Once in the smokehouse—a series of narrow holding chambers in which hickory smoke circulates—the hot dogs hang at about 120 degrees for an hour. This “tempering phase,” Bodman says, helps set up the “protein matrix”—in other words, the slow temperature rise ensures a good bind of the protein, water, and fat. The temperature in the smokehouse then rises to about 180 degrees. When they’ve reached an internal temperature of 162 degrees, the dogs are quickly chilled.
And there it is, the country’s best hot dog.
Others have their own recipes, of course. Frank Ruta, of D.C.’s Palena, stumbled across the formula for his superb dog by chance. He’d been working on a mortadella, the Italian emulsified sausage that is not unlike baloney, and stuffed some leftover forcemeat into hog casings. He served one to a friend who said, “This tastes a lot like a hot dog,” and the next thing he knew, it had become the hit of his café menu. Passing pork, pork liver, veal, and spices such as allspice and nutmeg through a grinder several times and then puréeing it in a food processor, sometimes twice, he has been able to create what Tom Sietsema, restaurant critic for The Washington Post, has called “a sausage of distinction.”
Independent sausagemakers once routinely smoked their own dogs, but with industry giants like Oscar Mayer and Hebrew National—as well as the more specialized companies like Vienna Beef and Milwaukee’s Klement’s Sausage Company—pumping out millions of them, fewer individuals go to the trouble. Empire Market, in College Point, Queens, and Kurowycky Meat Products, in Manhattan, still do, reports writer and hot dog expert Ed Levine. In my hometown of Cleveland, where there is a great sausage culture owing to its German and eastern European populations, there is apparently only one man who makes his own hot dogs.
Norm Heinle, age 61, of The Sausage Shoppe, creates a superb German wiener, as he calls it, from beef and pork. A devoted sausage man since he began working, at age 13, in the store he would come to own, he makes at least 50 pounds of dogs a week, and sells them retail from the premises.
While I bow before such a show of individualism, I also know that the hot dog requires a great deal of work and care. Given that he could just buy Vienna Beef dogs and sell them in his store instead, why does he bother? He paused briefly, and with a smile that was part grimace, he said, “Pride.”
I bought a bundle of these handcrafted hot dogs to grill at home and take the edge off my hot dog craving. But it was a force all its own. I boiled some water, dropped the dog in, covered the pot, and turned off the flame. When the dog had come up to heat in this gentle way, I set it on a cutting board. I sliced. The interior was perfectly smooth. I pressed on it with the knife, and juices flooded to the cut surface. Then the taste: firm texture and subtle flavor of garlic mingling with coriander and a bit of smoke, noticeable but only when you looked for it. Then a handheld bite—crack!
Here truly was great American craftsmanship, handmade and proud.
What, you were expecting a recipe?
Although I grew up in the shadow of Shea Stadium, I’ve never been to a baseball game. While my friends were doing the seventh-inning stretch and devouring franks, I was inside, glued to Graham Kerr’s Galloping Gourmet. But I’ve always been a die-hard hot dog fan.
So when the chance to make a homemade hot dog in the gourmet test kitchens came along, I rejoiced. Sausagemaking is just the right mix of fatty meat cookery and exquisite Play-Doh satisfaction, and I imagined that working with emulsified-meat sausages would be as groovy. (While pasty wet meat may not sound pretty, it makes my mouth water.)
The all-beef hot dog was ruled out immediately after writer Michael Ruhlman kindly warned me that beef fat can be a home cook’s worst nightmare. Without the proper industrial equipment, he said, rendered beef fat just doesn’t play ball. If you try raw, unrendered fat, he added, you’ll be picking out connective tissue and other gnarly bits while still struggling with the unsportsmanlike fat.
After deliberation, we decided to try a beef hot dog using pork fat. I mail-ordered my specialty ingredients: hog and sheep casings, pink salt (a PC name for nitrites), and dextrose. When they arrived, two days later, it was just like Christmas—only with intestines instead of tinsel.
I cleared a wide work area. I soaked and rinsed the casings (always a gory thrill) before chilling and cubing the meat and fat. I then chilled, ground twice, and processed, methodically monitoring the temperature of the fatty eraser-pink mass like a mad scientist.
I’d like to tell you it was a piece of cake and that I’m the new emulsified-meat spokesmodel. But the truth is, I never got to stuff, smoke, poach, grill, or eat.
I failed. I had fat globules where I should have had silk. Perhaps it was the grinder, perhaps it was the fat, perhaps it was the cook. Hot dogs are a much trickier business than I’d imagined.
I spent the next eternity cleaning the grinder, food processor, and meat-spattered counters. The upside—my hands were creamy soft from handling all that fat. The downside—I cannot offer you a great do-it-yourself dog. (I also smelled a bit funky on the train ride home.)
Defeated, I spilled into a local hot dog boutique and ate two dogs loaded with toppings. The only cleanup required was of my mustard-spattered grin. I had accepted that some endeavors are just better left to commercial operations—or fanatics. —Maggie Ruggiero
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