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A kimchi dog from The Mayor pop-up Hots & Brats (Photo by Eileen Mellon)
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This trio of hot dogs from Fat Tyler's Meat Cart includes one laden with beef chili, a Southern-inspired option with pimento cheese and pickled onions, and another with mustard and sauerkraut. (Photo by Eileen Mellon)
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Belmont Butchery hot dogs during the smoking process (Photo courtesy Tanya Cauthen)
Hot dogs are everywhere. The handheld snack is a reliable concession at baseball games, destined for a squeeze of mustard, relish and onions in the bottom of the third. They can be spotted on rollers glistening with grease at gas stations or movie theaters and even late night at local spots from Black Lodge to City Dogs. At summer cookouts, they serve as the requisite sidekick to burgers. And in the early 2000s, they were the subject of one of most iconic lines of actress Jennifer Coolidge’s career: “You look like the Fourth of July. It makes me want a hot dog real bad.”
Yet, despite their place in culinary history and pop culture, hot dogs are also often thought of as a lowbrow food made with inferior, artificial ingredients and scrap meats. But if you ask a trio of local meat purveyors, they’ll deem hot dogs one of the most flavor-packed products on the market.
“They’re something that basically very few people make from scratch,” says Tanya Cauthen, owner of longstanding Belmont Butchery in the Museum District. “We only make them four to six times a year — Memorial Day, Fourth of July, Labor Day and Super Bowl Sunday, and if someone asks me and I happen to be in the right mood.”
The reason? Making hot dogs is an incredibly labor-intensive, multistep process, especially when done on a small scale.
“Basically, hot dogs are one of the most complicated sausages you can make unless you have really, really fancy, expensive equipment, and even still, it’s more difficult,” Cauthen says.
That extra level of craftsmanship and difficulty are what originally turned the locavore on to making hot dogs; she admits they provided a chance for her to show off her skills, eventually becoming one of her signature offerings.
At the butcher shop, Cauthen and her crew use extra lean, local pastured beef or pork for their hot dogs, which lends them a bigger, bolder flavor. “If we’re going to go through all this effort, we might as well use the best beef we can,” she says.
While sausages take shape through a relatively simple grind-it, mix-it, stuff-it method, the meat for hot dogs must be ground anywhere from two to four times until it reaches a consistency similar to that of angel hair pasta. Prior, the tallow, or beef fat is chipped and turned into a hollandaise-like emulsion, which can break as easily as the brunch-centric sauce.
When done properly, the result is a thick paste of hot dog batter that gets stuffed into casings and separated into links. At most artisan butchers, including Belmont, the links will rest overnight before they are smoked, plunged in an ice bath and then dried. “And now you have a hot dog,” says Cauthen, concluding a nearly 10-minute explanation of the multiday process.
For Tyler Trainum of pop-up Fat Tyler’s Meat Cart and prime pork purveyor Autumn Olive Farms, high quality is his philosophy. He began slinging sandwiches and hot dogs last year through his nomadic concept at events across Richmond and the region.
“It’s not an awesome thing, unless you can get an awesome, good quality-made dog,” Trainum says.
Similar to their heritage-breed pork served at restaurants from Dinamo to The Inn at Little Washington, hot dogs from Autumn Olive Farms are held to the highest standards. The majority end up at the establishments they already work with, or aboard Fat Tyler’s Meat Cart. Any remaining product makes its way to Carytown grocer Ellwood Thompson’s.
While Cauthen completes the entire hot dog-making process in-house, Trainum seeks out a 100-year-old expert for the final steps: Their hot dogs are processed and made at Maryland-based butcher shop and market Hoffman’s Meats. In operation since 1923, Hoffman’s is responsible for the franks served at Baltimore Orioles baseball stadium Camden Yards and meat for concessions for the Washington Nationals and Baltimore Ravens.
“The whole reason they’re the best is because of how many they make and how good they are at what they’re doing,” Trainum says. “They do hundreds of thousands of them a year, but the difference between [their typical offerings] and ours is we’re using prime cuts of our pork.”
Using a mixture of hams and jowls, Trainum says the balance of fats leads to great emulsification, and, after a light smoking, the end product is enclosed a collagen casing that checks the box for that classic chew frank fans seek.
“That’s really what it’s about,” he says. “You can have a lot of different hot dogs, but if you don’t have that good snap and pop to them and chew, to me, that’s not a great hot dog.”
Both Cauthen and Trainum explain that store-bought hot dogs are made with mass production in mind, typically plumper, fluffed up with water and full of chemicals. “With the fancy equipment, all basically done by sort of a robot,” Cauthen says. Small-batch hot dogs tend to be bound more tightly. “Our [hot dogs] are a little bit denser because of the high percentage of actual meat in them,” she says.
Instead of added nitrates that preserve the meat, Autumn Olive Farms uses celery salt, which acts as a natural curing agent and is free of artificial chemicals. “Our is like comparing McDonald’s to a Michelin-star restaurant,” Trainum says. “It’s high-grade ingredients across the board — no substitutions, no greenwashing, no nothing.”
Kyle Morse of The Mayor launched his Richmond-based business with a focus on sausage, but a few months ago, he introduced hot dogs into his repertoire through a pop-up dubbed Hots & Brats. The celebration of glizzies has since made dozens of appearances at area farmers markets and events, and his hot dogs can be found at Stella’s Grocery, Ellwood Thompson’s, Good Foods Grocery, and the Birdhouse and St. Stephen’s farmers markets.
Morse uses wagyu beef, tweaking a recipe in collaboration with Bill Tellapan, a chef friend he previously worked with in New York. The meat is processed by New York City-based meat wholesaler Heritage Foods, which uses only antibiotic-free and pasture-raised cuts. With a wholesale vision in mind, Morse says outsourcing is the best fit for his concept.
“The amount of work that goes into making a hot dog is hilarious; you think of a hot dog as scrap meat or whatever or an afterthought, but it’s actually really hard to make,” Morse says, echoing his counterparts. “I had someone ask, ‘Why do you put the best beef into the hot dog?’ and it’s like they do get a really bad rep. My mother-in-law tried one, and her reaction was, ‘Wow, I forgot hot dogs actually have flavor.’”
With grilling season about to commence, Belmont Butchery, Autumn Olive Farms and The Mayor all offer a more localized version of the summertime classic.
Cauthen says, “I love the fact that hot dogs are getting a resurgence. I don’t feel like they get the credit they deserve. There’s definitely a lot better options, and I love that people are willing to actually kind of, quote, ‘get a lowbrow sausage’ or what they think of within that way, but with great-quality meat instead.”
