The Spam Dog is too much of a good-ish thing

For reasons that are not clear, the man who unleashed Spam onto the world kept a file filled with nasty letters from World War II soldiers who were forced to survive on his canned meat, the one with a shelf life measured in years, not days. Jay Hormel called it his Scurrilous File.

“If they think Spam is terrible, they ought to have eaten the bully beef we had in the last war. Maybe that’s where the verb ‘to beef’ came from. Maybe the verb ‘to spam’ will come out of this war,” Hormel told the New Yorker in 1945.

Hormel could not have predicted the worst abuses of the internet, but he clearly envisioned a day when the name of his beloved/abhorred product would be repurposed into an epithet. To almost every online denizen on earth, “spam” is synonymous with unsolicited, unwanted junk, the kind of stuff that gets trapped in computer folders that, unlike the letters in Hormel’s file drawers, no one ever touches.

In a sense, you could apply the same pejorative to the new Spam Dog, a product that no one needed. You could argue that Hormel, the company behind Spam, has spammed us with its Spam Dog. The link is being promoted to food-service owners, the kind of stadium operators who have satisfied our salty, deep-fried cravings just fine without Hormel’s campaign to Spam them. The Spam Dog is now available at select stadiums, restaurants and convenience stores, including ABC and 7-Eleven outlets in Hawaii, where locals have a love-hate relationship with the product.

Because Spam is not part of my regular diet, I thought I should reacquaint myself with the meat, which is available not just in cans, but also in single-serving pouches. (The packaging for the latter boasts every slice contains 9 grams of protein, just in case you gym rats want to trade your whey protein isolate powder for a stack of Spam.) I pulled a slice from its pouch and immediately realized, much to my dismay, that it’s as pink as a newborn piglet, courtesy of its curing agent, sodium nitrite. The meat is also rather slimy. You can’t get this thing into a hot skillet fast enough.

I fried up the slice for a breakfast sandwich, in which Spam took the place of a traditional sausage patty. I topped the canned meat with folded eggs and cheddar cheese, then tucked the stack inside a sourdough English muffin, all toasted and buttered. I took a bite. It was — I don’t know how else to say this — so gross. The eggs and cheese did little to mute the screaming level of salt in the meat. Worse, the patty radiated an aroma not found in nature, unless the nature in question is the mechanical hum of the factory floor. The only thing that made the Spam palatable was an outrageous amount of Crystal Hot Sauce.

I threw half the sandwich in the trash bin outside, and prayed for the raccoons that would stumble upon it later.

The Spam Dog has more ingredients than the canned stuff, which, no matter what you may think of it, has been unfairly maligned as “mystery meat.” Classic Spam has only six ingredients, all of which are easy to pronounce, if not identify by sight. (Who among us without a chemistry degree or charcuterie background could ID sodium nitrite?) The Spam Dog adds a few more to the mix, including safflower oil and “flavoring,” which covers a broad spectrum of spices, oils and aromatics. But the one addition that stands out is dehydrated pork stock, a potential game changer.

The first challenge of the Spam Dog is finding one, which is not as easy as Hormel makes it sound. Rather than road-trip to LMCU Ballpark in Comstock Park, Michigan — home of the West Michigan Whitecaps minor league baseball team and one of the few ballparks carrying the Spam Dog — I asked the Hormel media team for locations closer to Washington. They pointed me to the Casual Pint, a midsize chain that promotes itself as a “craft beerstro.” It has two locations in Northern Virginia.

When I landed at the Casual Pint in Falls Church, Virginia, I discovered the pub offered the Spam Dog with two preparations. One was basic, nothing more than a dog topped with squiggles of mustard and ketchup, then tucked into a potato roll. The other was a nod to Hawaii: a dog adorned with a sweet pineapple salsa and teriyaki aioli, then slipped into the same potato roll.

My first bite of the basic Spam Dog was a pleasant surprise. I was expecting, to borrow a phrase from Jim Gaffigan, nasty meat. Instead, I got a mouthful of juicy pork, its salt levels aggressive but not homicidal. The dehydrated stock had dialed up the pork flavor exponentially. The Spam Dog is pork to the power of two. I declared that I was a convert. I could see myself ordering a Spam Dog at a ballpark as a welcome alternative to the all-beef frank.

Four bites later, I retracted everything. The gurgling inside my stomach told me there was no way I would finish this dog, not even under duress. The accumulative effect of this processed frank — the salt, the oil, the dehydrated pork stock, the “flavoring” — was wreaking havoc on my system. The Hawaiian version simply added a layer of sweetness atop of this tidal wave of manipulated flavor.

The Spam Dog reminded me of competition barbecue, in which pitmasters inject their briskets with all sorts of enhancers to provide judges with one exquisite bite. This kind of turbocharged meat is not designed to be eaten as a meal. As with competition brisket, the Spam Dog can be enjoyed in a single, isolated bite. Anything more, and you’re likely looking for the nearest toilet, wondering whether you’ve just been spammed with another unnecessary item.