Can you brew a Papa Johns garlic cup in a Keurig machine?
all it takes is the press of a button
Hi clowns!
This week’s edition of Food is Stupid tackles yet another dumb food photo that’s floating around on social media right now. (As you know, I love trying to recreate viral shit to see if it’s any good, sometimes it is.)
Since the internet is an ouroboros that eats its own ass, a feat Marilyn Manson is probably jealous of, this photo is making the rounds again after being around for years:
User @matttbastard posted a photo of a Keurig coffee maker with a Papa Johns Special Garlic dipping sauce tub jammed into it, captioned, “become ungovernable.”
A crapload of people started wordlessly tagging me on Twitter, alerting me that the photo had popped up again. Heh. Apparently @matttbastard hasn’t read my newsletter. My entire food writing career, if you could even call it that, involves being “ungovernable.”
Davida and I usually drink coffee from a tiny little drip coffeemaker that produces exactly two mugs worth of coffee every day.
But, we have a Keurig machine that we’ve had stashed away for a long time. It was a gift from Davida’s sister-in-law, Mandy. I figured that if we were going to finally use it, I might as well employ it in the worst way possible, which is for the newsletter. Sorry, Mandy. Please forgive me.
I very well understood that I could potentially destroy it, but if I was going to do that, it might as well be with the most delicious dipping sauce known to man.
I cleaned out the Keurig (man, that was a lot of dust) and plugged it in.
As soon as I tried pushing the Special Garlic sauce tub into the pod chamber, however, I knew I had a problem.
As I suspected might happen, the tub just didn’t fit into the Keurig’s little receptacle.
It was too wide and squat. Now, I’m sure the pods that go in those things are proprietary to the device. If Special Garlic dipping sauce tubs fit neatly into Keurig machines, the hot beverage market would look very different right now. We’d all be sitting around sippin’ on sauce.
“Grandma, would you like a nice hot mug of your favorite Special Garlic tea after dinner tonight?”
Forcing the Keurig machine closed wasn’t fruitful, either.
The thing is mostly made of lightweight plastic, so I didn’t want to jam it shut too hard. I could feel it straining when I applied pressure, and knew something was bound to snap off. I eased up on my extremely muscular approach and took a slightly different angle to brewing the Special Garlic sauce in our Keurig device.
Davida, thinking smartly, had purchased cute little reusable baskets that are retrofitted for Keurig machines, so I whipped one out.
A basket has the capacity to hold enough grounds for a single cup of coffee, which meant that it had plenty of room for the contents of a Special Garlic dipping sauce tub.
I transferred the contents of the sauce container into the Keurig basket, laughing to myself maniacally.
I installed the basket into the Keurig and nodded to myself.
“This is how the way the world ends,” I whispered. “Not with a bang, but with an individual mug of Papa Johns Special Garlic sippin’ sauce.”
I turned the Keurig on and waited for it to brew.
The coffeemaker made a small buzzing sound and I heard the bubbling of hot water deep within its guts. After years of sitting on our shelf, it finally awoke from its deep slumber, and began emitting a thin stream of Papa Johns Special Garlic dipping sauce from its coffeehole. I’d chosen a very special vessel for this experiment, a novelty Ron John Surf Shop mug that had my name on it, that I’m sure was crafted for me specifically, and not some other asshole named Dennis.
The rich smell of shelf-stable margarine wafted through the air and I pretended like I was in a really weird Folgers commercial.
Once the Keurig finished brewing, I peered deeply into the eternal abyss, which happened to be a mug of hot water with a sheen of yellow garlic-flavored margarine on top.
It’s hard to take a selfie while sipping out of a scalding mug of Papa Johns Special Garlic dippin’ drink, but I managed one.
Maybe I’m a culinary degenerate with no sense of shame, but…the Papa Johns K-cup drink was oddly satisfying. Pure calories, baby. There’s something soul-warming about a beverage that leaves a sheen of probably-hydrogenated-fat down your esophagus, you know? (If you already knew that, we need to be best friends immediately.) It tasted like garlic butter, but sort of watered down, since the dipping sauce was mostly just floating on top of the bulk of the liquid in the mug.
But the hot water gave the drink a comforting tone, and I stood there enjoying my new favorite fall beverage. I somehow felt at peace. Or perhaps that’s just what it feels like when your arteries start hardening. What a journey; I’d started by trying to trash some dumb internet meme and then I’d come to some unusual path to inner enlightenment.
Then I realized I was fucking drinking a hot mug of Papa Johns Special Garlic sauce. I immediately became disgusted with myself, poured it down the drain, went into witness protection, and never wrote about food ever again.
Thanks, internet, for providing me with really dumb shit to do on the weekend. Don’t forget to share the newsletter (seriously!) on social media. If you can’t become a paid subscriber, this is the other best way to support Food is Stupid.
And, of course, consider becoming a paid subscriber today.
Later this week, for paid subscribers, I’ll continue down this K-hole and create a cross between our favorite caffeinated beverage, coffee, along with instant cup noodles. I think I’ll call it “cramen.” I’ll be cramen it right up my ass.
This’ll be the fourth week in a row of extra editions for paid subscribers, so don’t sleep on it. Don’t worry—if you sign up for a paid subscription now, you’ll get access to all the archives via the web, including all past paid material, and now there’s a huge archive of it. The newsletter is over three-years-old, after all.
Okay, clowns, as always, I love you all. I’ll say hi to some of you lucky few later this week. And yes, I know Papa John Schnatter is unhinged.
This seems like a pretty deranged idea but combining this hot garlic liquid with rum would probably make the most cursed Hot Buttered Rum of all time. Other booze+hot buttery garlic water ideas include:
hbgw+vodka= would probably be nasty but vodka doesn't really taste like anything
hbgw+whisky= a savory hot toddy that might be kind of amazing, even with the addition of honey
I'm not sure whether it would be more helpful if you donate your body to science or to a toxic landfill. Either way, I hope you don't have to make this decision for a very long time.
Though after this post, I'm not willing to wager anything.