- [Announcer] Funding for this program was provided in part by the RE Synergy Foundation, content for the sustainable world, G&C Foods, quality at every turn, Pittsburgh Spice and Seasoning Company making life taste better, the Allen family, Robert, Ashley, Carol, and Fred, and viewers like you.

(upbeat music) - I'm the son of a butcher.

- You might be a son of a butcher, but I'm the original butcher.

Some ask me, what is the meat industry to you?

For me, it starts at a place where my family runs a grocery, butcher shop and a catering business.

And sure it's about the business side of things, but for me, at its core, it's a story about relationships.

- Come on, A.J.. We got work to do.

- Today we're gonna talk about the difference between some of the ingredients that you're gonna see in a store bought hot dog, which would be mechanically separated chicken, dextrose, corn syrup solids, sodium lactate, sodium nitrate, and modified food starches.

We're going to show you how we make it without any of those ingredients.

This is gonna be a no nitrate hot dog.

It's gonna be clean label, which is salt and some ingredients.

And then using the science of the meat and understanding how we're gonna hold this hot dog together.

So we're gonna start here.

We got a half a pig and we're gonna break this down and show you where we get started.

So we're gonna cut here between the second and third rib.

And this is gonna separate the shoulder from the loin.

And we're gonna separate the ham from the loin muscle as well.

We're gonna take a little bit of an angle when we cut this.

And then this is gonna make our roast here, but we don't need this extra, the piece on our ham.

So while I have this here, I wanna show you too that when we, there's certain raw materials that you need to make a really quality hot dog.

And when you're doing what we're doing, we're not adding any binders, we're using the science, so we need to have the highest quality cuts and the highest quality fat we can get.

So on a pork, the highest quality fat is gonna be on the top of the animal, which would be this, on the loin and in the shoulder, and then towards the front of the animal.

So the highest quality fat is gonna be from here, and then this loin, this back fat.

So we're gonna take this and trim some of this fat off here so we can use it for our hot dogs.

(upbeat music) So there's some that's some good quality fat that we're gonna use for our hot dog here.

And as well, some people want to take the shank meat and put that in their hot dogs.

There's a lot of connective tissue in that shank meat, so you don't typically want to use too much of that into your meat block.

Hot dogs has always been kind of a thing that everyone has perceived as you just put anything you want in it.

Well, some people do that and that's why you have to have binders and starches and dextrose and some sugars and stuff to help as a binding agent.

But the way we do it, if you are using quality fat and you start with quality raw materials, then you don't need to use any of that stuff.

(upbeat music) But hot dogs, you're always considering, it's always a balance of ratios of fat to lean ratios.

Understanding these products here, you can use the connective tissue and the muscles.

You just can't make that your exclusive meat block.

Okay, so we're gonna start burning out some of these pieces that we're gonna use in our hot dogs.

For us right now, spare ribs hasn't been a real big seller 'cause we're all people, most people come here and want the baby back ribs.

So we're gonna go ahead and put these in our hot dogs as well.

So usually when we're doing, when we're burning meat out, we try to get all of the meat off of the top and off the bottom before we go in between the ribs.

Kinda saves you going back over it again.

Well, don't wanna do the job twice, we'll do it once, but we don't wanna do it twice.

Dad always told me, I'll pay you to do it once, but I won't pay you to do it twice.

(jaunty music) - [Narrator] The first hot dog was created at the peak of the Roman Empire.

Emperor Nero's cook, Gaius, mistakenly cooked a pig with the intestines still inside.

The intestines swelled with air.

Gaius had the genius idea to stuff the intestines with various meats and thus hot dogs's cousin, sausage was born.

- But when you're making hot dogs, it's a finer textured product.

You have to grind it several times.

So to use trim and stuff like the ribs in between, that's not a real big deal as it would be as if I was trying to make a sausage where I actually wanna start with a bigger whole muscle cut.

And then when I grind it, just use bigger particle sizes.

