Hot Dogs & Sausage

Quote:

Originally Posted by Justice 

a link is just as helpful.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_dog

It was an ominous Thursday afternoon  waay back in grade 6 when we had a class outing to the local meat packing plant.  This was in Saskatoon, a prarie town and the plant had contracts to supply most of the supermarkets in western Canada with weenies.

The sight of the two "gentlemen" in surgical-white hipwaders shoveling in, uh... "stuff" into a floor mounted meat grinder grille is forever etched into my delicate, eggshell mind.  I tried my best to forget it, but when viewing  Pink Floyd's "the wall" several years later in grade 12, I had a relapse and just about tossed my cookies in the theater.

What's in the stuff?  Mechanically de-boned meat.  What that is, is a s/s conveyor belt that feeds bones through  a chain whip.  The chains flail at the bones and are then "combed" off, and the resulting sludge is further processed.  The sludge has an added bonus of being already ground, (labour saving!) and it binds with other ingredients much better than just ground meat.

But, hey, what really is meat?  Classic definition is muscle.  Liver and kidneys are "offal", but a heart is a true muscle.  Facial muscles and sphincter muscles aren't offal, and they're too good for dog food.

So there's some kind of meat, water, (usually ice) fat, salt, fake smoke flavour, maybe milk powder, and a bunch of sodium somethings. Fat and water and tissue make a great emulsion, which is what sausage is, an emulsion.

To make snausages, you'll need a meat grinder, of course, a food processor is nice, and a stuffer.  Soak your lamb casings in water, and change the water several times.  Grind your farce course, then fine, then in the food processor.  Don't let it get warm or the emulsion will split. Load up the sausage casing onto the stuffer uhh..."tube" and tie a knot at the end.  Load up the stuffer chamber with farce and try not to get any air in there.  Start cranking and while stuffing, start making links by twisting the casing.  Smoke or not to smoke, your call, then poach and then cool down.  Reheat in your favorite way.

Food pump.

       Very good but you forgot  beef lips, sows and pigs ears, beef feet, sodium nitrate and nitrite for color retention  and preservative qualities, oleo resin of paprika, sometime sodium benzoate as preservative. We all studied cookery not pharmacy!

  But remember ""It comes from a higher source'' 

Welcome to Cheftalk.

I guess by now you must have realized that this is not a wikipedia.  What Cheftalk is, is a bunch of people--many professionals in the industry-- who answer questions.  Live people, if you like. 

"French fries" did answer your question and provided you with a very simple link which did give a lot of information.

While I made no attempt to hide my disgust for the hot dog, I did provide you with information on what type of equipment was needed and how to stuff a sausage.

Thing is, if you look at the replies, not many of us have much respect for the hot dog, and I think that when you go through all the trouble of making a "hot dog" you can't sell it at a price that reflects the labour and ingredients you put into it. Call it a "house made sausage" and you probably could sell it, but "hot dog" "Weiner" "Frank/franfurter" will make most people not want to pay any more than 3 bucks.

I like a good hotdog.  Some are better than others and thinking about what is in them can certainly ruin the experience.

Try this for a source of information on making sausage, including emulsified sausages (AKA hot dogs):

http://www.amazon.com/Great-Sausage-Recipes-Meat-Curing/dp/0025668609

We fed them to the staff under the guise of   TUBESTEAKS  with sauteed sweet onions.

Quote:

Originally Posted by foodpump 

Welcome to Cheftalk.

 

I guess by now you must have realized that this is not a wikipedia.  What Cheftalk is, is a bunch of people--many professionals in the industry-- who answer questions.  Live people, if you like. 

 

"French fries" did answer your question and provided you with a very simple link which did give a lot of information.

While I made no attempt to hide my disgust for the hot dog, I did provide you with information on what type of equipment was needed and how to stuff a sausage.

 

Thing is, if you look at the replies, not many of us have much respect for the hot dog, and I think that when you go through all the trouble of making a "hot dog" you can't sell it at a price that reflects the labour and ingredients you put into it. Call it a "house made sausage" and you probably could sell it, but "hot dog" "Weiner" "Frank/franfurter" will make most people not want to pay any more than 3 bucks.

Way to welcome a newcomer to the site.  I should think anyone is welcome to come and ask questions, even if you think the answers are obvious - which they are not.

And please speak for yourself, I and many others have respect for the hot dog.  I happen to love hot dogs in fact.  I have seen "weiners" and "frankfurters" on plenty of menus and for more than $3.  Haven't you ever been to a german restaurant?

German restaurant?

Yup.  Worked in about a dozen of them, in Europe and in N. America.

Menus featured "Weinerli" or "Weinerswurstchen" Schublig, Bratwurst, Weiswurst, Blut und Leberwurst, Mettwurst, Teewurst, Landjaeger, Pantli, and many, many others. 

However, these sausages were "honest" work, featuring real meat, little salt, real smoke, and real casings. 

Every "Weiner" or "Hot dog" I've had in N.America was--shall we say--horrible?  Mystery meat, strange red colouring, skinless or packed in plastic tubing with advertising on it, and loaded with salt, 2 hotdogs usually supply you with 35% of your daily sodium intake.  Not to mention the various and funny sounding "sodium's".

If you want to make an honest product--and I have, and am happy to give instrutions on how to do it-- then you need to give yourself and your business a wide--very wide space away from the term"Hotdog".

i remember i watched this show on tv..
flame me for this... but i think its called "take home chef?"

an episode .. the guy made home made hotdogs... without the pump lol

i think he just took the grounded meat and then took a piping bag and slowly pumped it into the casing...
 

You have to thread/roll on the soaked casing onto the piping bag tip,  This is why sausage stuffers have such long nozzles, to roll on a decent length of casing.  It's also why stuffers have a 1 way vent, to vent out any air pockets.  If you get an air pocket in a sausage, the farce around the resulting air bubble will turn black when it's poached.

A food processor is basically an inverted router motor with sharp blades.  If the motor is small and has poor torque, it can't cope. If this is the case, you can process smaller amounts, or forget about the processor altogether and just use finer and finer dies on the meat grinder.  This is a no-fun job, because as the mix becomes more finer and more cohesive you will get air locks down the meat grinder shaft, and will use a lot of energy and time pushing the mix down.  What took you 5 minutes to grind course will take you 15 minutes to grind fine.   However, as long as the mix is kept cold, it doesn't really matter.

You also have to remember that the food proccesor didn't really come onto the scene until the early '80's.  Prior to this we had the "Buffalo chopper" which is totally backazzwards from the food processor.  A donut shaped bowl rotates around and a horizontally mounted set of blades chops inside the "trough" of the donut shaped bowl.  A real pig to clean out, glad it went the way of the dinosaurs.