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Kitchen gadget review / cheese gun / Rhik Samadder Photograph: Jill Mead for the Guardian
What?
The Fondoodler ($30, fondoodler.com) is a hollow cartridge and ratcheted plunger mounted in a nozzled pistol, with heated tip. Discharges cheese.
Why?
Want to eat food that looks like radioactive worm casts and will eventually kill you? You, my friend, are in luck.
Well?
Some people believe a supreme intelligence loved us so much, he left us alone, to make our own choices. How would we live, what would we create? Behold the Fondoodler, an electric dairy glue gun that lets you pipe hot cheese like Polyfilla. “Lightly pull trigger until cheese extrudes from tip,” read the instructions, and you can’t help but think: “My God, what have we done?”
I’m looking at it right now, and I still don’t know what it is. First impressions are that it resembles one of those “pump up your junk” home devices that, once Googled, will be advertised to you for ever (#apparently #whoknows #notme). I push the cartridge through a block of red leicester – like taking a punch biopsy – then return it to the gun, and plug in to heat. The process “works” with any cheese – I pull the trigger and orange discharge wriggles forth on to Ryvita, where I write my name in coagulating fat. Then I draw some boobs, and then I’m out of ideas. Actively trying to doodle defeats the point, whatever the point of doodling with cheese is in the first place.
Fondoodler’s Instagram page suggest using hot monterey jack as mortar to build a cabin made of crackers. Fat chance. No one is going to do that, or follow the safety note that advises “do not apply melted cheese directly on to skin”. Because this is a tool destined for an accident on a stag-do hazing. I can picture the groom, comatose in a Czech Republic dormitory, while friends violently epilate his most intimate hairs and draw cheese ones on instead.
But this is what we want, isn’t it? The final word in idiocy, a device so pointless it can only be understood as art, and so messy it turns snacks into dirty protests. What is it? The perfect gadget for our times.
Redeeming features?
When Fonzie from Happy Days was finally arrested (he would be, he was older than those other kids, and his “office” was a toilet) I imagine the Fondoodler could be his prison nickname.
Counter, drawer, back of the cupboard?
Landfill, or the Smithsonian. I honestly don’t know. 1/5
[“Source-ndtv”]