With a hot dog, you're always using small particle size to make it so about any trim that you can use to put into it will be fine for making a good quality hot dog.

And you can see I'm separating out the fat and the lean just so I have a better idea of what ratios I'm gonna need when I'm mixing this, I'm gonna have two different grinding processes.

I'm gonna have like a lug right here similar to what this stuff is, is gonna be 85% lean, 15% fat.

And then my other pile that I'm gonna be grinding is gonna be 50% fat and 50% meat.

Here's some of that leaf lard we talked about earlier.

I wouldn't want to use all leaf lard for it 'cause it's not quite the quality as you had with the back fat and some of the fat from the shoulder.

But it still makes, it'll still work.

Like I say, everything's kind of, it's like a balance.

You have to, you can't do too much of one thing.

So I'm gonna get some of this back fat off here.

Again, this is a higher quality fat that we can use.

(upbeat music) We'll cut that into some smaller pieces for our grinder.

So right now this is be what I consider almost a hundred percent fat, but then I'm gonna go ahead and go back in and add the lean meat to it so that way I know I'm at 50%.

My father, sometimes he likes to just eyeball things, so he'll look at something and say, yeah, that's about 50% fat.

And then I'll look at 'em and say, well, how do you know?

And then he just, he always hits me with a well, because I've been doing this for 40 years.

And usually if I go back and double check him, he's right on to money, so that's a pretty good excuse for him.

Here's some of my trimmings off of the shoulder.

So pork shoulders are typically somewhere around 80 to 85% lean.

If you just took a whole pork shoulder and you just boned it all out and threw it in, that's about where you'd be.

So being this come off of there, I'm gonna say this is real close to that 85% that I'm targeting to go in there.

I'm just trimming out some of the blood clots that you get some occasionally here.

(upbeat music) If you're new to doing any meat cutting or learning, you can see a lot of times I'm using the point of my knife and I'm just kind of taking small pieces and pulling it away from the bone.

A lot of times when I'm teaching guys about how to to cut pigs or how to cut deer, they're trying to make big cuts in here with the middle of their knife.

And I'm focusing on just using the point of my knife and being pretty precise where I'm making my cuts.

Okay, so here we got the ham.

I'm just gonna take some of the trim off of this ham and then we'll get this ham cured and put down.

Okay, that's about, we're gonna trim off of that for into our hot dogs.

Now we got left is this shank.

So out of my a hundred pound meat block that I'm gonna be making, the shank meat is gonna make up less than 5% of what's going in there.

So like I said, you can use it, it does have connective tissue in it and you can use that in your meat block, but it just can't be your whole entire meat block.

And there's our fat pile.

Okay, so we got our meat blocks now established here after we trimmed up those pigs and this.

And this meat block here we have, this is a 85% lean, like I talked about before, and 15% fat.

And then this meat block here, this is a 50/50.

So this is would be the pork fat and some pork trim.

People often they think about a hot dog and they like, I want a healthier hot dog, and so this I'm making as healthy and as pure of a hot dog as I can.

But the reality is that there's to make a hot dog with the texture and the flavor and the snap when you eat it, that you need to be right around 25 to 30% fat.

So while this, we've pulled the binders and stuff out of it, there still is quite a bit of fat in a hot dog just to keep its identity.

So this what we have here.

Once we add all of our ingredients and these two lugs of meat in there, then this will be, final batch will be a hundred pounds total.

And that's gonna get us between seven and 800 hot dogs that we'll get out of this a hundred pound batch here.

So, and then, so we'll talk about some of the ingredients that I'm adding.

This, this ingredient here, this is a fruit and a spice extract that's gonna help us to retain the color, the natural color of the meat.

This is gonna be in place of what nitrate or a celery powder would be.

But this is a new product and it's just using the fruit and the spice extracts.

This right here, this product here is a yeast extract.

And this is to help us to raise the pH of the meat to help us to retain the water that we're gonna be putting into these hot dogs.

Then we have a red pepper, a ground coriander, a black pepper.

