Cinnamon toast bungholes

our apartment smells like a barn right now

Hello, clowns!

If you’re new to my newsletter, you may not know something important about me. I joke about buttholes, or bholes, as I sometimes call them, all the time. Bholes birth the opposite of food, which is why I constantly talk about them on a publication that celebrates nihilism in the kitchen.

However, one of my darkest secrets is that I’ve never cooked with them. I’ve cooked with bull penis at least three or four times now, solely because I found the idea hilarious, but I’ve never broached the culinary subject of bungholes. (Well, I did make Korean poo bread once, but that had nothing to do with actual poo organs.)

The idea of cooking poop chutes has always been daunting to me, but I’ve finally decided to break the final seal and sashay straight through the backdoor of Hell. Today, we foray up the ass and into the mouth. Or is it the opposite? Whichever it is, on this great day, we feast on rectums.

I would love to tell you a very inspired origin tale about how I came up with today’s idea, but really, the term “Cinnamon toast bungholes” just showed up in my head one day, and never went away. It’s a very difficult existence, being culinary genius Dannis Ree, you know?

It’s also very lonely. Probably for good reason.

Picking up a pound of pork rectum isn’t an easy task.

They don’t carry them at Walmart, I’ve never seen them at Costco, and my local supermarkets do not carry them either. But thankfully, the Chinese supermarket celebrates every single part of a butchered animal’s body (as it should be), and carries them right in the display of their massive meat counter.

I picked these up from 88 Marketplace, which is a massive grocery store just outside of Chicago’s Chinatown neighborhood.

They’re labeled “pork bung,” which should describe them accurately, since they are technically the large intestine and the rectum of the pig. Asking for them was a real treat, since most of the employees at 88 Marketplace speak limited English.

The butcher asked me politely what I wanted, and I said, “Pork bung, please.”

“What?” he asked, trying to decipher my English. A lady came up to the counter and stood right next to me, browsing. I hoped she wasn’t listening.

“Pork bung!” I shouted, through my mask. We finally resorted to pointing at various items through the glass case, and he asked how much I wanted.

“A half pound,” I said. He promptly weighed out a whole pound and handed it over to me.

When I first took them out of the bag, I was struck right in the nostrils with a barnyard-like aroma.

You know, I’d assumed that they’d smell like poo, but they actually smelled more like pee, if anything. The kitchen got smelly pretty quick.

I’ve actually tried prepared pork bung before, and in Chinatown, in fact. The version I had was a crispy fried one, and I remember the flavor having a lingering ass taste, which is why I never had them again since then. But I remember loving the fried texture, crispy on the outside, soft and fatty on the inside, so I figured I’d cook them and then deep fry them.

And in terms of flavoring, if I was going to turn them into cinnamon toast bungholes, I might as well use the officially licensed Cinnamon Toast Crunch seasoning.

I found this shaker at the grocery store and have been using it on sweet potatoes and butternut squash, which have historically turned out pretty good. Never in a million years did I think I was going to use it on assholes, though. I bet General Mills didn’t see this coming either.

Before you start, you really have to wash these things out.

I rinsed them four or five times in fresh water and let them sit in a vinegar and water mixture for a while. I even ran water through them, which was hilarious, because they filled up like a hose and squirted water out the other end. The fun never stops in this house.

I’d read in multiple recipes that you’re supposed to simmer the pork bungs for a long period of time to get them to become tender.

One recipe said to boil them initially, discard the water, and then simmer them in a seasoned liquid.

So I did.

After the first boil the bung looked like a scary lamprey fish with those razor teeth or a chestburster from Alien, and the apartment started to take on a really terrible poo smell. It was like I brought a farm right inside our kitchen, and all the animals took a fat dump into the pot on the stove. It’s fitting I was using my Dutch oven for this experiment, now that I think about it.

After I discarded the water from the initial boil and got a big stinky bung facial from the steam, I used some beef broth to try and tame the ass scent, and hopefully, the flavor.

This was when the bung tubes would have to simmer for a while, so I parked myself on the couch. Davida was reading a book and apparently hadn’t noticed the pig butt smell yet, because she said, “It smells good in here.”

Then she stood up to do something, looked at me, and said, “Oh. I smell the bung now. It smells like when that pipe burst in the basement.”

An hour and a half later, I pulled out the pork bung and let them cool off.

They’d taken on an appropriately brown color from the beef broth. And at this point, the apartment smelled absolutely terrible. I’ve done some pretty stinky things before, but nothing this intense.

We have a small place, which meant we’d just been marinating in the smell for almost two hours now. The cats were doing the thing where they were closing their eyes, craning their necks up, and sniffing the air, probably to figure out why their home smelled like a Porta Potty.

Then I cleaned out the Dutch oven, sliced the pork bung into small rings, and heated up some vegetable oil to deep fry them in.

If the apartment smelled like pig butt already, the deep frying really didn’t help.

Not only did the air become saturated with a cooking oil smell, it vaporized more of the ass odor and saturated the air with it completely. The only way it could have gotten any more concentrated is if I marched straight up an actual pig’s bhole. I was pretty impressed at what I’d done, but simultaneously horrified.

I tossed the o-rings in a very generous helping of Cinnamon Toast Crunch seasoning and let the gang survey my work.

They stared wordlessly at the pile of chopped bung on my fancy plate. The smell of cinnamon wafted up towards my face, which was nice, and so did the scent of derriere, which was not so nice. What’s interesting is that my brain would not allow the odors to co-mingle, meaning it picked out each separate smell, one pleasant, and one not, probably in order to try and convince me to focus on the one that my brain detected as a biological (and scatological) threat.

I told my brain to be quiet and popped a bung ring right into my mouth.

The texture was just as I remembered, kind of like a freshly fried piece of chicharrón. Which is to say, it was great. The entire thing had a really good crackle to it, and the cinnamon sugar was nice at first, but quickly gave way to the taste of ass. There must be some kind of culinary grandma-level wizardry you have to accomplish in order to remove that flavor, but it remained elusive to me. The issue was that the barnyard flavor just stuck around in my mouth for what felt like forever, and that’s not an aftertaste you want to linger.

Davida examined the plate for a little while and reluctantly tried one, because she was being a good sport about it. She bit through the outside of one piece, then took a nibble of its interior.

She declared, “It’s not the worst thing I’ve ever eaten. The outside is really good, but the closer you get to the inside of it, the more it tastes like a public bathroom.”

That’s it. Public bathroom. Those were the words I was searching for, but could not find. This is why she and I belong together. We stand around in the kitchen eating bungholes trying to find the right words to describe them.

Would I willingly eat pork bholes again? Knowing me, probably. But I think I’ll just let someone else do the cooking next time, because our apartment still smells horrendous a full day later. And we’ll probably skip the Cinnamon Toast Crunch part too.

We wouldn’t want to cover up that scrumptious bunghole flavor, you know?

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I have a feeling more than a few of you did not enjoy reading this. But being the greatest food writer in all of history means you have to take some risks. This is my burden.

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Hope you all had a wonderful holiday, clowns. As always, I love you all, and I’ll hop into some of your inboxes later this week.