PHOENIX -- Yours truly didn't expect to be covering a media gathering Thursday morning to learn a churro stuck in a chocolate long john donut, topped with frozen yogurt. Levy Restraurants executive chef Michael Snoke didn't think he'd be there either, even though he's the creater of the Churro Dog and the also-famous D-bat dog, an 18-inch corndog that sold at Chase Field more than 10,000 times last baseball season.
When social media takes the Churro Dog to international fame, these things happen.
So, here are all your churro dog questions answered.
When Snoke was prepping for a D-backs suite-holder event that included a cooking session with team president Derrick Hall and former player Luis Gonzalez last year, he and fellow catering supervisor Lisa Maynard were attempting to come up with the next hot dog hit.
"She says the words 'Churro Dog' to me, and then I had an immediate vision in my head of what this should be," Snoke said. "From there, we rolled it out at the suite-holder appreciation event. We swore them all to secrecy so nobody would get their hands on it, and here it is."
For a photo shoot, the Diamondbacks asked Snoke to put together a Churro Dog at 10 a.m. Wednesday. Just before 1 p.m., the team tweeted out a photo and posted it to Facebook, announcing the addition to the Chase Field menu. It didn't take much time to go viral. Within half an hour, it was trending in the United States.
"The fact that it's a dessert, it's got a kind of cool style to it," Snoke said. "It's a combination of not only a donut but you have the crispy churro, and then you have basically a sundae on top of it. I think it's a lot of fun."
After creating to the D-bat last year, Snoke said people around him joked that his legacy linked to a corndog. The attention it drew was so great, frats began making the 3,000-plus calorie meal at Chase Field an initiation ceremony for new members.
"I was like, really, this is going to be my epitaph?" Snoke said.
Nope, because the Churro Dog hype has already surpassed the popular D-bat. So with the D-bat expected to return in 2015, there's now the aptly-named Double-Dog Dare challenge: Consuming both the 18-inch corndog with fries, then finishing the meal with the Churro Dog.
"I would like to see somebody do that in one sitting, and I've seen somebody eat the entire D-back by themselves, but to top it off with this, I don't know. That might be a mess," Snoke said.
Chase Field will sell Churro Dogs at two locations during games: At kiosks on the main concourse near sections 114 and 123. Snoke hasn't begun crafting his next invention. The focus now is getting a relatively easy item to make out to customers efficiently. Based on the reaction upon the announcement, the lines could get long.
"That's why it's got to be worth the wait," Snoke said.
The Churro Dog will cost you $8.50 and 1,117 calories to burn off.
From his own mouth: "I've been in the business 27 years. I came into sports entertainment about 12 years ago in Detroit. Arizona was my home. After Super Bowl XL (hosted in Detroit), I wanted to come back and there was a position within the company here at Chase Field, and it was just a marriage."
Executive chef Michael Snoke, mastermind behind the Churro Dog.
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