HOT DOGS _ How It's Made

Hot dogs are sausages in a roll. It's likely that German sausage makers came up with the idea. German immigrants were selling them from push carts in New York's Bowery as far back as the 1860s. A century and a half later, hot dogs are still big on the street. To make standard hot dogs, they use a mix of pork, beef and chicken. The cuts they use are called trimmings. Pieces of meat left over from cutting steaks or pork chops and they're mainly muscle tissue. They grind the trimmings the same way butchers grind hamburger meat by pushing the cuts through a metal plate pierced with holes. They add processed chicken trimmings to the ground meat then mix in food starch, salt and other flavourings. The starch thickens the mix while the flavourings vary depending on where the hot dogs are to be sold because people in different regions have different tastes. They spray water into the mix and blend everything together in a big rectangular vat. A dash of clear corn syrup adds sweetness. They mix in more water which helps disperse the ingredients and make the hot dogs juicier. Another machine then shreds the meat batter into a fine emulsion and vacuums out any air. They load rolls of cellulose tubing into the stuffing machine. It pumps the meat puree into a long casing twisting it every 13 centimetres, the length of one hot dog. It takes just 35 seconds to make a chain of hot dogs that would span a football pitch twice. Then they link three of those hot dog chains for an even longer string and load several at a time into another machine which drapes the hot dogs onto moving racks. It's all carefully timed so that a twist always lands on the bar. The racks shunt the hot dogs through a liquid smoke shower then through an oven with several cooking zones. The liquid smoke seeps through the casing and adds flavour to the dogs as they bake. Hot out of the oven, they drench these franks in very cold and salty water to chill them in preparation for packaging. The hot dogs then file down to an unloading zone. Here a machine pulls them off the bars onto a conveyor. The hot dogs slide off the conveyor into metal containers. If you've been wondering what those black stripes are on the casings, all is about to be revealed, or should we say, unpeeled. The stripe is a marker. When they strip off that casing, the absence of a black stripe means that the hot dog is done and ready for packaging. Inside the peeler machine, a tiny knife slits each casing along the top then steamy air blows the casings right off the dogs. This machine peels 700 hot dogs every minute. An inspector checks to make sure the casing has been completely removed and that there are no defects. Then it's into a device that looks like a plastic bicycle chain. The sprockets position the hot dogs for packaging. They manufacture an incredible 300,000 hot dogs an hour. That's close to two and a half million per shift. So they really do churn them out like it's a sausage factory. Which of course it is. Good thing really. Means lunch shouldn't be a problem.