Make the Bread, Buy the Butter - Jennifer Reese [81]
Meanwhile, I decide to clean the mess on the grinder. Raw pink hot dog paste has worked its way into every crevice of the machine, and to get it out I have to probe delicate orifices with a bit of damp paper towel wrapped around a toothpick. Thirty minutes later, when I have almost finished detailing the grinder, it is time to remove the meat from the freezer again. I put it in the food processor to whip it to a “uniform paste.”
Because I dislike stuffing sausages, I momentarily consider making hot dog patties, but unlike breakfast sausage hot dogs by definition are tubular. So I pull out the tub of sheep intestine casings—limp, translucent, and packed in salt—and soak them briefly in cool water. Then I affix an intestine to the end of the grinder’s sausage-stuffing attachment. I feed the mixture through the grinder one last time to midwife eight stubby, phallic wieners.
I pull out the bag of hickory chips, rig up the stovetop smoking apparatus, and smoke the dogs for 45 minutes. They shrink and torque and I plunge them briefly into a bowl of ice water to chill. Then they go back into the refrigerator.
Day 4. I grill those hot dogs for dinner.
How are they? Good! No better or worse than the usual, but good. I have achieved the fine-grained, baloney-like texture of hot dogs you might buy at a baseball game, minus the disconcerting stray cartilage chips. Cosmetically they don’t quite measure up—they are squat and bulbous—but all in all, I am proud.
But they have been an expensive endeavor. Ruhlman estimates that his recipe yields two and a half pounds of hot dogs from two and a half pounds of short rib meat, but I end up with a scant pound and a half of stuffed dogs. Short rib meat costs six dollars a pound and hot dogs, on average, cost five dollars a pound. This means I had made ten-dollar-per-pound hot dogs. With a tremendous amount of work, I had been able to turn a respectable cut of beef—so delicious braised and served with potatoes and a glass of zinfandel—into very expensive wieners.
They are, on the other hand, despite the dose of pink salt, comparatively healthful hot dogs, frankfurters that a person can eat without any squeamishness. And most people I know feel squeamish about hot dogs.
This is rational. The vast majority of commercial dogs are made of industrial meat scraps, which often include animal skins. In a typical mass-market hot dog, the percentage of fat—including, in some cases, trans fats—is almost twice as high as the fat naturally enrobing a beef short rib. Big food companies make hot dogs with mechanically separated meat (msm) that, as described matter-of-factly by the United States Department of Agriculture, is “a paste-like and batter-like meat product produced by forcing bones with attached edible meat under high pressure through a sieve or similar device to separate the bone from the edible meat tissue.” I read that and I wanted to unread it. I bet you do, too. Beef franks no longer contain this “batter-like” substance because of the risk of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (mad cow disease), but chicken and pork hot dogs do.
Yet however nauseating the concept of “msm”—and it is very nauseating—should we really use short ribs in hot dogs? If we make our sausage from good cuts like the short rib, aren’t we eliminating a vehicle for the less alluring bits and therefore being even more wasteful than we already are?
I will probably continue to eat store-bought hot dogs occasionally and squeamishly.
Make it or buy it? Buy it.
MUSTARD
The first time I made mustard, it was so pungent my eyes watered and my nose ran. I packed the jar in the