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Food junkies JP Lambiase and Julia Goolia of Orlando, Florida, are the architects behind Hellthy Junk Food—a website and YouTube channel featuring all sorts of unbelievably outrageous junk food creations that the couple makes themselves! In honor of our 100th anniversary, JP and Julia partnered with us to create something explosive—a grilled cheese volcano with tomato soup lava!
With Robert Ripley’s aspirations to have his very own volcano in mind— a feat he attempted in 1945 —Hellthy junk Food decided to build their own unbelievable volcano out of grilled cheese and tomato soup:
In the end, this volcano required four cans of family-sized tomato soup, six loaves of bread, six packages of American cheese, and one jar of mayonnaise. The mayo was used in lieu of butter, and—according to JP—elevates the grilled cheese. The ingredients, plus two hours and 15 minutes in the kitchen resulted in a mountain of tomatoey magma and cheese with a total calorie count nearing 11,000.
After witnessing their crazy creation for ourselves, we had to know more at this dynamic duo, so we sat them down for an interview:
Q: What inspired you to start making crazy food and posting to YouTube?
A: We started the channel as a way of eating out less and still being able to enjoy our favorite restaurant foods at home. It was never our intention to make crazy food on YouTube, but it eventually turned into that when we realized our channel wasn’t so much instructional as it was entertaining. It wasn’t until we created the Pizza Cake over three years ago that the crazy food started to happen. Being a little odd or different in the food world evolved into what we are today.
Q: What has been the most difficult thing to make?
A: It would have to be the Junk Food House. We spent days drawing up blueprints, building, crafting, designing, etc. We wanted to show our junk food take on a gingerbread house for the holidays, making it out of our favorite savory junk foods.
Q: Do you eat everything?
A: No. We were both raised not to waste food, though, so every chance we get, when it’s something unmanageable for the two of us to consume, we invite friends over to eat with us. The best example of this is when we invited two competitive eaters over to our house and together they both polished off over 8 lb of food. Mind you, that was just an appetizer for them. They got a 32-in pizza after that.
Q: What was your most disgusting creation?
A: JP has created a lot of disgusting dishes, such as the Giant KFC Drumstick made out of a dog bone, frequently cross-contaminating various proteins and stuffing random food inside other food. But our most disgusting creation of all time has to be the ketchup and mayonnaise ice cream.
Q: Are there any creations that turned out so bad they were never released as an episode?
A: The only creation that we can recall that never made it as an episode was the Churro Fries; it just never panned out. We’ll show our fails on camera because at the end of the day it’s all about being 100 percent transparent with our audience. Nobody’s perfect. It’s okay to fail, and if you can learn from it, it’s that much better.