We have the sugar.

This is a large part of the ingredient.

This is a ground mustard seed.

We have a little bit of garlic.

And then the main ingredient of the show here is the salt.

And we'll talk a little bit more about why salt is so important.

But when you're making hot dogs the way that we are, you're gonna add the salt, we're gonna add ice to the product and it's actually gonna drop the temperature of the meat and it's gonna start to get this protein extraction, which the protein, when you extract that protein, it's gonna start to actually hold the meat together and then you'll add their fat.

So we will get into that a little bit further on down here.

- [Narrator] Two European cities claim to have invented what is recognized as today's hot dog.

Residents of Frankfurt claim to have created the frankfurter in 1484.

Vienna claims to have created the wienerwurst right around the same time.

The debate wages on to this day.

- And now we're gonna head over to the grinder and do the grinding and the mixing process.

So we're gonna grind this 50/50 portion through first.

We're just gonna grind it one time.

And then we're gonna take the lean meat, the 85/15, and we're gonna put it in, keeping it separate from the fat that we ground through first.

And we're gonna grind it through three different times.

And what we're doing is we're trying to make that particle as small as you can to help with the emulsion.

So while it may not make sense that we're gonna keep grinding it and making it as small a particle as we can, we're actually causing more surface area for individual protein that's in the hot dog.

So you would think about if you had the surface area of your fist and what that would be.

And then if you took something and you took a bunch of say as a bunch of golf balls and stuck it there, now you're seeing you have a lot more surface area.

So that's gonna help with our binding process.

Since we're not using a modified food starch or a binding agent, then we need to extract as much protein and have as much surface area as possible.

(upbeat music) (grinder whirls) Okay, so we're gonna keep the fat separate.

Now we're gonna add the lean and grinding this through three times.

(grinder whirls) Okay, now we're gonna add the lean meat and then we're gonna add the salt and most of the ice.

What we're doing is we're trying to extract the protein of the meat, which is gonna naturally help to bind the product.

So as we extract the protein of the meat, then we're gonna, after we get a good protein extraction, the meat's gonna hold together nice.

I can show you.

Then we're gonna add the fat.

And what that fat particle is actually gonna encapsulate the individual pieces of protein.

And then that's gonna give you a nice tight bind.

And then we will add the rest of our ingredients to the meat block.

But we first want to get that good protein extraction first.

(jaunty music) - [Narrator] The affordable and highly portable hot dog quickly became a favorite at many sporting events, especially baseball.

Legend has it that the owner of the St.

Louis Browns, Chris von de Ahe, paired hot dogs with beer and sold them from his tavern.

- Okay, here's the salt we're adding.

Since pretty much meat preservation has come about, we've been adding salt to that.

I mean I used to add salt to meat to get it across the ocean to help to preserve it, so the salt is still the main ingredient and the main preservative in any meat products.

That's why when you're read an ingredient label, the first thing yet, the list ingredients as the how much, the most quantity that's in a product going to the lesser.

And so salt is almost always, salt or water are the first ingredients on that product.

Okay, now we're gonna begin to mix.

(mixer whirls) After the salt, we added the yeast and the spice extract to help with the color.

Now, we're gonna add some sugar in here.

We are gonna add the red pepper.

We're gonna add our fine ground black pepper ground.

Okay, we're gonna add the ground mustard seed.

And I'm only gonna add a portion of it and make sure it blends nicely since there was so much of it.

I'm gonna add the coriander.

And I'm gonna add a little bit of our garlic.

I wanna make sure those mix up and blend nicely.

(mixer whirls) So we added all of our ice.

Now we're gonna add a little bit of the spring water.

(mixer whirls) Okay, we're gonna add this yeast extract that's gonna help to raise the pH to help to hold onto all this water and ice that we're adding to it.

If you think about when an animal or the basic pH is seven and whenever an animal is goes through rigor mortis, the pH is usually around like 5.8, so we're actually trying to increase that pH back in the meat that's gonna help to hold onto the water.

