Surf and turfuckit: let's glue four types of meat together

always trust a product called "meat glue"

Oi, clowns!

Welcome to this week’s edition of the newsletter. Today, we will be discussing the supply chain’s broad effect on the economy, and we will also address rumors that Elon Musk plans on disrupting the ecotourism market with a new project called “Cannonball Bojangles.”

Just kidding, I got you!!! For a second I bet you thought you were reading a real newsletter, you know, with news. I’m hilarious.

This round of culinary shenanigans involves a product I’d heard about, but never seen in person, called “meat glue.” Meat glue, also known as transglutaminase (which is a naturally occurring substance), is an enzyme that forms bonds between different types of proteins. Reader’s Digest, which is where I go to read all my food news at dentist offices, has a pretty good introduction to the stuff.

But, honestly, you do not need to know any science about meat glue aside from the fact that you can use it to fuse multiple pieces of meat together. I’d only heard about it in food nerd videos, but one day, I decided to actually buy some. Turns out, it’s only $15 for 50 grams of the stuff on Amazon.

So I said to myself, “Dannis Ree, as the greatest food writer in all of history, you should use this ‘meat glue’ to fuse all sorts of animals together to create a ‘supermeat.’ Like, pork, beef, chicken, and fish. It’ll be like a surf and turfuck everything because life is meaningless.”

I am also wondering if you could fuse someone’s butthole shut with it, but that’s a topic for another edition of the newsletter. Probably a paid version.

This meat glue has a weirdly cute brand name, “Moo Gloo,” which is messed up when you think about it, because it exists to glue parts of different dead animals together.

It’s sort of like a Human Centipede, but with food.

The package contains a compressed powder that I’m sure would get you arrested in some parts of the country.

Try explaining that to a cop. “Hi, officer. That’s not illegal drugs, that is meat glue. I’m on my way to a friend’s house to settle a bet of whether or not this stuff can fuse my bhole shut. What? No, I don’t want to sit in your car.”

I went to the “about to expire” meat section at our local grocery store, Jewel-Osco, and scooped up a bunch of shit that was pretty much about to be thrown out.

That included pork chops, some really thin ribeye steaks, chicken breast, and a filet of cod that was only like two bucks for some alarming reason. I guess I was buying it for an alarming reason so it all canceled out.

I trimmed the bone off this somewhat smelly piece of ribeye and sprinkled some of the meat glue on top.

There was a suggested amount you’re supposed to use per weight of meat, but I completely ignored that because I obviously know what I’m doing. Come on, I just ran over an entire chicken with my car to see if I could tenderize it that way, I’m obviously the world’s leading expert when it comes to Moo Gloo.

I smushed the $2 piece of cod on top of the smelly ribeye and continued my layers.

I repeated the process with the chicken breast and then with a thin slice of bargain bin about-to-expire pork chop.

Nothing felt like it was particularly fused together yet, and I figured this process would take some time, so I wrapped it up with plastic wrap, stuck it in a Ziploc bag, and put it in the fridge overnight.

After 24 hours, the meat had fused together into one fairly solid lump.

Holy shit. This actually worked. I briefly wondered what would happen if I snorted some meat glue. Then I trimmed the surf and turf-ish filet into small cross-sections and salted them.

I heated up a pan and slowly cooked off the surf and turfuck-everything slices for about five minutes on each side, and it was time to plate them.

I needed an element of green, so I grabbed two desiccated leaves off a dying basil plant of mine.

When I bought the basil, it was a lush group of plants that I thought was going to give me months full of herby delight. But within days, all of the plants died except for one. It’s the chosen one. It will save us all.

Then, I took a spot of A1 Sauce, the greatest Sauce ever known to man, and dragged it across a useless rectangle plate with the back of my spoon.

Then I popped the four meat surf-and-turf slices and put them on the sauce, with the dying basil leaves sprinkled delicately on top.

I dug in and took a bite.

I mean, it tasted exactly what you’d imagine it to taste like, an amalgamation of pork, chicken, beef, and fish, but the thing is, if I hadn’t known what was in it, I wouldn’t have been able to identify anything but the fish. The longer I thought about it, the more fucked up that was. I mean, I enjoy fast food on a semi-regular basis, which I’m assuming is in part, scraps tossed together. If I was fed some multi-meat version of a Human Centipede, I’m not sure I’d be able to figure that out on my own.

Horrified at the realization, I took the rest of the packet of the meat glue and, using a leaf blower, I blew it all up my ass.

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I still have a shitload of meat glue left. Ideas, anyone? If you’re a fan of the newsletter, don’t forget to share it on social media, because it helps grow Food is Stupid and gets me closer to…actually, I’m not sure where it gets me:

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Now that you’ve read this far, you should enjoy this piece where I modeled for The Onion as a guy named Ken Yang. Yes, that’s actually me. One bucket list item scratched right off the list.

As always, I love you all, and I’ll hop into your inboxes again soon.