What You Should Know About Pizza Hut's Hot Dog Stuffed Crust Pizza
Fans of Mel Brooks' 1987 laugh riot, "Spaceballs," may fondly (or not-so-fondly) remember a character called Pizza the Hutt. A playful jab at Jabba the Hutt from "Star Wars" (via Yahoo News), Pizza was a bubbling amalgam of melted cheese, sauce, and night terrors – the sort of concoction that would traumatize the bravest ovens. If you could pry your mind away from his unthinkable face, maybe you wondered what his feet would look like if he had any. Well, Pizza the Hut (with one T) may have answered that question when it invented the Hot Dog Bites Pizza.
Introduced to the U.S. in 2015 to honor the anniversary of Pizza Hut's Stuffed Crust Pizza (via Pizza Hut), this oddly-crusted creation had an outer ring crammed with 28 little hot dogs. If your imagination hated your appetite, then each individual slice probably looked like a greasy, cheesy foot with literally crusty sausage-toes. That sounds like the perfect culinary nightmare to complete the anatomy of a sentient pizza beast. But Pizza Hut made its Hot Dog Bites Pizza sound more like a dream come true, writing, "The wait is finally over." Surprisingly, it didn't start off as an American dream.
A frank discussion of hot dog-stuffed crusts
The Hot Dog Bites Pizza might sound as American as apple pie. But apple pie didn't originate in America, and neither did this pizza. Pizza Hut's Hut Life blog explains that the dish debuted in Asia, where stuffed crusts were all the rage. After turning Japan into the Land of the Rising Hot Dog Crust and building a Great Wall of Hot Dogs around China's pizzas, in 2012, the company brought its culinary hot-doggery to the birthplace of America: the UK. Canada came next. Meanwhile, Americans were left in hungry anticipation, their empty arteries no doubt dying to be stuffed like a crust.
When the Hot Dog Bites Pizza finally arrived in the U.S., it came with a side of mustard and the option of a pretzel crust. Business Insider tried out the original and pretzel versions, and frankly, the hot dog crusts didn't cut the mustard. As one tester put it, "The hot dog was salty, the pretzel surrounding it was salty — there's just no way I could eat more than a slice of this." While the original crust got higher marks, some said the hot dogs detracted from the crust and should have been used as a topping instead.
Orlando Weekly contributor Adam McCabe may have had the harshest rebuke. McCabe called the dish a "deathtrap," giving a whole new meaning to "Tombstone pizza," and described eating it as "a desperate struggle for satisfaction" that you will ultimately lose.