Can you make toast in your microwave using a Hot Pocket sleeve?

our apartment smells terrible now

Greetings, clowns!

I hope you all had a fine and wonderful Thanksgiving. My family had a small potluck gathering, and it was nice to have everyone together. We all ate and laughed a lot. That is pretty much all you can ask for when it comes to Thanksgiving, isn’t it? All those good little things put together made for one big good day.

I did not, however, subject my family to my newest Thanksgiving dish, the Turfucken. That was just for you.

dickholedannis

A post shared by Dennis Lee (@dickholedannis)

Many of you reading this right now are new to the newsletter, which is wonderful.

Substack featured me in an email interview a few weeks ago, and a bunch of you have now made the unfortunate discovery of my writing. For those of you new to my exquisite and breathtaking work, I am what you may call the “foremost expert” on writing about food. I also often threaten to shove foreign objects up my ass for absolutely no reason.

Namaste!!!!!!

In this week’s edition of the newsletter, I’ve decided to put my scientific skills to the test, by seeing if I can use our microwave to toast shit.

I recently ate some delicious Hot Pockets, and while many people prepare them by heating them up in the microwave, I prefer air frying them, since their exterior gets actually crunchy that way. This is probably more finicky than most people get with Hot Pockets, but when you’re me, the greatest food writer in all of history, you must hold yourself accountable to only the highest standards.

Those weird sleeves included with a Hot Pocket never seem to do anything anyway, so I ended up hoarding a few to see if I could do anything interesting with them.

I looked at them and thought, “Dannis Ree, you must use your skills to examine this strange technology that you’ve never once bothered to understand. If those piece of shit sleeves don’t actually make Hot Pockets crisp on the outside, could you use them to at least make a quick toast with some cheap bread?”

I can’t say I’ve ever had a Hot Pocket out of a microwave that I’d actually consider crunchy on the outside. Have you?

I thought, perhaps, maybe I was just missing something and that the sleeve wasn’t actually supposed to crisp up the Hot Pocket. Maybe it was just there to make it look like you’re putting actual effort into microwaving your depressing lunch, by using weird culinary tools or something.

But, after some closer examination of the Hot Pocket packaging, I did find out that the thing is actually meant to crisp up your food.

Well, at least that’s what it claims. I mean, the Hot Pockets people call it an actual “crisping sleeve.”

I’ll be the goddamn judge of that.

Would one of these things at least make a piece of buttered toast? Toast is supposed to be crisp, right?

A Hot Pocket crisping sleeve will always be a jacket of mystery to me.

This is cardboard lined with a plastic-like substance, that probably leaches chemicals into your food as it’s rotating in the microwave.

I briefly scanned over the ingredients list of a Hot Pocket and discovered that there’s already approximately 3,584 ingredients in one of them. So I assumed that adding an extra few carcinogens during the cooking process probably wouldn’t do much more noticeable damage to a human body anyway.

I generously buttered a small piece of bread on both sides in order to prep it for the microwave.

Dry toast is no good, especially if it’s the cheap-ass stuff. In that case, the bread merely exists for you to saturate with butter or jam or something, because where else are you going to get that valuable nutrition, you know?

I kissed my bread friend on the head and tucked it into its coff—I mean, sleeping bag.

Mr. Bee wanted to say his farewell too, so he jumped in the microwave with the aspiring piece of toast.

Don’t worry, I yelled at him and pulled him out of the microwave before he got into any real trouble. I set the microwave to cook for an arbitrary two minutes and stood in front of it, listening as the butter began to sizzle, around 30 seconds in.

I wanted to stop the cooking process to make sure everything was okay, but then I stopped myself. A watched piece of bread never toasts, isn’t that the saying?

After another 30 seconds, the bread was making all sorts of alarming sizzling and crackling noises. I just assumed that the butter was sort of frying the bread in the crisping sleeve and this was supposed to happen.

But around the 1 minute and 45 second mark, the sounds were getting kind of scary, so I halted the experiment and opened the microwave door.

Fuck.

The microwave had filled up with white pillows of smoke and it smelled terrible. Davida peered into the kitchen from the couch as I started cursing, and watched as the smoke curled out of the microwave. This was not a good situation. In fact, this is the first time I think I’ve ever burned anything in the kitchen this egregiously, if you can believe it.

“You know,” she said, thoughtfully, “I think people really miss when you actually hurt yourself on the blog.”

“I know,” I said, watching the smoke rise up to the ceiling.

Once the acrid smoke had finally cleared, I pulled the plate out to examine what had happened.

Part of the crisping sleeve appeared to have scorched, big time. The plate was still hot to the touch. But what about the bread?

Haha.

Hahahahaha. Fuck. Man, this thing was pitch black on both sides. It occurred to me that if I’d let it cook much longer in the microwave that it might have actually caught on fire, and this story might have ended tragically. Can you imagine the police report for that one?

Deceased ignited a piece of bread on fire in the microwave. Apparently the subject had a newsletter called “Food is Stupid” in which he conducted extremely irresponsible experiments with food, while constantly talking about his anus during strange tangents about nihilism. He also had delusions of grandeur that may or may not have been fueled by strangers on the internet.

Three extremely small stuffed animals were in the vicinity of the incident, apparently named Harvey, Mr. Bee, and Pepper. Why they were regularly included in these experiments is unknown.

After that brush with actual disaster, I wisely decided to repeat the experiment one more time.

I jammed the other Hot Pocket crisping sleeve I had on hand with another piece of buttered bread, but this time, I kept a close eye on what was going on in the microwave.

After 15 seconds, I opened up the microwave. So far, no smoke. That was a good sign. I let the microwave go for another 15 seconds before I started getting scared, and removed the bread.

Hey, would you look at that, the bread started toasting!

Davida took a bite, then handed the microwaved bread over to me. I took a bite too. It may have looked like toast, but in fact, it was not toast. If anything, it sort of tasted like bread jerky, dry and extremely chewy, and not delicious in the least. Man, attempting to make toast in the microwave wasn’t just a failure, it was a complete disaster. Not only did I fail to make a delicious piece of toast, but now the apartment smelled like a car fire, and probably won’t air out for weeks now.

I learned a valuable lesson today.

I should try it again, except next time, for twice as long, right?

---

Thank you all for being on this magical journey of burned microwaved bread with me. If you’re not a paid subscriber to the newsletter, do me a favor and at least share this thing on social media, would you? It helps Food is Stupid grow, and motivates me to char more shit in my kitchen for no good reason.

And, of course, please sign up for a paid subscription to become part of a super-cool club, where you get additional exclusive newsletter editions every month. Plus you can go back and read the fully unlocked archives at foodisstupid.substack.com, and considering there’s well over two years of content on here, you’ve got plenty to catch up on. And…you’re helping feed our asshole kittens.

For paid subscribers this week, I’m going to try and see if I can get some color on some hot dogs in a Hot Pocket sleeve, because I clearly haven’t learned my lesson yet. Do you think hot dogs can catch on fire in a microwave? I better get an extinguisher.

As always, I love you all very much, and see you in your inboxes soon.