What happens when you put mustard in a foaming soap dispenser?

let's find out together

Good morning, clowns!

This week’s newsletter is a little early, which means you get an early start on clutching your head, shouting, “Dannis, what the fuck are you doing?”

Today, I have decided to explore a very special saucing technique: Foams.

Since very few of us, if any at all, are going out to eat at fancy restaurants that serve dishes with cool stuff like flavored foams on them, perhaps we can recreate that experience at home using simple technology. In normal times you would pay $300 per person at a fine dining restaurant to have a very tired chef do this for you. Sure, you can use things like food stabilizers to make scrumptious bubbles of flavor, but who wants to do all that? Why not bring the luxury home to you? What if you want foam on demand?

“Dannis Ree,” you say, “I want to enjoy the luxury of edible foams. I want to live the food influencer lifestyle. Like that one person I follow on Instagram whose constant barrage of oversaturated high-end food photos makes me feel like my dinner of Stouffer’s lasagna is complete shit. A little touch of foam on my lasagna will fix everything that is wrong with my life. Everything.”

Today, I am here for you.

I bought a brand new automatic touchless foaming soap dispenser for the affordable price of $10 to see if I could bring the magic of flavored foam right to your home kitchen. I surmised that with this one cheap device, maybe we all could feel like we eat Michelin-starred meals for every day of the week.

Imagine the possibilities of an automatic foaming condiment dispenser.

Foamy nacho cheese at 7-Eleven? Yes, please. How about airy mayo? You bet. A delicate ranch dressing like a kiss from God? Fuck yes. Foam that nasty shit all over my chicken wings.

The dispenser actually looked kind of cool and futuristic.

Harvey, Mr. Bee, and Pepper, all liked sitting around it. I mean, just look at them, they’re positively beaming.

The closer I looked at the soap dispenser, the more I suspected it was inspired by Daft Punk.

Maybe it actually is Daft Punk, who’ve recently put in their retirement notice. After all those years of performing at shows, they’ve decided to go out and follow their other dreams of becoming automatic foaming soap dispensers. Perhaps they can spin an occasional DJ set in your bathroom while you’re in there taking a dump, while sampling and autotuning your farts.

First, I had to make sure this dispenser was working properly.

I put water in it to see if it would shoot out, and indeed water sputtered out, filled with bubbles and everything. Terrific. Everything was already going perfectly.

Next, I grabbed the first thing out of the refrigerator door I could get my hands on.

This happened to be yellow mustard. Mustard is great, but you know, a foamy mustard could really push things over the top. Especially a foamy mustard conveniently ejected by a bathroom device, directly onto your food.

Instead of waving my hands directly under the soap dispenser to catch mustard foam, I decided to put a hot dog on a fondue fork, because I love jabbing wieners with sharp objects.

Plus, the added distance would give me a chance to escape if things went south real quick.

I reluctantly pushed my hot dog in front of the soap dispenser.

Apparently there’s a little reservoir in the dispenser, because it ejaculated a bunch of water from my earlier test run directly onto my sausage. I waved my wiener around the robot a few more times and the water finally emptied itself out, paving its way for mustard.

After some serious laboring, the poor soap dispenser could only emit this single droplet of mustard.

The thing is, that single drop kept getting sucked back into the dispenser. It never made it onto my hot dog, no matter how many times I tried. Trust me, I tried. I could feel the machine getting exhausted, so I gave it a quick break.

I realized that the viscosity of foaming soap is actually pretty thin, so I watered down the mustard significantly before I tried it again.

All it took was some added water and some vigorous shaking to get the mustard to an easier consistency for Daft Punk the Automatic Foaming Mustard Dispenser.

Well, apparently this was still too thick for the dispenser, but at least I made a little bit of progress.

The machine struggled but couldn’t quite emit a single drop of foamy mustard, no matter how hard it tried. Don’t worry, Daft Punk, we’ve all been there. I mean, look at the thing. It even looks dejected.

Davida saw me fooling around in the kitchen and said, “Can I take a photo of you using it?”

I handed her the DSLR and she took a picture of me hard at work. I’d say it turned out really well. New profile photo, perhaps?

Unfortunately, this experiment came to a premature end, because Daft Punk the Automatic Foaming Mustard Dispenser actually died.

Maybe it gave up. I’m not entirely sure. All the lights on it were still working, but after a lot of attempts, it stopped sputtering and the motor mechanism inside went ominously silent. I rinsed out the tube, tried to clear the port out with a toothpick, forced water through both ends, but nothing would fix Daft Punk. Trust me, I’m as disappointed as you that I had to cut this one short, because I was upset that I broke the machine within 10 minutes of opening it. Honestly, I probably should have gone with a mechanical version, but I flew too close to the sun, like a dumbass with a dream.

Thank you for your sacrifice and all the good party music, Daft Punk. Too bad we couldn’t have tried…One More Time.

*cue disco lights*

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I was not expecting I’d have straight up destroyed that soap dispenser. I realized there was a chance that it might not work, but I didn’t account for the possibility that it’d actually die. If I can revive it somehow, don’t worry, there’ll be a round two. If you found this to be a very important part of your life today, please share it on social media. This is the best thing you can do for the newsletter other than a paid subscription.

And of course, please consider a paid subscription, because it’s what keeps this thing afloat. You get exclusive content like last week’s cinnamon roll chili pizza mashup and unlock the full archives on the web. It’ll also keep Nugget fed with plenty of treats.

Love you all, and I’ll pop into some of your inboxes on Friday. The fun never ends in this kitchen, clowns.