Hot Dogs and Health

I love hot dogs. As a kid my family ate very little meat, let alone the forbidden “processed foods” of which hot dogs were the poster child. After all, it was well known that you could not trust what was in those processed foods. I have some ill-formed image of butchers scraping the floor bits to make hot dogs. Undoubtedly some of this is exaggerated or fabricated by my imaginative childhood fantasies, and yet a simple price comparison would beg the question: what is in a hot dog? At a quick glance an Oscar Meyer hot dog costs $2.99/lb and often you can find ground beef for the same price! How is that possible? I honestly do not know, but I have to imagine it comes from using cheaper ingredients (remember pink slime?) than just ground beef. 

As a young farmer and aspiring sausage maker I remember wondering: how are hot dogs made? Are hot dogs necessarily unhealthy? Was it just my upbringing? I believe that grass-fed beef has many health and ecological benefits, could we make a hot dog from our grass-fed beef? The answer has been many years in the making and today we have some hot dogs for you to try.

So how are hot dogs made and what goes into a hot dog? The hot dog is originally a German sausage called a frankfurter or wiener – depending on whether you’re from Frankfurt or Vienna. According to hot dog history, the original frankfurter was a pork sausage, and when it was brought to Vienna a creative sausage maker mixed beef and pork together to make the Wiener. Thus a frankfurter is a pork sausage and a wiener is a mix of beef and pork.

Wieners, frankfurters or hot dogs are what is called an emulsified sausage. This is part of what gives the hot dog its distinct and in my opinion delightful texture. A regular Italian or breakfast sausage is made by mixing spices gently into the meat, grinding the meat and stuffing it all into the casing. When you bite into a regular sausage you can taste and feel the small chunks of meat contributing to the texture. Hot dogs, and also bologna have a smooth and uniform texture. This is achieved by a process similar to making mayonnaise (also emulsification), and therein lies the magic.

So how does one make a hot dog? You can find all sorts of amazing videos on youtube about how different hot dogs are made in huge factories. Indeed commercial hot dogs are one of the most processed foods you can buy. It does not have to be that way. It just so happens that the hot dog’s emulsified texture means that it can hide other ingredients very well. “Fillers,” are often added to hot dogs as a cheap way to add weight, and you can’t taste them! I want to share how our friends at Eagle Bridge Smokehouse make the hot dogs we are so proud to offer today.

How we make our hot dogs:

• The first step is getting the fat content correct. For pork this is similar to our regular sausage but for beef we need a slightly higher fat content than our regular ground beef and so we add some brisket meat. 
• This meat is ground and mixed with spices just like a regular sausage and then it is put in a special machine called a bowl chopper. (If you were doing this at home you would use a food processor, or your hands and a lot of elbow grease!) 
• Then the ground meat is mixed vigorously with some cold water until just the right consistency is achieved. 
• Our now emulsified sausage is stuffed into natural sheep casings and hung on racks to await smoking.
• The sausages then are hot smoked, which means they are smoked using hickory smoke until the sausages are fully cooked.

Needless to say I’m excited to share our hot dogs with all of our customers and, if I’m honest, I’m apprehensive. I consider it my job and mission in life to educate our customers and as many people as possible on how our food choices impact health. The health of our bodies, the health of our land, the health of our neighbors land, even the health of the ecosystem we pass on to the next generation. The use of nitrates in our food to prevent serious illness is necessary at times. Where possible we keep our food safe without the use of any nitrates, like in our No-Nitrate Bacon, No-Nitrate Ham Roasts or No-Nitrate Ham Steaks. Hot dogs present a conundrum: use of synthetic nitrates, with known quantities or use of celery powder/seed, which is a natural substance and feels “better” in some ways. For a deep dive into the chemistry of nitrates check out my blog post about it.

In the end I believe moderation is key and both choices are good. As a sausage mentor friend once said: “eat nitrates and use your cell phone less, you’ll live longer.” In the meantime I would like to hear from any of my fellow hot dog connoisseurs out there. Try our hot dogs, let us know what you think. Compare the All Beef Hot Dogs to our Pork Hot Dogs. I’ve created a Hot Dog Taster Box for you to try and if you fill out my Hot Dog Taster Survey you will get a coupon for $5 off for use on your next order.

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Update on baby horses:

We were relieved and thrilled to welcome a new baby foal on the farm this week. Mable, Chad’s second mare, had her foal and so far so good (at the time of this writing I still do not know the gender). The emotional upheaval of birth followed so closely with death has us all more attentive to the little one than normal. Are they nursing enough? Are they having a difficult time getting up…oh good they got up. The first few days of life are critical and there was no better reminder of this than losing such a young foal last week.

Thank you to the many folks who reached out last week about our foal. I share our stories both as a form of education and as catharsis. Thank you for sharing back.

Maple Update:

The sap has been flowing with cold nights and warm days. Lewis and I have been dutifully boiling the sap in our cinder block evaporator. With only 3 taps our predicted syrup production is relatively low, however we have already hauled over 20 gallons of sap (estimated by a 7 year old) and this feels like a lot. After all, 2 gallons of sap is over 30% of his body weight!

The favorite afternoon snack for the neighborhood has been a sip of warm “sweet sap” from the evaporator. As days go by it gets sweeter and so does their excitement. I’ve also noticed sticky door handles, sticky gloves and more than one sugar crash before dinner. During our last boil, in fact, the sap was “too sweet” to drink, only good to taste. We must be approaching syrup!