Making Hot Dogs from Scratch - How to Make Natural Casing Hot Dogs at Home

for years the very idea of the process to make hot dogs conjured images of chicken beaks and horse lips and every other ungodly piece of an animal that nobody wants to eat being poured into a giant machine in a factory and cranking out the hot dogs that we all know and love but it wasn't until I got into sausage making and more specifically started making my own hot dogs from scratch that I realized that the basic hot dog doesn't have anything especially weird in it at all that is to say a high quality or homemade hot dog doesn't have anything weird or gross in it certainly if you were to look at everything that goes into the cheapest mass-produced hot dogs there'd be some less than Savory ingredients that most of us would probably rather not know about but today we're going to be making a big batch of the most delicious and quality hot dogs made from some good cuts of meat lots of seasonings and a couple other ingredients audience it's not that much different than what goes into something like a bratwurst or an Italian sausage it's all about how we grind and process the meats and the other ingredients while something like a bratwurst has a bit of a more coarse grind and you get some texture when you bite into it but with hot dogs we have to grind and process that meat until it is considered emulsified and that's where we get that very smooth very untextured consistency when you bite into a hot dog then we're going to be stuffing it into some natural casings just like we would with any sausage links and we're going to end up with more than five pounds of beautiful amazing homemade hot dogs [Music] let's get started by taking a look at our proteins we're making these hot dogs with both beef and pork so first we've got some very nice pork shoulder also known as pork butt next our beef I'm using a bottom round roast for this because that's what I happen to have on hand something like a chuck roast would work well too but I will mention that I'm going to trim some of the particularly big pieces of fat out of it this is more of a personal preference I just don't happen to think that the beef fat works as well for sausages and hot dogs however pork fat does work very well and that brings us to our little pile of pork fat I just go to my butcher and tell them I need some pork fat it's very cheap and they pretty much always have it I think this half pound of pork fat cost less than a dollar if you can't find pork fat you don't have to use it you can just use the fatty parts of your pork shoulder it'll still work all right but we're making five pounds of hot dogs and so the quantities the weights of these are two and a half pounds of the pork shoulder two pound beef roast and half a pound of the pork fat there's no absolute rule for the proportions of these ingredients the fat to the meat and so forth but you do want to make sure to have some decent fat content so it's a good delicious juicy hot dog so the first thing I really have to do is trim these up a bit so they'll fit into the meat grinder pretty much cubes or long thin strips so I can feed it into the grinder foreign and while I'm getting the grinder set up I'm going to stick all that meat into the freezer for just a little while maybe 15-20 minutes to let it start to kind of get a little harder which is going to go through the grinder a bit better and for our first grind we're going to use the medium grind plate and then we'll end up switching to the Fine grind plate so we can really get that meat broken down so we can end up with our emulsified mixture now it's time for the first grind I'll alternate between the pork the beef and the pork fat just to make sure it all gets Incorporated and Blended together pretty much from the start next let's take a look at our seasonings we've got smoked paprika garlic powder onion powder kosher salt mustard powder white pepper ground nutmeg and a little brown sugar and I'll just mix them all together so we can add them into our ground meat now it's time to add these seasonings to the meat and to do that we're going to mix all those dry seasonings with one cup of ice water now we do this to both help distribute all those seasonings throughout the ground meat but also to introduce some more liquid some more moisture into the meat mixture in sausage making and hot dog making you don't want your meat mixture completely bone dry or it's not going to stuff into the casings as well not to mention it won't be quite as juicy now we're just going to pour the seasoning water mixture onto the ground up Meats and start giving it a really thorough mix with our hands don't worry about overworking the meat it's really not a concern with the hot dog making especially since we're going to be grinding it all again anyway okay now we're gonna stick this whole thing back into the freezer for a little while about 20 minutes let it start to get hardened up again so we can run it through the grinder a second time this is especially important with already ground meat because it's really going to want to fight you a little bit to feed it through that grinder if it's not a bit hard such as from putting in the freezer for a little while all right we're switching out the medium grind plate with the fine grind plate and we're doing our second grind all right second grind is done and now I'm gonna just go ahead and put this meat into the fridge for now while I start getting everything else set up to start making our hot dogs now let's talk real quick about our natural casings for hot dogs much like breakfast sausage links we want to use sheep casings now there are synthetic collagen based casings that you could use for sausage making but whenever possible I really