Those Americans who think of Britain as a backward food desert are this week eating their words. For we are the first to experience Pizza Hut's latest wheeze, the "hot dog stuffed crust" – a sausage coddled in the crust of a large pizza. (Don't all start hieing ye to your nearest branches just yet: it's delivery only at the moment.) The Sun in typical understated style, calls this creation "the stuff of dreams". Fox News and the LA Times deem us "lucky" to be so honoured. No less an organ than Time magazine hails a "caloric coma", and in an existential cri de coeur, laments that Britain is "one step ahead in the heart-attack-in-a-box department". How, it wonders, can America "redeem its title as most unhealthy country … Come on Paula Deen, where are you when we need you the most?"
It was Pizza Hut, you may remember, who unleashed the stuffed crust on to a peaceful world in the distant 1990s. They got that discriminating gastronome Donald Trump to flog it; Trumpy barked that we had to eat the slices "crust first". (A Brooklyn family who owned a patent for crust-stuffing sued Pizza Hut for $1bn at the time; they lost the lawsuit in 1999 (pdf).) You'd have thought that mucking around once with crusts would be enough for these people. But no. "The new range," gushes a spokesman, "builds on our proud tradition of creating innovative dishes to enjoy on a night in with friends."
I hadn't eaten a Pizza Hut in around a decade, since I worked in one during the school holidays. I remembered frozen discs of dough which we sprayed with a canister of "developer" so that they rose like boils in the pans. I remembered lumps of beef and pork distinguished by different shades of brown. I remembered sloppy tinned pineapple and anchovies that smelled of infection. Hopes were low.
When it came, the box was strangely heavy. There was no sign of the "free mustard drizzle", which is probably just as well. I flouted Trump and ate a slice point-first. It was pretty good. The sauce had a decent balance of sharp and sweet, the cheese was ungreasy and smooth, the toppings of chilli and onion (I'd gone for a "veggie sizzler") brought a bit of lift. The bread was fake and weird but chewy like a bagel. I soon neared the end of my slice and its bedoughed, pink-brown phallus. I took a tentative bite.
It was a hot dog sausage. It was rubbery and processed and salty and smoky. How, in its own filthy way, could it be anything other than delicious? I peeled back its pappy cladding and gazed in conflicted seduction. I finished it. I had another slice. I put the box away. I came back a few minutes later and had another slice. I put the box in the bin.
So there you are. The hot dog stuffed crust: delicious.
