Pod Insights The MeatEater Podcast Ep. 858: The Science and Magic of Hot Dogs About this episode Steven Rinella https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella/?hl=en talks with hot dog expert John Carter of Viskase and Randall Williams https://www.instagram.com/randall__williams/?hl=en.
Topics discussed: The history of hot dogs; the science of meat emulsions; characteristics of the perfect hot dog; what goes into the dogs; clean factories; skinless casings; the importance of salt and ice; why it’s so tough to make a good wild game hot dog; and more.
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Transcript 25,402 words · 9 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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2:10 Steven Rinella? This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless severely bug bitten and in my case underwearless. Welcome to the Meat Eater Podcast.
2:19 Speaker 02 You can't predict anything.
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2:45 Steven Rinella? All right, everybody, if you ever wanted to know everything you'd ever wanted to know about hot dogs and sausages, now's your chance. Joined today by your mechanical engineer?
2:54 Speaker 04 Mechanical engineer.
2:55 Steven Rinella? Mechanical engineer and hot dog expert, John Carter from Alabama.
3:02 Steven Rinella? Came on the show because we were talking, Randall is big, explain how the whole thing happened, Rand. This is your, this is your deal.
3:08 Speaker 04 Well, we were talking about making hot dogs with Jesse Griffiths and I received an email. Roman passed it along. There was an email sent to the podcast, the meat eater at the meat eater whatever.com. And it's, it was rather bold in its tone. He said, I don't know what sort of quack.
3:31 Speaker 05 Hack.
3:31 Speaker 04 Hack you've got lined up here. We hadn't mentioned Jesse by name, so it was not a personal slide against Jesse, but I said, we're working with someone. He said, I know all about hot dogs. The science of hot dogs.
3:46 Speaker 04 And he said, I can guarantee you that I can give you. It caught my, I'm glad that you worded it that way because it caught my attention and I called you up and I talked to you for 30 or 40 minutes about hot dogs. You cleared up some misconceptions that I had in my own mind about a subject near and dear to my heart. And I said to Steve, this should just be a podcast. Because I think I came into you with maybe the two things that really had my head spinning.
4:11 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
4:12 Speaker 04 About caseless technology and, and I learned about lunch meat on that call and I sort of paced around my house for a few. Few minutes afterwards, just thinking how little I knew about.
4:24 Steven Rinella? Something you thought you knew all about.
4:26 Speaker 04 Something I thought I knew all about. And so here we find ourselves.
4:29 Steven Rinella? Yeah, cuz initially what was going on is I was talking about wanting to make a video about making roller dogs.
4:37 Speaker 04 Right.
4:38 Steven Rinella? Meaning making hot dogs. And in our world, in the, in our like world of sort of wild game and fancy food things, people hear hot dogs, making hot dogs of deer meat. And they always are, in their mind, they're trying to elevate the hot dog or add a spin on a hot dog. And so I started saying, okay, never mind hot dog.
5:05 Steven Rinella? I'm talking about roller dogs, meaning when you go into a gas station
5:11 Steven Rinella? and you find hot dogs at a, at a shockingly low price. Okay, there, there was a, if, if you're in Sioux State, like in Michigan, there's Sioux, Ontario and Sioux, Michigan.
5:24 Speaker 04 Right.
5:24 Steven Rinella? Sister cities, separated by the St. Mary's River. The Canadians always want to pull into our gas station cuz they can get smokes and stuff cheaper than they can get them over in their own country. So this is a big gas station full of Canucks going in there to do, to get gas. They fill up, right? Cuz America just has, some things are cheaper in America. This place used to have four roller dogs. This is, I'm going back to early 90s. Four roller dogs for a dollar.
6:00 Steven Rinella? Sometimes insane hot dog prices.
6:03 Speaker 04 It's impressive.
6:04 Steven Rinella? So if I'm like, how do you make a hot dog?
6:11 Steven Rinella? We wanted to make a video about it. So that's why we were like trying to find hot dog experts. And then you wrote in saying that the hot dog experts we're using aren't up to the job. What we're sitting here getting, and I don't want to hack out. This is a great, this is a sausage. If you can see in the camera, Philly, they can see this.
6:26 Speaker 05 Yeah.
6:27 Steven Rinella? There's a couple of little scraps. Someone sent these in. They sent it under a package called roller dogs. It's a venison roller dogs. It's an elevated. It's delicious. It's delicious. If I made that, I'd be proud of myself. Ain't a hot dog.
6:43 Speaker 05 Right.
6:44 Steven Rinella? Ain't a hot dog.
6:45 Speaker 04 It's like if someone said, oh, I make an Oreo, but it's better than Oreos.
