Ragebite: I Ate Blue Hot Dogs For You People, Are You Not Entertained?

Welcome to Ragebite, a column where Dennis Lee finds the most absurd, anger-inducing recipes the internet has to offer and goes where no one has gone before: actually cooking them himself.

For today's edition of Ragebite, we head to TikTok for some decidedly colorful inspiration. The TikToker @itsmeju1iette is dedicated to trolling food internet at an exceptionally well-executed level. Juliette does things like create meat cereal in the style of Froot Loops, uses her dog's actual paws to make paw print cookies, and fills the frunk (front trunk) of a Tesla completely with tiramisu (unfortunately, commercially-made meat cereal does exist, and we once tried it).

One of her videos from a few years back is a simple one showing her cooking hot dogs in Gatorade, which turns them a remarkable blue color. Could this actually happen? Gatorade needs no introduction, but in my mind, the drink wouldn't impart that much color to a hot dog — or would it? There's a distinct possibility that Juliette doctored the dogs for the video too, considering the kind of attention-seeking stuff some TikTokers pull off.

@itsmeju1iette

Gatorade hot dogs just hit diff 💙 #trending #viral

♬ Luxury and fun big band jazz(1324443) – Ponetto

Obviously, as The Takeout's great explorer of the culinary unknown, I set to the task of seeing whether infusing hot dogs with Gatorade worked. Part of me needed to know exactly how it tasted too — brightly colored food is obviously the most delicious food, right?

What I found particularly interesting was that this Gatorade hot dog seemed easy to pull off. All it took was Gatorade and hot dogs (and, optionally, a bun). I picked Fierce Grape Gatorade because it was the darkest color on the grocery store shelf. I already had some pale East coast-based Kayem hot dogs on hand thanks to a product sample kit. While this edition of Ragebite was conceptually more simple than the last one, involving potato chip mashed potatoes, I felt like the simplicity here was what really made the idea sing.

The video inspo isn't exactly a step-by-step instructional cooking tutorial — Juliette simply says to "soak" the hot dogs in Gatorade for 15 minutes before serving them. But the video depicts her dropping them into a saucepan, which I took to mean that she simmered the wieners in hot Gatorade. This sort of reminded me of the time people were poaching chicken in NyQuil, which was potentially very dangerous. Fortunately for me, instead of medicine, these Gatorade hot dogs involved decidedly safer kitchen staples.

I placed four hot dogs and a whole bottle of Gatorade in a saucepan. Since I was cooking with somewhat unclear instructions, I had to proceed using my best judgment. I decided to heat the Gatorade until it was boiling, then turn the heat down to a simmer. 

The immediate issue I dealt with was that hot dogs tend to float in water. That meant any surface area of the hot dog exposed to air might not get a chance to interact with the dye from the drink. I grabbed the only heat-resistant thing that would fit in my saucepan, a little Pyrex bowl, and placed it on top of the hot dogs. At first it was filled with air, but I eventually convinced it to mostly fill up with Gatorade. After the first bubbles started forming, I turned the heat down and set a 15 minute timer. 

What I wasn't expecting was the smell. It was mainly just a very strong hot dog odor circulating through our shoebox of an apartment, but I could catch a little bit of grape scent in the air too. I sent the work Slack a brief message: "It smells wild in here."

Then my wife came back home from work, took one step into our place, and said (I kid you not), "It smells wild in here!" Most of the time when I'm cooking hot dogs on the stove, I'm typically not simmering them for 15 whole minutes, so that would probably explain the intensity of the smell. After the time was up, I came back to the saucepan and found that the hot dogs were visibly more plump than they were initially. And they did look, well, interesting.

I fished a few of the hot dogs out from the Gatorade bath, put them on a plate, and examined them closely. I guess Juliette wasn't trolling after all — the hot dogs had turned a disturbing dark blue color, similar to the ones in her video. In retrospect, I shouldn't have been all that surprised, since hot dogs are porous, but also, I was gleefully mortified. Just stop scrolling for a second and stare at these things. Do it. Let them stare back at you. Be strong and stare back into the culinary abyss.

I wanted to try these hot dogs at their purest level of enjoyment (I use this word loosely) and took a bite into one of them sans bun or condiments. Interestingly enough, the Gatorade only colored the surface of the dog, and the Fierce Grape flavor was subtle. But it was there all right, though it was very faint. The meaty savoriness of the all-beef hot dog did the heavy lifting, and for something this strange-looking, it didn't taste as atrocious as it appeared. 

I did, of course, have to try a Gatorade hot dog with some condiments on it, so I squiggled some mustard and Chicago's #1 hot dog enemy, ketchup, on top. The fake grape aroma still wafted from the hot dog somewhat, and I could still slightly detect it at the end of some bites, but the most offensive part about this whole thing was how it looked. If Heinz still sold that bizarro purple ketchup, this thing would have been even more visually magnificent.

There was one last detail that I felt like I might have missed, so I revisited the preparation of the hot dogs. As I mentioned earlier, though Juliette did show her hot dogs on the stove, her verbal direction was to "soak" them. I'd gone a step further by simmering them, not soaking them. I thought for one last try, I'd soak another batch of hot dogs on the counter for 15 minutes at room temperature. After 15 minutes, I pulled one out and bit into it (hot dogs are pre-cooked, but please do not try this at home). This time the grape flavor was a bit more prominent, but only because the Gatorade was clinging to the surface of the wet dog. Otherwise, aside from sort of a chlorinated look, it was just a regular hot dog.

I did have a revelation from all this. There's a time and place for colorful hot dogs, but only for a specific crowd: children. Some kids flock to strange-looking food — imagine an orange hot dog for Halloween, or heck, even this weird blue hot dog for the Fourth of July. So does this Ragebite concept work? Absolutely. Is it horrifying? Totally. But in the scheme of things, Gatorade hot dogs aren't the worst thing I've ever tried — they just look like it.