DALLAS (KDAF) — Hot dogs are one of the greatest American foods, but what’s actually in them? In preparation for the Fourth of July (and that famous hot dog contest that we’ll all be watching), Ranker has listed hot dog ingredients, ranked by “Oh no!” factor.
Variety Meats
Variety meats include ground-up livers, kidneys, and hearts of various animals, and you can find them in any hot dog with “byproducts” or “variety meats” listed in its ingredients.
Antibiotics
Antibiotics are more of a backdoor ingredient that ends up in your hot dog via the meat used to create it. On factory farms, antibiotics are fed to livestock to promote rapid growth and prevent illness. There’s no way for you to know how much of those antibiotics survive the journey from cow to pink slime, but you likely end up consuming at least a little bit.
Chicken Trimmings
Also known as “mechanically separated chicken” (whatever that means), chicken trimmings are described by the USDA as “a paste-like and batter-like poultry product produced by forcing bones, with attached edible tissue, through a sieve or similar device under high pressure to separate bone from the edible tissue.” The resulting mixture is sometimes added to hot dog recipes.
Beef
Beef is a totally normal thing to put in a hot dog, but it undergoes a weird process first. Rather than simply being ground down, beef is mixed in with chicken trimmings and turned into the pink slime that haunts your dreams. (Does anyone remember the pink slime Tubby Custard from Teletubbies?)
Natural Sheep Casing
Natural sheep casing is one hot dog ingredient that is very straightforward, for better or worse. Natural sheep casing is made from the cleaned intestines of lambs, and it’s the balloon-like structure that holds in the delicious mystery that is a hot dog. Is it gross that you’re eating a meat tube wrapped in intestines? Scots have been enjoying a version of this as Haggis for hundreds of years, so it’s really just a matter of what you can mentally and physically digest.
“Flavor”
This ingredient is unsettling, to say the least. Under current U.S. Food and Drug Administration guidelines, many combinations of flavoring agents can simply be listed as “flavor” rather than being spelled out individually.
Sodium Nitrite
Sodium nitrite is a chemical used to cure meat and prevent botulism – but it’s also responsible for the unnaturally pink color that you see in most hot dogs. Still, it’s a small trade-off considering that sodium nitrite keeps hot dogs from going rancid.
MSG
MSG is a flavor enhancer that’s dumped into many processed foods, including hot dogs. But it’s also naturally occurring in things like tomatoes.
See the full list of ranked ingredients here.
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