PIG OUT
Your game-day appetizer bench doesn’t have to be deep: Dough and dogs are all you need to score big with fellow Texans
Dough and dogs. They’re all you need for souping up your Super Bowl. We’re talking, of course, about pigs in a blanket — those impossible-to-resist bundles of hot dogs wrapped in pastry that liven up any casual cocktail party and certainly game-day snacking.
They’re ridiculously simple to make. Two ingredients will score you a party-in-a-pouch touchdown.
All you need is a meat (good hot dogs, cocktail franks, grilled or boiled sausages, or smoky links from your favorite barbecue joint) and prepared dough (refrigerated croissant or biscuit dough, pizza dough or puff pastry). Beyond that, you can tuck a schmear of mustard and maybe a slice of cheese into the dough roll-up and gloss the pigs with an egg wash and a sprinkle of sesame seeds, poppy seeds, everything-bagel mix, flavored salts or even your favorite barbecue seasoning (pepper, salt or ground spices).
Voilà, you’re in hog heaven.
Texans may have a natural affection for pigs in a blanket because they underscore a meat-anddough theme within local foodways. Kolaches? Our favorite savory types are essentially sausages in pillowy dough. Split biscuits with a sausage patty in the middle? Same idea. Even a corn dog — or Texas-proud Corny Dog, that glorious State Fair baton — echoes pig-in-a-blanket goodness.
One can even make the case that the San Antonio favorite crispy dogs — fried tubes of hot dogs stuffed with cheese and wrapped in a corn tortilla — is a regional take on pigs in a blanket. Tejana food writer, cookbook author and blogger Vianney Rodriguez made crispy dogs, which many claim were born at San Antonio’s defunct Malt House, on her Sweet Life site, sweetlifebake.com.
Crispy dogs, she said, are a “crisper version of a pig in a blanket swapping out the dough for a tortilla.” A Tex-Mex pigs in a blanket.
“Crispy dogs for Super Bowl? Oh, they would be perfect,” Rodriguez said.
In Houston, quality pigs can be found at the Hot Bagel Shop, 2015 S. Shepherd, where the bagel dog rules. The popular bagel shop sells smoked sausage, jalapeño sausage and beef wieners encased in bagel dough. The most popular version, though, are the mini dogs — bagel dough wrapped around small wieners.
“The grease kind of seeps into the dough and gives it a flavor accent,” said Sarah Wicks, manager of Hot Bagel, which her dad and uncle opened in 1984.
Like the bagels, the bagel dogs are boiled first before they are baked. “It holds the flavor into the dough,” Wicks said.
Restaurateur Benjamin Berg put pigs in a blanket on the menu when he opened B.B. Lemon on Washington in 2018. Those tiny bundles remain so wildly popular that Berg added them to the takeaway menu at his high-end steakhouse, B&B Butchers & Restaurant; to the happy-hour menu at his Annie Cafe & Bar; and to the bar menu at his luxe boîte Turner’s. Haute pigs and a classic Martini or a flute of champagne? Works for us.
“Pigs in a blanket is the perfect food,” Berg said. “You go to any cocktail party in New York City, and you have to have pigs. It’s a perfect food for an adult party or for a kids party.”
And perfect, too, for Super Bowl entertaining.