Thread by @mattbramanti

it's National Hot Dog day, so let's talk about these little guys

🧵

This is a hot dog

It’s a cooked sausage served in a slit bun and optionally topped with condiments

Let’s talk about the name first
There are a few theories

According to the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council, a unit of the American Meat Institute trade group, it probably originated in Germany as a reference to the dachshund

Another theory, definitely not endorsed by the American Meat Council, says it’s because dog meat was used in sausages in Saxony and Bavaria in the 19th century

Hot dogs are often labeled as “frankfurters,” “franks” or “wieners”

Traditionally a frankfurter is shorter, thicker and all pork, and a wiener is longer, slimmer and made from beef and pork

But now the U.S. Food and Drug Administration defines the standards for such things, and they’re all the same

Title 9, Chapter III, Subchapter A, Part 319, Subpart G, §319.180 of the Code of Federal Regulations:

Let’s be honest – we’re not talking about high-quality meat

A hot dog may be no more than 30 percent fat, no more than 40 percent fat and added water, no more than 15 percent poultry

Otherwise, it’s pretty much open season – beef, pork, chicken, turkey, mutton, goat, you name it

There are competing claims for the first hot dog – a sausage in a bun - in the United States

Some claim Anton Feuchtwanger first sold them in St. Louis

Some say it was Charles Feltman in Coney Island

Honestly it probably was neither man

Putting a sausage on a bun ain’t exactly rocket surgery

at any rate, by the 1930s they were the all-American food

Eleanor Roosevelt served them to King George VI during his first visit to the United States

His Majesty was a fan, according to The New York Times

Nowadays the leading brand of hot dogs across the Fruited Plain is Oscar Meyer

I have here a package of 8 Oscar Meyer jumbo beef franks, an ordinary and necessary business expense

Now we will examine the physical object

it's a cylinder with ~hemispherical ends, roughly 4.71 inches long and 0.92 inches in diameter

it weighs 1.793 oz., a little short of its nominal weight of 1.875 oz.

i attribute this discrepancy to the hot dog juice

i dried it off with a paper towel so it wouldn't get my drug-dealer scale all funky

here's what's in it:

everything a growing boy needs

the sodium phosphate allows it to hold more moisture, the sodium diacetate inhibits bacterial growth, the sodium nitrite cures the meat and the sodium ascorbate prevents the development of carcinogenic nitrosamines

How It’s Made did hot dogs
It’s not pretty, but let’s go

Here’s how the sausage is made

these dogs are pork, beef and chicken

trimmings are fed into a machine that grinds them to a fine consistency

Salt and spices are added to the mix

The exact recipe is often obscured by “natural flavor” on the label, but garlic, mustard and paprika are common

Water and a little corn syrup are added

At this point the meat is a smooth, revolting paste

The stuffing machine forces this paste into casings made of cellulose, at incredibly high speed

The casings are twisted every 5” or so, but they’re still linked together in a continuous chain

The chains are arranged on conveyor racks

These pass the dogs through a shower of liquid smoke flavor and then into an oven

They’re fully cooked in the oven

Then they pass through a shower of cold brine to stop the cooking process and get them ready for packaging

The chains are unwound on a conveyor

And fed into a machine that slits the casing and blows it off with hot air

this machine, like your mom, can handle more than 600 wieners a minute

The cold, uncased hot dogs are combined into bunches (of 10, for this brand) and packaged

So that’s how hot dogs are made

Let’s talk about how to prepare them

They’re already fully cooked - you could safely eat one right out of the package

But that’s nasty, and even my readers aren’t that drunk

I’m the oldest of 7 kids, so when my mama made hot dogs, she made a bunch of hot dogs

She boiled them in water

I prefer them grilled over domestic natural gas

But I want to try this
Skewer the dog, cut a spiral down it and stretch it out so you get more surface area for grilled yum-yums to form

or you can fry them up in a skillet

or let them roll around all day in a gas station

ok, your hot dog is warmed up by your favorite method

now how do you serve it?

the hot dog is a regional creature

The Vicar of Christ’s native hot dog is an all-beef frank with tomatoes, dill pickle, sport peppers, yellow mustard, chopped onions, fluorescent sweet relish and celery salt, on a poppy-seed bun

as it happens, I had one of these for lunch today

alas, no poppy seeds

The Sonoran hot dog or “Mexican hot dog” popular in Arizona is wrapped in bacon and topped with pinto beans, onions, tomatoes, salsa and mayonnaise, on a grilled bolillo

Seattle does them split, with cream cheese, grilled onions and raw jalapenos

Kansas City does them like a Reuben – sauerkraut, Swiss, Thousand Island dressing

The “Italian hot dog” from New Jersey often comes with two weenies, covered with fried potatoes, bell peppers, onions and deli mustard

As a son of Houston, my default hot dog is a James Coney Island coney, “all the way”

That’s a steamed dog in a steamed bun, with runny chili, cheese sauce, minced onions and yellow mustard

Three all the way and a Delaware Punch got billions of barrels of oil out of the ground for decades

So that’s the hot dog

Let me know how you like yours

If I missed anything or got anything wrong, let me know

and please suggest a topic for the next thread

Previous threads are here:

you might try food historian Bruce Kraig's "Hot Dog: A Global History," which is quite good amazon.com/Hot-Dog-Global…

or comedienne Jamie Loftus's "Raw Dog," which isn't
amazon.com/Raw-Dog-Naked-…

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