency Room, I exhaled with defeat and took myself to the local Korean Market where I found…Aconrn Flour? Wait, did they spell it wrong? Is this the right product?
I knew I was in trouble.
I set my oven to 375 degrees Farenheit, (because Nestle Tollhouse says that’s cookie baking temperature) and prepare myself for an apocalyptic combustion when these suckers come out. Onto the ingredients – I decided to make these cookies without eggs, because if I recall correctly, Negan took all the hens. Also, I’m choosing oil over butter because it’s the end of the world and zombies want our brains. Where in the hell am I getting butter? Nice oils like coconut or avocado won’t do because they’re not as shelf stable as something like, say, canola oil. So into the bowl it goes. And for our sugar, it’s white processed all the way because it literally never expires. Junky canned applesauce for the same reason- it’s cheap, gross, and shelf stable.
Somewhere on the internet, some hipsters were creaming over beets and their natural sweetness. That’s great, but when I opened the can, it smelled like straight dirt. Just tinny, canned, bloody dirt, something even a zombie could enjoy. For maximum carnage, I decided to puree the beets. Watching them grind up in the food processor, the little fat Thanksgiving kid in me is wishing they were cranberry sauce. The color is super beautiful, but alas. It’s just sliced dirt without a hint of sweetness.
I added oil and salt without measuring because the world is a terrible place. Natural sweetness from the beets and applesauce my ass, internet. This garbage needed over a half cup of sugar. And a half teaspoon each of baking soda and baking powder because cookies.
Moving onto the acorn flour- it’s the most repulsive starch I’ve ever cooked with. It was dusty, looked like makeup powder and tasted like…you know it…a dirty tree. It took more than a few minutes for this sludge mixture to pull into dough, but it finally happened. But when it did, the end result looked like a fun apocalypse pate. I did a quick batter taste and everything seemed relatively balanced. The sweet to bitter to garden soil ratio seemed to check out. Let’s bake.
I put them in the oven for 15 minutes, preemptively celebrating my gluten free and vegan contribution to the post-apocalyptic world. Cookies, a savior in a world of only pain, demise, and running corpses. I pulled the cookies out of the oven. They were done, but they looked suspiciously the same coming out as when they went in.
They most certainly weren’t the beautiful red circles Carol was holding in the screen shot I found. And hot fuck, they still smell like dirt. I let them cool for a minute and then dove in like zombies on a screaming blonde woman.
Oh my god…these are disgusting. Just absolutely rancid. They’re bitter. They’re filthy. The texture is fucked. They have this starchy film coating my mouth and it’s even soapier tasting than a bad IPA. Oh… my goodness, this was completely unexpected. I really though the cookies would be the easiest and most pleasant part of this entire lesson in self-punishment.
I hate it. I hate it. I’m done. It’s over.
Until the next experiment, anyways…
