Hot dogs are one of those special foods whose appearance doesn’t tell us much about their ingredients. If you’re like us you’re curious about all things food and aren’t afraid to dig deeper into the components of both the best and worst hot dogs you can buy.
| Channel | Publish Date | Thumbnail & View Count | Actions |
|---|---|---|---|
 CNN Business | 2016-02-10 21:58:04 |  10,364 Views |
This is what's in your hot dog
“Meat” is the obvious answer. Some sausages are chicken pork or a blend of those meats. Others are all beef like the best Chicago-style hot dogs. Specifically you’ll find trimmings of these meats on hot dogs — and no that doesn’t mean “questionable cuts” like old rumors would have us believe. Trims are the small bits left over from meat that’s been processed into steaks breasts thighs and other cuts. That said your hot dog may also contain some form of organ meat like heart or liver. If that’s the case the label will say “variety meat” or “with meat by-products” followed by the specific variety of meat in question.
But what about those mysterious ingredients that make a beef hot dog different from a piece of ground beef? Some sausages are cured for one which requires a few chemical additives. They taste good because of the addition of spices and then there’s that cylindrical shape. How does that happen? It turns out that there are more components than just meat that go into making a hot dog a hot dog.
No discussion of hot dogs would be complete without discussing nitrites. Nitrites are chemical compounds sometimes used as a preservative that effectively give meat a pink color and make it salty. The main difference between salted and unsalted hot dogs comes down to the type of nitrite used. Salted hot dogs contain nitrites such as potassium or sodium nitrate while natural nitrites such as celery powder are used in unsalted hot dogs.
