What is the general process in making a hot dog from a pig/chicken/cow?

February 6, 2008 1:38 PM

1. Get dead cow. 2. ? 3. Hot dog! What is the general process in making a hot dog from a pig/chicken/cow?

I'm preparing a blog post about processed meat and realized that this part is hard to find objective information on. I know bits and pieces. I don't really care how the animal dies and this is not an article focusing on ethics or animal cruelty.

Specifically, for one part of my article I want to write about how hot dogs are made from a paste of "mechanically seperated meat". A Vegan on NPR or some radio program claimed that this was what hot dogs were made of. However, I've found (wikipedia) that the U.S. government regulates this and a product can contain no more than 20% MSM. So my question is, can someone point me to info on how a hot dog (or bologna etc) is made?

I want info like:
-Starting with dead pig/cow/chicken or whatever, does a person or machine make cuts to remove large/small portions or a machine? Or is it a combination?
-What cuts of pig/chicken/cow go into processed meats other than MSM (I'm assuming scraps or the cheapest?)
-I seem to recall reading somewhere that contrary to popular belief that hot dogs are mainly chicken, so is it basically 80% chicken 20% MSM (beef/pork)?
-Links to pictures of each step?

Thanks in advance.

posted by wolfkult to Food & Drink (13 answers total)

You need to grind the meat into a paste, add your spices and put it into a sausage machine, that will shoot out the meat through a tube which, on the front of will be a long tube of casing, which is usually cow or pig intestine, although soy ones are generally becoming available. Then you twist the casing to your desired length and then boil them to cook and then cut them (or not) and then store or eat them.
posted by parmanparman at 1:44 PM on February 6, 2008

You can use any part of animal, as long as it's not covered with hair or has bone. Never use meat with bones.
posted by parmanparman at 1:46 PM on February 6, 2008

Response by poster: I'm mainly interested in how the store bought ones are made.

Mmmmm, intestines...
posted by wolfkult at 1:46 PM on February 6, 2008

You'll want to start by reading the USDA Hot Dog fact sheet.
posted by zamboni at 1:48 PM on February 6, 2008

I worked in maintenance at a plant that made various sausage and hotdog products when I was a kid, and can tell you from direct observation that the Hormel kind are pretty much lips and assholes. But the better hotdog brands contain more than mystery meat.
posted by M.C. Lo-Carb! at 1:56 PM on February 6, 2008

Made How has a pretty good description of how hot doggy is formed, plus a nifty little illustration.

Also, I'm not even going to pretend I know what's going on in this video, but there are a few shots of hot dog type things being made.
posted by iconomy at 2:04 PM on February 6, 2008

Not all Sausages need be cured (those that aren't don't keep long) but hot dogs are cured. This keeps anaerobic bacteria from giving you botulism, which is named after the Latin word for sausage (due to improperly cured sausages). Uncured sausages (e.g. Polish sausages) don't keep for very long, and you have to cook them immediately before eating them.
posted by aubilenon at 2:14 PM on February 6, 2008

This is pretty good information about the history and processing. This is the best "sausage making" website I have ever used. It is generally for home sausage making but does a good job of explaining the process. I have been in a couple of hot dog factories. I have also been in the meat factories that produce the "meat" that is used for the hot dogs. Hot dog meat is made from the "trim" (which consists of fat and meat) that comes off of larger cuts of meat that they are trimming. In the case of pork, it also generally comes from the picnic shoulder. The meat is mixed with fat to the specific quality standards of a hot dog producer. It is then shipped to the hot dog factory. The amount of "mechanically separated" meat is highly regulated. They test the amount of calcium in the mechanically separated meat to make sure that it does not contain a lot of "bone." Feel free to send mail if you have questions or this is unclear.
posted by catseatcheese at 2:14 PM on February 6, 2008

If you find it, River Cottage with Hugh Fearnley Wittingstall (sic?) did a whole 30 minute TV show about sausage making that was essentially step by step. He also did a whole "Meat Book" with some ideas for sausage creation.
posted by parmanparman at 3:03 PM on February 6, 2008

zamboni's USDA link (yuk yuk) is a good place to start as what constitutes a "hot dog" in the U.S. is pretty well defined by law. Those other sites have good manufacturing info. Just chiming in here to clear up some misconceptions:

The cheaper the hot dog the more likely it contains a blend of meats including poultry. Usually only the cheapest ones will have a large percentage of poultry, and there's really no shortage of dogs out there made without any poultry.

Casing, curing and cooking vary among sausage species but there are a couple of things that make a sausage a hot dog. Hot dogs are a subspecies of Cooked/Smoked Sausage. This means they're always sold fully cooked, and for a hot dog that cooking process almost always involves smoke.

Chemical curing is optional but almost any hot dog you'll find, except for some specialty/organic products, will have been cured.

Hot dogs are always cooked in links, but the vast majority of hot dogs sold in this country are skinless -- these are stuffed in a cellulose or plastic casing that gets stripped after the cooking stage. Natural casing hot dogs are pricier and harder to find (but IMO tastier) -- these casings are usually made from animal intestines. Cased Kosher dogs are harder to find but these almost always have artificial collagen casings.

I haven't worked at a hot dog plant so I can't say what actual practice is but by law hot dog meat has to be composed only of skeletal meat unless the label's otherwise marked. Thus, legally there shouldn't be "lips and assholes" in there unless you see something about "variety" or "byproduct" meats. The same rules apply for mechanically-separated meat (pork or poultry only -- mechanically-separated beef isn't allowed at all due to BSE concerns.)

Oh, and here's another good article on sausage production that has a pretty lengthy section on hot dogs. Bon appetit.
posted by Opposite George at 3:57 PM on February 6, 2008 [1 favorite]

You'll want to watch this.
This Is Hormel is a Hormel factory promotion video from 1965.

The meat (ha!) of what you want begins at 17:50.
posted by Cat Pie Hurts at 6:16 PM on February 6, 2008

This web page has been around since HTML 1.0. It is one of my favorite pages on any topic, if only for its casual footnotes such as "myoglobin index (Bull is 100)."
posted by ikkyu2 at 7:28 PM on February 6, 2008

When I worked at a hot dog factory, the process went a little something like this:

1.) Big cardboard boxes filled with sides of beef would arrive in the morning.

2.) Said boxes would be dumped into gigantic grinders -- I mean, like three stories tall.

3.) At this point, the meat would be a pinkish/brown paste which never failed to remind me of baby shit.

4.) Nitrates and other apppetizing chemicals would be added. The chemicals came in large bags that looked like feed sacks. I'd say they were around 30-50 pounds apiece. The smell of these chemicals would take the hair out of your nostrils.

5.) The chemically-saturated paste would be injected into long plastic tubing and twisted off into hotdog shapes.

6.) WHen the tubing reached this point, a guy at the end of the line would stick a metal rod through the loops of almost-hotdog-material, cut it off at the end, then turn ninety degrees to his left and place the rod into the oven, which would slowly rotate the rods forward until they reached the end about 90-120 minutes later.

There were fewer than 200 production workers at our plant, working in two shifts. And we managed to crank out more than 200,000 pounds of meat a day. All for $7-11 an hour.

(I never saw the proverbial rooters and tooters but, of course, your mileage may vary.)
posted by jason's_planet at 8:21 PM on February 6, 2008