prefer to use natural casings and with sheep casings it's a little Hit or Miss if my butcher's gonna have any and this time around he didn't so when that's the case I just buy myself some of these Lem natural sheep casings I really like these versus some of the other products because they don't come completely dried out and utterly packed in salt they're still packed in salt but also in a solution that keeps them generally pliable and relatively soft and I just think they're a higher quality than some of the other products out there if you're going with the pre-packaged but with any of the pre-packaged casings I have to rinse them out first I have to rinse as much of that salt and brine liquid off of there as I can so I'm gonna put a big bowl in the sink and just rinse these as good as I can with some warm water and then put them into this bowl with some more warm water all right the casings are rinsed and I've got them in a bowl of warm water and one more thing that I'm gonna do is add just a couple tablespoons of white vinegar to this water and the reason for the vinegar is because it's said to help soften up the casings a little bit more and maybe even make them a little more translucent which maybe is a little more preferable when making Natural Casing Hot Dogs I'm not certain that I can really tell a difference between when I add the vinegar and when I don't but it doesn't really hurt anything to throw it in just to be on the safe side so now I'm going to let these sit in this water for about 20 minutes while I get my sausage stuffer and everything else together and then we're gonna be just about ready to start stuffing these hot dogs this is my lamb five pound vertical sausage stuffing machine and this is what we're going to be using to to make our hot dogs the operation is pretty simple I need to fill up the container with meat and since I have five pounds of meat that should pretty much fill it to the top then I'll load the canister into the machine and we're ready to start going after giving my casings one final rinse I'm going to grab one of the long casings and start feeding it onto the tube of the sausage machine a couple quick notes loading the casings onto the tube is probably the most frustrating part of the whole sausage making process but a couple tips to make this easier one buy the upgraded stainless steel stuffing tube from LEM and stop using the kind of crappy plastic ones that come with the machine not only does the casing slide on the stainless steel a little better but the walls of the tube are thinner which makes the outer diameter of the tube overall a little smaller since sheep casings are very narrow any little bit helps when trying to load these things onto the tube and tip number two if it still seems like you're having trouble getting those casings onto the tube spray it with just a little bit of cooking spray to lubricate that tube a little bit when I've got an entire casing loaded onto the tube I'm ready to start stuffing to start I'll pull a little bit of the casing off of the tube at one end and start turning the handle to begin the meat being pushed down and through the tube this helps get rid of any air that's trapped in the canister or in the tube or even in the end of the casing as meat starts to come into the casing I'll tie the end of the casing off and continue cranking and filling until the entire casing has been filled with meat it takes a little bit of practice to get the technique down on this step it's important not to over stuff the casings because you need a little bit of leeway when it's time to start twisting your one giant hot dog into individual links and if at any point I get a bubble of air trapped in the casing that's kind of screwing up the flow I'll use my little sausage pricking tool and just poke a tiny hole and let the air Escape out of it most of the time this hole is too small for any of the filling to work its way out of it so don't worry about that as I crank with my right hand I'll use my left hand to sort of modulate the pressure around the tube allowing the casing to pull itself off of the tube as the meat fills the casing up every few inches or so I'll give the long big hot dog on the counter a bit of a curl just to save space on the countertop and I end up with one big spiral of hot dog and when I get to the end of the casing I'll just make sure to leave a good couple or a few inches without any meat stuffed into them pull it off the tube and just tie it off just like I did at the beginning I'll move that aside for now and come back to it after I've gone through all the meat in the machine and then we'll start twisting them into links now I just need to load up another casing and repeat these steps exactly the same way another quick note I'll make about the natural casings that I'm using as I mentioned these are sheep casings but sheep casings can come in a couple different sizes ideally for your classic Hot Dog sized link you'd want to find a sheep casing that's labeled 24 millimeters and if you've got a good butcher with a lot of inventory this may not be any kind of a problem or you can find them online but as I mentioned I really like to use the Lem brand sheep casings and unfortunately as far as I've been able to find they only come in the more breakfast sausage link sized which is more like 20 millimeters you still end up with a delicious and perfectly good hot dog but it may be a little thinner than the kind of hot dog you might be used to seeing at a store but since I eat pretty much Only Natural Casing Hot Dogs even if they are bought from a store or a butcher it's not completely uncommon to see them this thin I've got some classic kogels Vienna Franks in the fridge right now and at the end of this video after