6:49 Steven Rinella? Exactly.
6:49 Speaker 04 And it's, they have like a little chocolate cookie and there's some cream filler and another chocolate cookie.
6:55 Steven Rinella? Mm hmm.
6:55 Speaker 04 It might be a great cookie, but it's not gonna tickle all the, the Oreo notes.
7:01 Steven Rinella? Yeah, because when someone, yeah, you're right. They would make it. They'd be like, oh, no, it's an Oreo, but it's better.
7:07 Speaker 05 Yeah. When a consumer goes into a store, they make a purchase on, on two points, a wallet. And what's, what's the thing look like?
7:15 Steven Rinella? Okay.
7:15 Speaker 05 Visually, because you haven't tasted it yet, right?
7:18 Steven Rinella? Uh huh.
7:18 Speaker 05 So you can't make a decision on taste. So it's gonna be, how much does it cost? And what's it visually look like?
7:23 Steven Rinella? Okay.
7:24 Speaker 05 And those are key points for the whole processed meat industry.
7:29 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
7:29 Speaker 05 Is visual appeal, price point. And I think what you're saying is I want that hot dog price point. I want it to look and feel and taste like a traditional store bought hot dog.
7:41 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
7:42 Speaker 05 That's the goal.
7:43 Steven Rinella? Tell me, well, first off, give me like, how'd your career go? Like, how'd you wind up in the, how'd you wind up in the K, like sausage casing, hot dog biz?
7:53 Speaker 05 It's a bizarre path. So, yeah, my senior year in high school, so I'm gonna go all the way back to 1992.
8:00 Steven Rinella? That's the year you graduated?
8:01 Speaker 05 I did.
8:02 Steven Rinella? Me too.
8:02 Speaker 05 Really?
8:03 Steven Rinella? Hell yeah.
8:03 Speaker 05 Seventy three?
8:05 Steven Rinella? That's back when hot dog, roller dogs, that was like the kind of, I view that as like the heyday of roller, that's, we, that's what we ate for breakfast in high school.
8:12 Speaker 05 Yeah. We had, I put on there the night before and you're getting, getting the roller dogs from last night.
8:17 Steven Rinella? Pull into, yeah, you'd pull into the station, buy five dollars worth of gas, one dollar worth of hot dogs.
8:23 Speaker 05 So now I know that's a twenty seven to twenty eight to twenty nine millimeter hot dog.
8:30 Speaker 04 This is what got me. When we're talking about, when we're talking about the bore diameter of a, of a hot dog, this is what really got me going. But yeah, we had a marathon gas station that was like two miles from the high school and uh, It was like 99 cents for two dogs and a small fountain drink.
8:49 Steven Rinella? Okay.
8:50 Speaker 04 And then you could spend the other dollar.
8:51 Steven Rinella? Small fountain drink?
8:52 Speaker 04 Yeah, and you could spend the other dollar on a scratch off ticket.
8:55 Steven Rinella? God.
8:56 Speaker 04 So it was like the best of both worlds. You knew what you were getting and you also didn't know.
9:00 Steven Rinella? Fountain for a dollar.
9:01 Speaker 04 Yeah.
9:02 Steven Rinella? Yo, this has nothing to do with anything, man. That's why I thought this in for 1992, whatever. We used to have, you ever hear of Hardee's? The restaurant Hardee's? We had a Hardee's. Near our high school.
9:14 Speaker 04 Mm hmm.
9:15 Steven Rinella? Hardee's was running this thing. It was, I can't remember if it was Tuesdays or Thursdays. Early in the morning, it was all you could eat, B and G. Biscuits and gravy. All you could eat for a dollar ninety nine.
9:30 Steven Rinella? And it would be a foam, you'd go up to the counter and it'd give you a foam. Square. And they just mound it with B and G. And you'd go back to your seat and you couldn't barely finish it, but if you did, you'd go up and they'd held true to their word. They would hand you another one of them foam trays just mounted with that like fake. There's some, it was like milk and flour.
9:51 Speaker 04 There's some Gen Z'ers listening to this right now, wondering what sort of horrible world they're inherited.
9:56 Speaker 05 So that my, my first job at sixteen years old, I was a chef.
10:00 Steven Rinella? Okay.
10:01 Speaker 05 Had a little restaurant called Shoney's.
10:03 Steven Rinella? Oh, yeah, not a cook. Chef, okay.
10:06 Speaker 05 That's right. I was in charge of the breakfast bar.
10:08 Steven Rinella? Okay.
10:09 Speaker 05 And we had all you can eat fried shrimp at, at Shoney's. We'd roll out, your, your reorder would come out, there'd be two on the plate. We just keep sending you two, keep sending you two until you got sick of it.
