Frankenfurter
Darling Corduroy -
Even though I know hot dogs can’t be good for me, I just can’t say “no” when they’re available at a backyard barbeque or even in my normally healthful fridge. So, I know this is a loaded question, but what are hot dogs made of? Whatever it is, is it safe to eat? Are some dogs better than others? I mean,could they be “graded” like normal meat, or would they all just get an F?
Thanks,
I Put the Hot in Hot Dog
Dear Hottie:
Uh-oh, don’t let my wife know you’re calling me darling; she might get jealous.
Everything in a hot dog is edible; otherwise manufacturers wouldn’t be allowed to put them on the market. In general terms, a hot dog is a sausage made of a 5-4-3 forcemeat: 5 parts meat, 4 parts fat, 3 parts ice or ice water, plus seasonings stuffed into a casing. As with any sausage, it is the recipient of, well, the “less glamorous” parts of the animal: the parts that are more difficult to sell when they’re packaged as themselves: which is to say, the various scraps left over after the animal has been segmented into saleable cuts, etc. If a weiner includes organs (heart or kidney, for example), the organ and the breed of animal it came from must be named in the ingredients list. Different types of hot dogs, though, have different requirements.
Kosher hot dogs can only be made from animals and cuts that are considered to be kosher: which is to say, in the case of hot dogs, they are all-beef franks from an appropriately-slaughtered bovine (killed by an observant Jew with an extremely sharp knife with a single cut to the neck of an animal that has not been frightened) and all blood and blood vessels have been removed from the meat before it is ground to become the hot dog. You may have seen the ads for kosher hot dogs on TV which brag about how they don’t have any butts. This is because kosher law dictates that the meat in their hot dogs does not come from the hindquarters of the animal. This relates to Genesis 32:32, which is perhaps least confusingly translated in the New American Standard version of the Bible, “Therefore, to this day the sons of Israel do not eat the sinew of the hip which is on the socket of the thigh, because he touched the socket of Jacob’s thigh in the sinew of the hip.” Basically, it means unless the sciatic nerve is removed, the muscle is unclean according to kosher laws.
Turkey hot dogs can be assumed to come from the scraps that are left after processing turkey meat or from mechanically separated poultry meat: meat gained by forcing the leftover bones through a seive to recover whatever is possibly useable from the carcass. There is no limit to how much of the meat in a turkey frank can have been mechanically separated, but the ingredients list must specifically refer to it having been mechanically separated. All of the meat in Oscar Mayer Turkey Franks, for instance, is obtained via this process.
If you are concerned about the contents of the hot dog you’re eating, I’d say the easiest guideline is to buy kosher. When it comes to the manner in which the animals that went into the sausage were slaughtered and the way the meat was handled thereafter, the people making the sausage answer to a higher authority than the USDA.
Have a culinary concern? Recipe request? Food fascination? Email me! I’ll respond in a future post