we finish making these hot dogs maybe we'll do a little side-by-side comparison and we can take a look how they measure up okay now that we've got our great big hot dog spirals all filled up it's time to twist them into links and since the standard hot dog length is about six inches that's exactly what we're gonna aim for and for me six inches is pretty much exactly the length between the tip of my pointer finger and my thumb if I've got my finger and thumb extended thusly and so where we want to twist it we're going to very gently pinch and squish some of the meat out of the way a little bit so we're not trying to twist through the meat but rather on either side once we've got a little crimp made right here we're gonna give it some twists about three full twists now then as we move down it's actually going to be easier to make two crimps and twist our links like this that's the best way to ensure that you're not unraveling your previous link and we just keep going down the line until we've linked up the whole length of hot dogs we'll just uncoil it this side and recoil this side something that resembles kind of a reel-to-reel tape and for anybody under 40 years old tape is something that existed before CDs and for anyone under 20 years old a CD is something that existed before MP3s and for anyone younger than 10 years old MP3s are how we listen to music before streaming music services now I just have to do the same thing to my second coil of hot dog now we're at the point where if we were making sausages of some sort they'd be pretty much done ready to either cook or flash freeze and package up for the freezer but because these are hot dogs there's still another step that we have to do which is to pre-cook them hot dogs from the store are ready to eat right out of the package and we want the same thing here so I'm going to fill up a big pot with some water and I'm gonna go ahead and drop my whole spiral of Linked UP hot dogs in there I'll just do one at a time so I don't overcrowd the pot and now I want to heat that water up until it gets to a low simmer I don't want to boil these per se but I do want to simmer them on pretty low and once we reach that simmer we'll let these hot dogs go for 20 minutes after 20 minutes is up we're gonna pull those links out of the hot water and put them into some cold water for just a few minutes to basically stop the cookie process and once our hot dogs are completely cooled down I'm going to lay them all out on a couple of dish towels and sort of Pat them dry and let them air dry for a few minutes because when I put them in the fridge or freezer I don't want them to be soaking wet and now that our hot dogs are nice and dried off we're gonna go ahead and separate them into individual links so using a very sharp knife I'm just going to Slit The Twist between each one and that's all there is to it so here we have a couple of our final product Hot Dogs next to a store-bought kogels Natural Casing Frank now these are obviously not the same thing my hot dogs don't have any weird stuff in them no special coloring no special processes to make sure they turn out uh almost weirdly pink colored like store-bought hot dogs tend to be and you know I could have processed my meat even further to make it more or truly emulsified like a factory produced hot dog would be while the kogels Vienna is basically perfectly smooth and there's no sort of texture in it whatsoever mine do have just a little bit of of sort of texture and consistency to them and you can you can see that in there through the casing as for the length and the diameter I'd say that mine are pretty comparable to the Natural Casing kogels so I don't have any complaints there but my hot dogs come out a little bit closer to a sausage than a true hot dog with regards to the color and the fact they have a little bit of texture to them compared to store-bought but I don't really care about any of that what I care about is how does it cook up how does it taste so I think it's time for a taste test and because it's still the middle of winter and my grill is all put away I'm just gonna use a skillet with a little grill insert and I'm gonna cook one of these up and give it a try that right there tastes like a hot dog and a pretty darn tasty hot dog normally if I'm gonna go to these lengths it's to make something like my Italian sausage or maybe my breakfast sausage links but from time to time I do like making a batch of the homemade hot dogs and with this batch right here I should have enough to last me a good while now the last thing I'll mention is how I go about freezing them just like I do with my other sausage links I'll put some parchment paper down on some baking sheets lay the links all out flash freeze them in the freezer for maybe just about 45 minutes to an hour and a half until they're basically hard then I'll put them in vacuum seal bags usually two links per bag for something like a brat or an Italian sausage or maybe four or for breakfast links vacuum seal them throw them in the freezer and they're going to be good for a year or more it's absolutely no different with the hot dogs except when you thaw them out they're already pre-cooked so heat them up in whatever way you prefer and enjoy be sure to like And subscribe and stay up to date with all our latest stuff including of course food videos thanks for watching and until next time this is Great Lakes prepping

Channel: Great Lakes Country

Views: 225,072

Keywords: making hot dogs at home, hot dogs from scratch, sausage making for beginners, hot dog seasoning blend, sausage stuffer how to, how to make hot dogs, frankfurters homemade, vienna hot dogs

Id: OSKqPCGx1Hw

Length: 18min 16sec (1096 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 19 2023