Hot Pockets: Four Meats, Four Cheeses, Infinite Regrets
Sometimes your significant other is out of town and you make a regrettable decision that poisons everything. Here is mine: I ate a Hot Pocket.
I wouldn’t call it temptation — what’s tempting about Devil’s Sausage Rolls? — so much as an impulse to see if a much-loved food from my childhood could actually stand the scrutiny of a more refined palate. Which brings us to this.
As alluring as the Bastard-Stromboli looks in its crisping corset — which crisps nothing, by the way — and as sexy as the prospect of unwrapping said corset while you mouth your way to its nethers seems, this experience is a uniformly bad one.
There’s obviously butter in the crust — along with a vague whiff of garlic, not unlike a clove had been peeled and left at room temperature for days — but the fact that it’s used to such ill effect is offensive. Imagine if someone had soaked a paper towel in melted butter, then wrapped it around around some oily cheese and generic meats — that’s what this is. That’s all this is.
The cheese — the types of which are unidentified by the box — evoke memories of school-cafeteria pizza, while the meats blend together, offering the same taste from different shapes. (And for the record, I only counted two such shapes in my particular Satan Calzone.) I suspect the experience would be better without these cardboard-tasting lumps mucking up the slurry of generic cheese product, but I’m not willing to try and verify that for a good long while, if ever.
It’s tempting to say there’s nowhere to go but up — that this situation could be improved by either addition or subtraction — but I very much doubt that, as the dark alchemists at Nestle who birthed this Vile Stromboli are clear masters of misery.
So, why would you reach for Hot Pockets? Perhaps you’re yearning for a simpler time, an idyllic childhood in which you would be satisfied by anything resembling pizza, a time before you developed a refined palate, when were able to indulge in simple, easily microwavable pleasures. This is, to an extent, understandable — I’m the one who ate a Hot Pocket, after all — but I implore you not to succumb to these dark impulses. The nuance that comes with varying degrees of quality is a thing to be cherished, not spurned, and Hot Pockets are creatures that squat on that nuance and unleash a foul torrent that drowns out everything else.
As I write this, the discomfort in my abdomen is growing. Perhaps the best that can be said about Hot Pockets is that, provided you are sufficiently motivated not to eat them again, you are likely, given time, to recover from the gross feelings they inflict on your body.
Jim Gaffigan was right.
1/10 would not eat again.