Early last year as the show 30 Rock was nearing its final days the Risky Fuel household began experimenting with trying to recreate one of main character Liz Lemon’s favourite foods — Cheesy Blasters.
The recipe was simple:
You take a hot dog Stuff it with some jack cheese Fold it in a pizza You’ve got Cheesy Blasters
Undaunted, awhile back we tried to make Cheesy Blasters again, this time modifying the recipe with one major change: Instead of buying pre-made frozen pizzas and wrapping them around hot dog wieners, we bought a bag of pre-made pizza dough and used that dough instead.
It was… AMAZING. By using the real pizza dough it not only tasted better, but you could structurally engineer something that had better wraparound/pigs-in-a-blanket qualities.
So, to recap, here’s what you do to make rockin’ Cheesy Blasters:
1) Buy a bag of pre-made pizza dough, some hot dogs, a can of pizza sauce and some shredded cheese.
2) Cook some hot dogs.
3) Open a can of pizza sauce.
4) Make a canoe out of the pizza dough for the hot dog, put the hot dog in there.
5) Throw some pizza sauce and cheese into the canoe.
6) Close that canoe’s edges together so the hot dog is sealed right in there.
7) Sprinkle a bit more cheese and pizza sauce on the top of your Cheesy Blaster.
8) Throw it in the oven and bake for about 10 minutes or until the dough starts turning golden brown.
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.
Weenies and Cheese
The innards would be Selection Monterey Jack Cheese ($5.69) and Olymel 100% Beef Weiners ($3.99).
Next, the pizzas.
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.
Boiling weenies
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.
Defrosted pizzas
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.
Deluxe Pizza Cheesy Blasters pre-baking
Cheese Pizza Cheesy Blasters pre-baking
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.
Cheesy Blasters just out of the oven
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.
Befouled pizza tray
Here’s what they ended up looking like after I pried them off the tray along with the salvageable cheese slurry:
Deluxe Pizza Cheesy Blaster with bonus cheese slurry
Cheese Pizza Cheesy Blaster
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.
Risky Fuel 