Part hamburger, part hot dog. Say hello to the Hamdog.

Is it a hamburger? Is it a hot dog?

Yes and yes.

A man in Australia has patented the Hamdog — part hamburger, part hot dog — and hopes to bring it to the United States next year.

“America’s a bloody big place, they consume around 50 billion burgers a year,” food entrepreneur Mark Murray of Perth told CNBC. “If we pick up even 1 percent of that market, then that’s still around $2.5 billion a year.”

The Hamdog looks like a hamburger with handlebars — or the planet Saturn, flattened.

A hamburger patty with a slit on top holds a long hot dog. The zany marriage of meats sits on top of a custom-made bun and is topped with lettuce, pickles, cheese and several sauces. It costs the equivalent of $6 in U.S. dollars.

The how-to-eat-it part is up to you.

Start at one end of that giant frankfurter? Bite into the burger part first?

“I had the idea on holiday when I was leaving a bar in Nashville,” Murray told CNBC.

“I grabbed a burger and a hot dog as I was really hungry. I was sitting in the car eating them both at the same time, and my wife was looking at me like I was an idiot.”

An idiot like a fox, it turns out.

When he presented the Hamdog on the Australian version of “Shark Tank” last year, the judges just laughed at him. But now he has patents in Australia and the United States and formally launched it two months ago, CNBC reports.

He’ll have competition on American shores. A bar in Decatur, Georgia, already serves a much messier version of what it also calls a “Hamdog” — a hot dog wrapped in a beef patty, deep-fried then smothered with chili, fries and a fried egg.

Murray is selling the Hamdog at fairs and markets and sporting events.

With a lot of international media attention coming his way in recent weeks, he’s hoping Hamdog franchises, at $10,000 a pop, will get scooped up in America.

He’s already thinking even further outside the bun.

“We’ve had requests of all sorts for gluten-free, vegan and vegetarian Hamdogs,” he told News.com.au. “Once the product is out there and that process is sorted, we’ll start experimenting.”

This story was originally published September 22, 2016 at 8:35 AM with the headline "Part hamburger, part hot dog. Say hello to the Hamdog.."