How we make our hot dog standard
All right. So, this is going to be a tutorial on the hot dog. Simple, easy. But just want to make sure we make it the right way. Same way every time. Little butter down there. You want to brush your dog a little bit. We want to go ahead and brush our bun just a bit. We don’t want to saturate it. We just want a touch of butter on there. Dust them up and cover that guy. Let them hang out there like that for a few minutes. The reason why we butter everything adds a little bit of flavor, a little bit of moisture, but really it’s about the flavor. Um, we try to put butter on everything that we can. Uh, just cuz it helps give that flavor profile for us. Um, anybody can just grill a dog or put a dog on a roller or a dirty water hot dog. Uh, we like to put just a touch of butter. helps give that really nice deep creamy sort of flavor. Um, little bit of saltiness. Also, um, all of our snack bars do have sauerkraut. Some places portion, some places do not. If you are going to be doing sauerkraut, very simple, easy process. Just going to go right onto the griddle. It’s not a lot, just a little bit. You can see it’s maybe a little bit less than uh 2/3 of this cup. This is a 3 and 1/4 oz cup. So, we don’t want to put a lot on there. There we want to put just enough. Uh if you are going to be doing onions, workstation cleaner than mine, but just running through things. So onions, we’re going to take a nice bit of a handful here. Anytime we’re doing onions, grilled onions on anything, we do want a fair amount of them. We don’t want to put just a tiny bit. If you are going to be making some grilled onions, though, same thing. You guys want to put a little bit of butter there. But them up just a little bit. We can let them just kind of hang out and do their thing on the griddle. If you ever are in a situation where you need to rush them along a little bit, you can feel free get them under a tent. Give them a little bit of a water steaming in there. That’ll that’ll help the action move along a little bit. Uh, you know, the water will hurt the flavor very very tiny amount. So, don’t put too much water. Look at that. We got a nice golden brown color on our bun. As consistent as you can. Of course, you know, every bun has some ridges to it. So, it’s not everything is going to be perfect the whole way through, but uh we want a nice golden brown color. People eat their eyes first. Give that dog a roll every now and then. Let it get nice and grilled on all sides. Uh if you like, you can take your knife, you put some slices to the side. And a couple of our cooks do like to do that. It really does add to the visual profile as well. As far as the sauerkraut goes, you give it a little bit of a toss. We’re just giving a little bit of heat. We’re not really getting these uh we’re not cooking the kraut, so to speak. We’re just getting it a little bit brown and a little bit warm. The onions, of course, also need to be tossed every now and then, so you can get a little roll over. You can see them getting nicely golden brown there. Caramelizing onions is important. You want to get a bit of a browning to them because that really kind of helps bring out the flavor uh of the onions and helps add to how it tastes with the hot dog and with the burger, with the pretty much anything else that we do. You can see the dog is starting to get some browning going on there. You’re going to notice they start to plump up when you cook them. So, that’s something that we want to see. Uh, as the other reason why we grill our hot dog buns like this, it also gets them really nice and soft and gooey on the inside. You can’t see it, but you see if I just You can’t feel what I’m feeling, but you just touch it. You see how it keeps the impression? That’s because it’s so nice and hot and gooey on the inside. That’s be a perfect hot dog bun for when we make this dog. Uh, some of our folks do tend to put the sauerkraut on the bottom. You can do that. I don’t have a preference. There’s not a recipe restriction as far as I go with how you’re going to be putting them onto the bun. Uh, you will get some people that say like, “Oh, my kraut’s not on here.” So, if you do put it on top, it’s a little bit more visually present for that. Although, it helps keep the flavor more consistent if you put it underneath. So, that’s why I don’t really I’m not I don’t care too much one way or the other. uh when it comes to hot dogs, but if you put it on top, you’ll be able to see it. So, it removes any of that like, hey, my kraut’s not here. Now, you see our dog is nicely golden brown on all sides. The skin’s getting kind of crisp. I can leave it here a little bit longer. It’ll probably start to split. We don’t need to do that. We just take it right off. Get it right into your bun. We’re going to take our nicely brown caramelized onions. If your dog was ordered with them, you see that color? They’re perfect. And I get them all over the top there. And then when you serve this dog, we don’t want to wrap it unless it’s being going to be to go. I’m not going to worry about the crowd cuz I don’t love kraut anyway. It’s going in one of our red and white boats. And it’s getting served just like that. That’s it. Very simple, very appetizing, very beautiful hot dog. And uh there we go.
Dining and Cooking