A beans ’n’ weens journey
Amy Drew: When National Hot Dog Month and National Baked Beans Month collide in kitchen.
The question, when drinking say, a nice Cabernet Sauvignon, is not whether the $100 bottle is better than the $15 bottle. It usually is.
But is it $85 better?
For most people, myself included, that’s usually a big N-O.
And so in embarking upon this beans ‘n’ weens journey (because July is both National Hot Dog and National Baked Beans Month), I decided I was going to make my beans from scratch — because time is money — and determine if the effort is worth bidding the Bush’s buh-bye.
More on the beans later. For now, let’s talk weens.
A recent piece in Mother Jones, inspired by a 2019 story in Scientific American, prompted by a study published in the Medical Journal of Australia in 2016 (that’s journalistic sausagemaking), reminded everyone of their deepest fears about hot dogs.
“Well, if your study is based on Hormel, Tyson and other factory farms,” says Matt Hinckley, owner of Hinckley’s Fancy Meats, “then, yeah — you’re going to find the lips and a**holes.”
For Big Ag, says Hinckley, the hot dog is often a way to get rid of garbage ingredients. For makers who are doing things the right way, they’re a lot of painstaking work.
“When it comes to culinary technique, the hot dog is the most complicated, labor-intensive thing we do.”
And hardly cheap. Hinckley’s smoked antelope sausage is comprised of Texas antelope, lean pork trim and pork fatback. The elk hot dogs? Wapiti elk, pork shoulder, belly and fatback. Game meats are leaner, and so they’re cut with pork to add moisture, flavor. No lips. Or other parts. Literal or figurative.
The proteins are then butchered and ground. The buffalo chopper — a machine that chops and/or emulsifies foods under vertically spinning blades in a rotating bowl — is necessary to give things like hot dogs and bologna their familiar texture. It rests a day before going into the casings, then heads into the fridge for another day so a pellicle can form.
“When you leave meat exposed in the fridge, there’s a skin that forms on the outside of it — that’s the pellicle.”
This is what the flavor adheres to during the smoking process, which is where the links go next, followed by a stint in the combi (“combination”) oven which can cook via steam, convection or a combination thereof. Post roast, the spa-like progression culminates in an ice bath for the weenies.
“It’s a crazy process,” Hinckley says with a laugh, “and the equipment is crazy, too. The buffalo chopper’s five grand, the smoker’s five grand, the combi oven’s ten… ”
Not to mention all those emulsified cuts of freerange meat.
So, if you’re wondering why Hinckley’s hot dogs cost $3 apiece when you can buy eight at the grocery store for $5, I’ll refer you back to the petri dish in that aforementioned article and say with authority that they are not even close to the same thing.
The antelope sausage comes fully cooked, so you can slice them into rings and serve as simple cold charcuterie with cheese, bread, cornichon, fruit … the list goes on.
I cut them into scrambled eggs for a home-onthe-range-style breakfast. But I also char-grilled a few for the buns (this is a hot dog story, after all) and found the flavor corned