The purple “Dawg” of Masters hits the scene

The+purple+Dawg+of+Masters+hits+the+scene

Sang Bae, Features and Arts Editor

It’s definitely purple enough to put Barney to shame.

The Dawg House concocted its “Dawg of the Month” in our Masters image: a deep fried hotdog piled high with sriracha sauce, barbeque onion sauce, bacon bits and enough purple coleslaw to get a few heads rolling. With a price tag of $4.50, the question remains: is it worth taking a bite?

If you guys want my answer, yes. From my experience, anything from the culinary minds of Robb Dublilier and Jeff Lee is worth a taste. Taking a bite out of this hotdog feels like an entire battle of textures and tastes. The purple creaminess and slight crunch of coleslaw fights to win supreme over warring factions of bacon and barbeque onion sauce combination while the hotdog splits open by the edges of my teeth, bursting into a sensation of satisfying confusion. It’s hard to taste any of the sriracha, but everything mixes well enough to not bother trying to taste it.

However, not everyone at Masters thought this hotdog was a smash hit. From the 10 taste testers taking Introduction to Journalism I had try the Masters Dawg, most of the criticism centers around the purple coleslaw. Leo Psaros described the Masters Dawg as a “purple slime dog” while Jack Murray wrote that the flavors didn’t mix and that the coleslaw “threw the dawg off”. However, Sung Min Hong wrote that he looked past its appearance to really enjoy the hotdog, only to comment that the amount of ingredients slightly lessened the impact of the taste.

To establish some semblance of a control group, I had the six remaining students try a “classic Dawg” from the main menu. Far from the mixed responses of the other group, Phil Minton went as far as describe the Mac Attack Dawg as “amazing” while Naomi Nivar thought the Hawaiian dog had a satisfying balance of flavors that had her taste everything.

The Dawg House ultimately takes the risk of stretching the creative limits of the hotdog, striking gold with a satisfying experience, concocting a failed experiment meant to fade away, or something in between. Where the Masters Dawg falls in that spectrum depends on the person. But as Dublilier once said, “The crazier the ingredients, the better the taste,” and there nothing 0wrong in taking a chance with that kind of philosophy.