Hello. As many who know me are aware, I like cooking weird or very simple things. Examples include: a 3 ingredient cookie, a no bake lemon pie, and Ramen Lasagna (A group favorite in my D&D group). So, when my dad sent me a video with an odd recipe, and I realized I had all the ingredients for it, I HAD to try it! The first attempt… did not go well. But I realized what I did wrong and tried again. Here are those two experiences.

But First, The Recipe

Before I get into what I did, both good and bad, what is this recipe I am trying? Well, I don’t have a written version I can just put here. That’s because what I was given was a video of a woman making this thing. So I will describe what was presented to me.

Step 1 was simple: Stab a hot dog with a bunch of pasta in a line. When done the pasta should look like a fence sticking out of the hot dog with a bunch of small gaps.

Step 2 is predictable: Boil the pasta and hot dog. Not much to say about this now… but I will get back to this.

Step 3 is where things get fun: Lay out the hot dog and pasta then apply tomato sauce onto the pasta. Then apply cheese, the video appears to use shredded parmesan.

Step 4: Roll up the hot dog in the pasta with the sauce and cheese on the inside. Then wrap a tortilla around the hot dog like a burrito.

Step 5: Fry the burrito on each side until crispy. And finally enjoy.

The First Attempt

For my first attempt I only used things we already had around the house. This meant a few ingredients were a bit… off. Starting with my hot dog, my family does not buy “Stadium sized” hot dogs, we buy polish sausages and use them as hot dogs. So I am starting with something oversized for the recipe. For my pasta, what I had easily available was Angle Hair pasta… so now I have an over sized and an undersized item. Great.

Before anything else I heat up my hot dog in the microwave. While the boiling might cook it, I won’t be moving it in the water, so I don’t want to rely on that alone. Next I begin stabbing my hot dog with the pasta and I notice two things. Fist is that it is taking A LOT of pasta to get across this hot dog (see oversized hot dog and undersized pasta). Second is that my hot dog is too large for my tortilla. Solution? Don’t use the entire hot dog. I stop placing pasta about an inch short of the end and move the entire thing to a pan with water and begin heating it.

This is also where I remembered I was going to take pictures of the process. And where I made my first real mistake. I set the stove to high and walked away as it began to heat up. After losing track of time I rushed back into the kitchen and saw the pasta waving in the boiling water. Having not made very much pasta, I believed it was done… I was very wrong. After putting the hot dog and pasta on a cutting board, the pasta quickly dried out, hardened, and snapped at the hot dog base. Leaving me with a perforated hot dog and undercooked pasta.

Thankfully, this undercooked pasta was easily resolved by simply boiling it more. But, I now could not roll the pasta and hot dog into a nice roll up with the sauce and cheese inside. So I applied the sauce and cheese to the tortilla instead. Then placed the hot dog with the pasta loosely around it into the tortilla and wrapped it all up.

Now to the frying. I drained the water from my pan, put down some vegetable oil and started cooking it. And the tortilla being too small comes back up here. As you can see in the photo it started unwrapping.

With everything else going wrong and this a the end I started treating it more like a quesadilla than a burrito. I got it crisp “enough” and but my losses before everything started spilling out.

Initial Thoughts

After my cavalcade of mess ups, how was the finished product? Interesting. Not like anything else I have had before and good enough for me to try again. But with a few thought out changes this time.

Firstly, a different pasta. Something with more volume. Secondly, bigger tortilla, so I could use the entire hot dog and get a good wrap around it.

For the cooking process… Well I will get to that.

The Second Attempt

Today I tried again and I won’t be going into as much detail as I did before, except where things are different.

So, this time I started boiling the water as I was stabbing the hot dog with spaghetti. I also set a timer for how long the spaghetti was supposed to take to be done. This solved most of my initial problems.

The spaghetti did not need nearly as much to get across the hot dog. Boiling before placing meant I didn’t have as much of a chance to get distracted. And the timer meant I wouldn’t pull it out so early this time… more on that in a bit.

With the spaghetti cooked, removed, and not broken, I got to apply the sauce and cheese as was intended. Then I rolled it up and put it in the, much larger, torotilla.

Frying up the tortilla went super easy this time. The tortilla only tried to fall apart once and was easily fixed.

The finished product looked good and tasted fairly good… with one small problem.

Final Thoughts

I have been alluding to one problem with today’s attempt. So enough beating around the bush: what was it? I didn’t boil the spaghetti long enough. The timer was set for the 10 minutes the box suggested, but took it out with 2 minutes on the timer. I figured this was much less than the box expected to be cooked in a way that should cook it a little faster. But I was wrong.

Turns out I got the spaghetti to about the point of Al Dente… Maybe? At least as I understand it. Which is to say, the core of the pasta was a bit hard. This put a bit of a damper on the final taste. But I still enjoyed the final product.

So, what would I do differently if I did this again? Simple: Skip the pasta. I would make a burrito with a hot dog (polish sausage) as it’s core. This will make cooking it simpler and let me add more flavors more easily.

This was an enjoyable experiment that led me to a final recipe I will likely enjoy several times in the future.