Hattix

You’ve got to hand it to the Germans. They’re as obsessed with amorphous shaped meat as we are with pies. Hamburgers, bratwurst, brockwurst, frankfurter and virtually all sausages ultimately derive from Germany (and before that from mutton patties that the Mongols made). Eating a few hotdogs, I started to wonder what meat it actually was (rather like how a vegan wonders which chemical in soy will give them cancer out of the 100+ recognised carcinogens in it) and imagine my surprise when I found it was 55% chicken!

From the label on the tin: Chicken (Mechanically recovered) (55%), Water, Pork Fat, Pork Collagen, Salt, Wheat Flour, Chicken Fat, Thickeners (E412, E451), Beef Collagen, Herbs and Spices (Contains celery), Flavouring (contains Milk Lactose, Soya, Egg), Natural Smoke Flavour, Preservative (E250)

The use of mechanically recovered meat in sausages is widespread - It’s what’s scraped off bones when they’re fed through a wire mesh after proper cuts of meat have been taken and quite suited for making sausages and burgers. I was just surprised as to how little pork it had in it, indeed the only pork is fat and gristle (collagen). There’s a little chicken fat and beef collagen in there too.

Of the “E-numbers” (which, I will add, are a wonderful way to standardise nomenclature), we start with E412 and E451, which are guaran and triphosphate. Guaran is an extract of the guar bean and around eight times better at thickening than cornstarch. Triphosphate is actually an emulsifier. Essentially this keeps the water content of the hotdog at the proper texture, thickness and stops it from leaking out. The preservative is E250, sodium nitrite. It inhibits fungal and bacterial growth and means the hotdogs do not have to be refrigerated and do not spoil in transit. It is very difficult to find any meat, especially pre-cooked, which doesn’t contain sodium or potassium nitrite. Why’s that then?

Poultry products, especially in mixed-meat servings, are vectors of three very nasty pathogens - listeria, botulism and salmonella. Salmonella especially is widespread, it’s as harmless to chickens as E. coli is to mammals (there are more E. coli cells in your body than human cells) but can cause deadly infections in mammals, especially humans. All three can grow under refrigeration (listeria can even grow when the meat is frozen!) but none of them grow well at all if nitrite is present. Indeed some countries do not permit the selling of prepackaged precooked meat which has not been nitrite treated. In the UK the pressure is more litigous - Wash the meat with sodium nitrite solution or risk extremely expensive legal action when people contract listeria? Here’s an interestingly amusing activist website which is about as grounded in reality as most vegan militants are.

Hotdogs, of course, are precooked and are quite defined by it. This means that the fat content of them is melted and spread out, the nitrites largely oxidised to nitrates and nitrosamines (the latter is carcinogenic, but only in very large quantities and you still shouldn’t include it in products for babies) and the colour which is added by the flavouring and pork collagen is leeched into the chicken.

Interesting facts about hotdogs (the sausage, also known as the frankfurter)

• In the US, they can contain no more than 20% mechanically recovered beef or pork, so everyone uses chicken.
• Sometimes known as “wieners”, this comes from the German name for Vienna, Wien which has its own variety of sausage mostly made of pork
• They contain high amounts of calcium as a result of being mechanically recovered
• As a sausage, the frankfurter has been around since the fifteenth century
• The name comes from “dachshund” (little dog), the first commercial sausage-sandwich of success were sold as “dachshund sausages” after their shape
• In the early 20th century they were called just “dogs” until they became associated with baseball in the US where, on cold days, vendors would advertise “hot dogs”
• Hot dog purists (yes, they exist) consider adding ketchup to be blasphemy since the strongly spiced and flavoured ketchup completely overpowers the subtly smoked sausage
• Adding English mustard to hot dogs sold in London was a common offering in the 1970s with more than a little humour. American tourists had no idea of the strength of English mustard as opposed to the more bland taste of their French mustard.
• There’s no standard recipe for hot dogs in terms of chicken, turkey, pork or beef content

There’s more nitty-gritty about how these kinds of meats are prepared in this post.