Appetizers

Ripped From the Inbox

An ongoing series in which we present a few gems from our press release-jammed inbox with no context or comment.

“Anti ‘Clean Girl’ Aesthetic Bevvy”

“This summer, self-control is officially cancelled, and FatBoy Ice Cream is to blame.”

“Story: New Jell-O meet the new sandwich?”

“In February 2026, [BRAND] received Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) status from the U.S. FDA for use as a general sweetener, establishing a strong regulatory foundation for global expansion.”

“Most dads would probably be perfectly happy this Father’s Day being left alone with a bottle of whiskey and a pound of bacon. But they’d have to say they were going golfing with a buddy and hide at his house to pull it off. And if caught, they’d never hear the end of it from their family or their cardiologist.”

À la Recherche du CarrotDog

For those of you in the U.S., we hope you had a restful and delicious Memorial Day. If you were in the Northeast like me, it was mostly rainy with a slight glimmer of sun toward the end. But perhaps that brief bright window gave you a hankering for the all-American sandwich: a hot dog. It’s days like these that remind me of the best screenshot perhaps ever taken:

I won’t go into a full art-crit rundown because the image speaks for itself. It has been shared widely over the years, ultimately earning meme status. Yet it still fills me with an indescribable joy. That joy is mostly thanks to the parenthetical CarrotDog now forever imprinted in my head. I’ve long thought about what CarrotDog could be beyond a mere carrot grilled to give it some char. From time to time, TikTok has served me videos from questionable vegetarian diet accounts showcasing CarrotDog recipes—most of them involving parcooking of some sort along with a smoky additive, all of them attempting to make Carrot into Dog. But this year Instagram served me another video from a surprising source: America’s Test Kitchen. The freaks they are—freaks who for decades have paired science with tedious kitchen trial-and-error to develop what they say are the best versions of every recipe—took it upon themselves to perfect CarrotDog. 

In ATK’s estimation, the key is to brine the carrots in water, vinegar, savory spices, liquid smoke, roasted vegetable paste, and soy sauce. They then boil them for 15 minutes, take them off the heat, let the pupating CarrotDogs cool in the brine, and then refrigerate them for at least six hours. The reason? To quote the most ATK sentence ever uttered: “The cooling period gives the flavor molecules in the brine plenty of time to travel deep into the carrot.” After that, put ’em on a grill and call it a day. So there you have it: the secret to CarrotDog, brought to you first by a disturbing Burning Man attendee and then my favorite magazine-slash-public-access-T.V. show. —Cale