What?
The Ham Dogger (£12.99, Firebox.com) is a Bisected cylinder with grooving protuberance. Creates a compacted meat tube with filling channel.
Why?
Anyone order a hot dog-shaped hamburger stuffed with weird ingredients? No? Then WHY IS IT HERE?
Well?
If Ham Dogger is the name they agreed on, imagine what names the committee must have rejected. Satan’s Log Gobbler? Poopy Bunghole III? As a device it merely sounds awful: two halves of plastic tubing into which one squashes any type of mince, using the back of one to press a trench in the other, stuffing the flesh aqueduct before combining the halves and frying. Yet it’s so much worse. The instructions read as if they started out nonsense, and were then put through Google Translate. “Plastic wrap can be placed over the Bottom ... to help release the patty from the Ham Dogger” sounds as if it was lifted straight from Ronald McDonald’s book of scat play. “Place bottom cylinder part inside hot dog bun”? Do they mean put the plastic tube directly into a hot dog bun, and eat it? Because I don’t want to die, I assume they’re talking about the bun-shaped plastic casing, which is totally superfluous. I dispense with that, and the idea of mummifying my meat roll in cellophane. There are more than 50 bizarre stuffing suggestions printed on the box, including celery salt, dried fish and “poitine”. (They either mean poutine, the Canadian cheese, chips and gravy dish, or poitrine, a French word the Collins dictionary translates as “woman’s bosom”.) I work with what I have: leftover pork and vinegared red peppers. I line the inside and assemble the meaty halves. I fry off the 75lb pork pipe, which weeps pepper from its tip like a case study in operations gone wrong. At a glance, it looks like food that has already ... completed its journey. Head on, it resembles a dog’s willy. Sadly, it doesn’t taste as good as it looks, and I spend a day on the toilet afterwards. Imagine doing this with beef and cream cheese, or turkey and cucumber. Ham Dogger’s creators have transcended its unnecessity, to show us possibilities as endless as a nightmare. Hot diggity dog, they have done a hell of a job.
Any downside?
Pushing pickled peppers into a meat sock and wolfing the results isn’t a great idea, no matter what Peter Piper says.
Counter, drawer, back of the cupboard?
As good gadgets go, this is textbook. A medical textbook. 0/5
