Tips, Tools, & Anecdotes « (y)our food choices™

Sauteed onions and peppers on a Let's Be Frank dog.

Hot dogs! Love ‘em or hate ‘em, everyone has an experience with this ubiquitous and oh, so traditional American food. Whether you call them red hots or white hots, franks, wieners or dogs, your favorite bun filler is a smooth, savory and sometimes snappy sausage with a long and storied history. How do you prepare your hot dogs? Do you grill them, pan fry them or boil them? What’s your favorite brand? Sabrett, Vienne Beef, Hebrew National or the classic Oscar Mayer? And what to put on them? Is ketchup OK or a big no-no? How about sauerkraut and onions … or pickles? Whatever your brand, however you cook them and whatever tops them, with the 4^th of July holiday behind us, the hot dog days of summer are in full swing.

Chopped tomatoes, onions, and pickles on a dog.

Now, this blog is about our food choices and when it comes to hot dogs, we’ve changed things up a bit in recent years. While most major national brand hot dogs are made from real, recognizable cuts of meat (the horror stories of pieces parts in hot dogs are mostly fiction), they do contain preservatives and curing agents that aren’t all that good for us in large quantities. We’ve stopped buying wieners that contain nitrates and nitrites. It’s a personal choice and we’ve made it knowing that the jury is still out on the safety of these additives.

Just as important, we’ve come to a point in our meat consumption where we are not only concerned about our health but that of the animals that become our food. So, we tend to buy grass fed beef dogs that contain no preservatives. It leaves us with fewer, but arguably better, choices. The beef dogs we recently purchased from Let’s Be Frank are monstrously long and perfectly delicious! The fat beef franks sold by Prather Ranch are amazing and Steve has to practically chain himself to his desk to keep him from wandering over to the Ferry Building for a regular hot dog “snack” break. Of course, when visiting Chicago, we’re likely to fudge a little on the additives issue because those Vienna Beef dogs are just too hard to resist. At home, however, we’re committed to buying and consuming the healthiest dogs we can find.

If you like your hotdogs big, Let's be Frank is sure to please!

Look, everyone has some sense of hot dog culture, but if you’d like to know more about the history of the hot dog and the regional differences that make each of our experiences unique, check out Bruce Kraig’s book Hot Dog: A Global History. It’s a little academic, but it covers all the bases and hell, who wouldn’t like to have a little hot dog trivia in their back pocket for the next neighborhood cookout?

Enjoy!

Once you kill a cow you got to make a burger. –Lady Gaga

What’s the best burger you have ever eaten? And please don’t say McDonald’s, Wendy’s or some other fast food franchise mess. In our opinion, those places are garbage pits. To us, the best burgers are the ones we cook at home. Why? Because we know what’s in them and we have a special ingredient that makes them the best they can be–Butter. We don’t fry them in butter, we add a small pat, about a tablespoon, in the center of the burger and then press a little indentation in the top of the rounded patty with our thumb so the burger will cook more evenly. Since it’s difficult for us to barbecue at our apartment, we use a grill pan to fry them up. Grilled for 3-4 minutes on each side, we end up with a medium rare burger. Since the burger meat we use is grass-fed, and from only one cow, we’re not worried about getting salmonella. If we were to purchase hamburger meat in the grocery store we would cook it longer, until it’s well-done. The reason for the well-done burger is that there are so many cows being made into hamburger meat and because it’s all mixed together if even one cow in the bunch is sick it will ruin hundreds, even thousands of pounds of meat—not a pleasant thought but true. Even with a well-done burger though, the little butter trick gives it a little extra fat so it doesn’t get completely dried out.

Burger toppings can be anything your heart desires, but for a really nice burger try caramelized onions and blue cheese. If you want something traditional there’s always that big slice of real cheddar cheese. Throw on some crisp bacon, sautéed mushrooms and barbecue sauce and it’s a big messy feast. This 4th of July, however you top your burger, try the “butter in the middle” tip. It will keep your burger nice and juicy even if you use store bought hamburger, and if you do, make sure you cook it until it’s well done!