We're gonna add the rest of the ground mustard seed.

(mixer whirls) Okay, we're gonna add the rest of that water.

(mixer whirls) And we're gonna continue to blend this until it's all nice and uniform, and then we'll grind it out that final time.

(mixer whirls) Okay, everything's blended well.

Now we're gonna go ahead and finish grinding this product out.

(mixer whirls) So the first handful I'd put back in because that would've been the meat that would've been trapped inside this auger part, so we wanna put it back in to make sure it blends well with the rest of the meat.

(mixer whirls) Okay, so we want to just verify.

I can see that the meat's doing what I need it to do.

The meat's starting to just by doing this so many times you can see the meat characteristics, how things are starting to stick together.

We're still gonna verify.

That way if I have an issue I can go back and say, oh, that must have been, that was the issue.

I think really when I started verifying and measuring temperatures and measuring all my ingredients, I got really adamant about it whenever I would have an issue and then I'd have to try to ask someone to try to like what did I do wrong, what could I have done better?

And there's so many variables that I had to just start really measuring this.

So got my thermometer in, measured it.

I wanted to be less than 34, and I'm at 32.7 right now.

And just as a feel test, we wanna make sure we have a good emulsion.

Without using the thermometer I can stick my hand down in it.

I can hold of that, and that's how I know I have a good emulsion.

It's gonna bind and it's just gonna stick there.

So now when I go to stick that in a casing for a hot dog, I know it's gonna stick together and that it's 'cause if you don't do all these steps correctly, I've done it in the past and the hot dogs will fall apart if you don't fall all these steps correctly.

(mixer whirls) Okay, so we're done with the grinding and the mixing process.

Now we're gonna take this product, we're gonna put it in our stuffer, we're gonna put it in a cellulose plastic casing and we're gonna link 'em to size.

So let's go check out the next part.

(jaunty music) - [Narrator] Each year, Americans consume 20 billion hot dogs.

That's over 350 million pounds of hot dogs.

- So, Brycen, now that you've been helping me do this, what's your favorite part of hot dogs?

Is it making 'em or is it cooking them?

There's it eating them.

- I like both of them.

I like to cook them.

- I guess I should have gave you another option.

Taking money for cooking them.

So as you can see, there's not a lot of extra room here.

They built this thing nice and tight, so you're not wasting any extra air flow.

And then what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna insert this internal temperature probe.

So as it goes through the smoke step, when it gets to the final step, then it'll go by internal temperature of the product and then it'll shut down and go into a cooling cycle in the shower mode.

Okay, so we finished the cooking cycle and now we're in the shower cycle.

So we're gently trying to bring the temperature back down.

But the reason that we're doing a pulsing shower is 'cause it's a more gentle process of dropping the temperature.

My old smokehouse would just put a straight shower on it until we target a temperature we were trying to go to.

And also I'm on city water, so if you just sit there and shower it like a lot, then it will, can actually kind of bleach it out a little bit, so we're trying to just kind of do a gentle pause shower slowly dropping the temperature until we target 115.

And then we're gonna go ahead and do a straight shower on the product.

Yeah, I like the way the color turned out on them.

Nice and solid and firm.

So we'll get the casings peeled off of them and then we'll get 'em sent in the cooler, get 'em chilled out.

I think this will work great on your grill for your hot dog stand.

And you can add your little special touch and make 'em gourmet.

- [Narrator] German immigrants brought the hot dogs to the States in the 1800s.

By the 1860s, hot dog carts owned by these new Americans were ubiquitous in New York City.

(jaunty music) (jaunty music continues) - I am a son of a butcher.

- That's right.

(laughs) (jaunty music continues) - That's all, folks.

(chuckles) - [Announcer] Funding for this program was provided in part by the RE Synergy Foundation, content for the sustainable World, G&C Foods, quality at every turn, Pittsburgh Spice and Seasoning Company, making life taste better, the Allen family, Robert, Ashley, Carol, and Fred, and viewers like you.