Author Archives: Aaron Brophy

UPDATE 6/30/13: Our second attempt at making Cheesy Blasters went much better than this one. To read about doing it right go HERE.

If your household is anything like the Risky Fuel household, it means you watch a minimum four episodes a day of the show 30 Rock.

It also means you’re familiar with the mythical food stuff “Cheesy Blasters.”

Y’know, the one with the song:

You take a hot dog
Stuff it with some jack cheese
Fold it in a pizza
You’ve got Cheesy Blasters

… and all the kids say, “Thanks Meat Cat!”

Sing it, Liz Lemon!

This sounds like our kinda food. So we tried making Cheesy Blasters. Here’s how it went:

First we bought the ingredients.

The innards would be Selection Monterey Jack Cheese ($5.69) and Olymel 100% Beef Weiners ($3.99).

Next, the pizzas.

We debated about buying those pre-made pizza crusts, or something delivery, but that all sounded like pain in the ass. So box food revolution was the way we went with a Selection Cheesy Pizza 2-pack ($1.69) for Sarah (she likes her pizza simple) and a McCain Deep ‘N’ Delicious Deluxe Mini Pizza 4-pack ($3.99) for me.

Then we began. First we grated the cheese (out of focus iPhone shot not shown), then we boiled the hot dogs.

It was at this point that we discovered our first major problem. I had kept the pizzas in the freezer beforehand and they had frozen. Which, duh, made them impossible to fold over the hot dogs. This necessitated a game of microwave defrost consistency checking. Basically, zapping the pizzas for 20 seconds, poking them, then zapping again until they seemed warm and pliable. If you want to save yourself some irritation, make sure your pizzas are room temperature and pliable.

Somewhere around this point I started preheating the oven at 425, finished boiling the hot dogs, then split them down them middle and threw them on the pizzas.

Oh, hai. Still with us? You’ve got the resolve of a Kenneth Parcell knitting a woolen bikini for his grandmother.

After this I sprinkled gobs of shredded jack cheese down the middle of each Blaster and attempted to fold them over (no photos because this was dirty work and I didn’t want to slime up my phone, I’m precious that way). And here is where we encountered the main engineering problem with creating proper Cheesy Blasters — the pizza’s ability (or lack of) to properly fold over around the weenie in a soft taco style.

The Selection Cheese Pizzas were fine. Being thinner, cheaper off-brand foodstuffs, their lighter nature worked well to make them more pliable, effecting an almost proper foldover seal.

The McCain Deluxe Pizzas were a different story, though. Their thicker crusts and obstructive “stuff” — the veggie bits, pepperoni, etc — made for a far less mutable product. I ended up “cracking” one of the pizzas while trying to fold it over, which sucked. So consider yourself forewarned.

Then I threw them into the oven to bake for about 10 minutes. And voila.

They look kinda alright, right? Well, except for that one I structurally compromised in the folding. There’s one major warning here, though — excess cheese dribble. You can kind of see it in the photo, but when you take a pizza, throw a hot dog in the middle, throw MORE cheese on it, then bake it, the cheese gets a’ flowin. And then it gets a-burnin’ on the pizza tray. And then it gets the cook a-pissed because he has to viciously repeated jab a fork under the Blasters to get them to unstick from the tray, then spend 20 minutes a-scrappin’ the burnt cheese off the tray.

Here’s what they ended up looking like after I pried them off the tray along with the salvageable cheese slurry:

Notice, Sarah’s Cheese Pizza Cheesy Blasters fared poorly during the unsticking phase.

And then we ate…

So what does a Cheesy Blaster taste like? Exactly like a pizza with a hot dog in the middle.

There’s no trickery here. It is what it is. If you like hot dogs and microwaveable pizzas and lots of cheese, you’re set. My only quibble was with the pepperoni on the McCain Deluxe Pizzas. That stuff tastes like armpit and is not a complimentary palate sensation to a wiener.

We’re committed to making these again because we’re convinced we can make them better. Baking in a glass pan to prevent the burnt cheese scraping episode, more attention paid to the engineering of the “fold,” and some bam-ups in the spice and condiment side and we’re as good to go as Jenna Mulroney filming Jackie Jormp-Jomp.