What meat was the original hot dog?
hot dog
While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions.
Select Citation Style
Copy Citation
Share
Share
Share to social media
Give Feedback
External Websites
Feedback
Thank you for your feedback
Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.
External Websites
- British Broadcasting Corporation — Frankfurter Recipes
Print Cite
verifiedCite
While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions.
Select Citation Style
Copy Citation
Share
Share
Share to social media
Feedback
External Websites
Feedback
Thank you for your feedback
Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.
External Websites
- British Broadcasting Corporation — Frankfurter Recipes
Also known as: frankfurter, würstchen, wiener
Written by
Gregory Lewis McNamee
Contributing Editor, Encyclopædia Britannica.
Gregory Lewis McNamee
Fact-checked by
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Encyclopaedia Britannica’s editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree. They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors.
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Last Updated: Article History
Table of Contents
hot dogs
Related Topics: sausage . (Show more)
hot dog, also called frankfurter or wiener, sausage, of disputed but probable German origin, that has become internationally popular, especially in the United States.
Two European cities claim to be the birthplace of the sausage: Frankfurt, Germany, whence the byname frankfurter, and Vienna, Austria, whence the byname wiener. Frankfurt holds that it has been making the sausage for more than 500 years. Whatever its ultimate origins, German immigrants brought the food to New York in the 1860s, where street vendors sold them as “dachshund sausages,” presumably because of their shape. It is from this that the term hot dog derives, with the implied suggestion that the sausage really was made of dog flesh. The first attestation of the phrase used in that sense dates to 1884, and by 1892 it was in widespread usage around the United States.
Britannica Quiz
A World of Food Quiz
New York remained the epicentre of the hot dog for many years. In 1871 a German immigrant named Charles Feltman opened a popular stand at Coney Island, a beach and amusement park in Brooklyn, New York, forever associating the sausage with fun and leisure. Feltman would later find a competitor in a former employee of his, a Polish immigrant named Nathan Handwerker, who opened his Nathan’s Famous hot dog stand at Coney Island in 1916. A gifted marketer, Handwerker promoted the stand by sponsoring a Fourth of July hot dog eating contest, a tradition that continues today; the winner in 2020 set a record by devouring 76 hot dogs in 10 minutes.
By the time Nathan Handwerker opened his shop, hot dogs had become widespread throughout the United States. They were served by the thousands at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and they were standard fare at baseball parks around the country, just as they are today. Easily cooked at home and eaten on the move, the hot dog became a definitive American dish, with regional variations that include the Chicago dog (an all-beef hot dog served in a poppy seed bun with yellow mustard, bright green pickle relish, chopped onion, sliced tomato, dill pickle, sport peppers, and celery salt), the New York dog (with sauerkraut, brown mustard, and onions), and, from Mexico by way of Arizona, the Sonoran hot dog (with pinto beans, salsa, mayonnaise, and bacon). Some vendors have become culinary destinations, such as Papaya King in New York, Pink’s Hot Dogs in Los Angeles, and Ben’s Chili Bowl in Washington, D.C.
Inexpensive hot dogs are made of “trimmings,” cuts of pork and beef that have not been used for other purposes. These leftovers are ground into a paste and stuffed into casings—that is, encased in a tube traditionally made of intestine. (This is the source of the jocular name tube steak.) Kosher hot dogs, as well as more expensive brands of the sausage, are typically made solely from better cuts of beef, but the production method is largely the same.
Although they are seen as a quintessentially American dish, hot dogs are eaten well beyond the boundaries of the United States. U.S. Pres. Franklin Delano Roosevelt courted controversy when in 1939 he served hot dogs to a visiting king, George VI of Britain. Although some commentators criticized the dish as embarrassingly plebeian, the king asked for a second hot dog after finishing the first. Not surprisingly, hot dogs abound in Great Britain today and nearly everywhere in the world.
What are hot dogs really made of?
Email icon An envelope. It indicates the ability to send an email.
Share icon An curved arrow pointing right.
Twitter icon A stylized bird with an open mouth, tweeting.
Twitter LinkedIn icon The word «in».
LinkedIn Fliboard icon A stylized letter F.
Flipboard Facebook Icon The letter F.
Facebook Email icon An envelope. It indicates the ability to send an email.
Email Link icon An image of a chain link. It symobilizes a website link url.
Redeem now
After the steaks, chops, breasts, ribs, thighs, hams, tenderloins and briskets are removed, there’s a fair amount of gristle, fat and offal remaining on a butchered animal, and early on, people realized this could be put to good use.
One of these products is the hot dog, a classic of pre-cooked, processed meat.
Trimmings
The National Hot Dog & Sausage Council (NHDSC) notes that hot dogs, whether regular, turkey, pork or beef, begin with «trimmings.» A purposely-vague word, trimmings come in lots of shapes and sizes.
«The raw meat materials used for precooked-cooked products are lower-grade muscle trimmings, fatty tissues, head meat, animal feet, animal skin, blood, liver and other edible slaughter by-products.»
Pre-cooking
Because of the butchering process, the leftovers used in products like hot dogs often have a fair amount of bacteria, and so pre-cooking helps eliminate that. In addition, pre-cooking has the added benefit of helping to separate the remaining muscle meat, fat and connective tissues from the head and feet bones. Cooking also makes the trimmings more manageable.
Because of the different sizes and types of carcasses, there are different pre-cooking times for different animals (and different parts), although it typically occurs within the range of 150 to 190 degrees Fahrenheit.
Hot Dog Production
Like many other products, such as bologna and liver sausage, hot dogs and frankfurters are created by «meat emulsion,» although as the FAO notes, «meat batter» might be a more accurate term.
Higher quality products are made from top quality meats and no chemicals. Examples include kosher, all beef hot dogs that have no by-products, fillers or artificial colors or flavors.
Less expensive types of hot dogs will have chemicals, fats and water binding agents added, and for many of these, the production process is simple:
First pork and/or beef trimmings are ground up in a machine and then extruded through a metal sieve-like device so they resemble ground hamburger meat. At this point, ground chicken trimmings (if any) are added, and together, the mixture is blended (emulsified) until it looks like the aforementioned meat batter.
Now salt, ground spices and food starches (if you made this at home, you might use bread crumbs, flour or oatmeal) are added, along with some water and corn syrup or another sweetener. Toward the end of the process, more water is added, to get the batter to the proper consistency (no one wants a dry wiener).
The batter is «pureed again [and] the excess air is vacuumed out.» Next the emulsified meat is pumped into casings (usually cellulose but sometimes natural), and the strings of dogs are hung on racks and fully cooked in a smoke house. Sometimes hardwood smoke is added. Later, the dogs are showered in cold, salted water, and then, if cellulose casings were used, put through a peeler to remove the casings (natural casings are left on).
Remember, «natural casings» means the intestine of an animal that have been thoroughly cleaned and processed.
Finally, finished dogs are inspected by hand, and only «flawless» tubed meat is routed to yet another machine where the dogs are grouped for packing.
If you liked this article, you might also enjoy:
- How Hot Dogs Got Their Name
- How Decaffeinated Coffee Is Made
- $311 and a Hot Dog Cart- The Founding of $928 Million Company
- The Business That Would Evolve Into Taco Bell Started Out Selling Hot Dogs
- How Shrunken Heads Were Made
Want to gain some daily interesting knowledge? Today I Found Out offers a free daily newsletter to help you feed your brain.