10:20 Steven Rinella? You'd wear them out, you know, you'd wear them out. Yeah, they'd fit, they'd become physically exhausted before they became full from having to refresh their plate.
10:27 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah.
10:29 Steven Rinella? All right. So your career, nineteen ninety two, you graduate.
10:31 Speaker 05 Ninety two, I, I went to a physics class.
10:35 Steven Rinella? Okay.
10:35 Speaker 05 My physics teacher in high school was Robin Williams' half brother.
10:40 Steven Rinella? Hmm, really?
10:41 Speaker 05 His name was Mc, McLauren Smith Williams, Christian Brothers High School in Memphis, Tennessee.
10:45 Steven Rinella? Hmm, Robin Williams' half brother.
10:47 Speaker 05 Half, looked just like him, had the same sense of humor and.
10:51 Steven Rinella? Writing poetry on the chalkboard and stuff.
10:54 Speaker 05 Awesome. So I, like, I became this guy that said, I want to be an engineer. Cause that one guy.
11:01 Speaker 05 So I went in.
11:02 Steven Rinella? Because he was Robin Williams' half brother because he was inspiring in and of himself.
11:05 Speaker 05 Inspiring in and of himself. Yeah.
11:08 Steven Rinella? He didn't have a lot of jingle, like his brother wasn't passing a lot of jingle off to him.
11:13 Speaker 05 No, he was a high school teacher and that, you know, that that's who he was. I got a picture of him. I'll send, I'll show you. He looked just like him.
11:19 Steven Rinella? That's great.
11:21 Speaker 05 He, uh, so he wanted me to go to the University of Tennessee to be a nuclear engineer.
11:29 Speaker 05 I wanted to be a mechanical engineer and I visited the University of Alabama. And once you visit the University of Alabama, you go to the University of Alabama.
11:36 Steven Rinella? Cause why?
11:38 Speaker 05 Just a beautiful campus.
11:39 Steven Rinella? Okay.
11:39 Speaker 05 That's just an amazing opportunity, not, not, not throwing anything out for the school or anything. I'm not a paid endorser, but it's an awesome campus.
11:50 Steven Rinella? Point where his mom's starting to harass him about his college plans. I'll have to throw that one out to him.
11:54 Speaker 05 Visit Alabama. My daughter went there as well.
11:56 Steven Rinella? You know, be a good, you know what company you and me should start, man? We'd kill it. Maybe we'll let Randall in on it. Imagine if we started a company called Nuclear Hot Dogs.
12:04 Speaker 05 It's a good idea.
12:06 Steven Rinella? We might have. Nuclear hot dogs. We'd kill it on that.
12:10 Speaker 05 It's a good brand.
12:11 Steven Rinella? We might've missed the boat. I don't know. I feel like.
12:13 Speaker 04 Like there's already one called that?
12:14 Steven Rinella? There's gotta be some guy out there. Nuclear hot dogs? No, there's not. I know Atomic Burger.
12:20 Speaker 05 Oh.
12:23 Speaker 04 Would they sue you?
12:24 Speaker 05 No, I don't know.
12:25 Steven Rinella? Not they wouldn't sue. They might try a cease and desist. You just ignore it.
12:28 Speaker 05 Atomic, atomic and nuclear are pretty.
12:31 Steven Rinella? Nuclear hot dogs.
12:31 Speaker 05 Those are two totally different.
12:33 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
12:33 Speaker 05 Areas.
12:34 Steven Rinella? Let's look into that. Go on. We'll hash out the details on this later.
12:38 Speaker 05 Went to, went to Alabama, graduated mechanical engineering. Whole plan was to be a process engineer. That was the plan and upon graduation.
12:48 Steven Rinella? Tell us what that means.
12:50 Speaker 05 Yeah. So every plant, whether they make steel, they make hot dogs, they make paper, they make cars. Have process engineers in them. And they're respons, they're responsible for optimizing the process, managing quality, improving the efficiency of the plant, things of that nature.
13:06 Steven Rinella? Okay.
13:07 Speaker 05 So I did a co-op. So I would go to school for a semester and then work for a semester, then go to school, then work. So it's, it's called a co-op program. Uh, so yeah, it took me six and a half years to graduate college, but it's because I worked.
13:23 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
13:24 Speaker 05 Uh, at a steel mill, a cast iron pipe manufacturing facility in Birmingham. And, um, I was convinced that's what I was gonna do. And interviewed, the job market was hot in ninety-two or ninety-seven when I graduated. And, uh,
13:40 Steven Rinella? I didn't dip in on that.
13:44 Speaker 05 It was good. I think I ended up getting like,
13:46 Steven Rinella? fishing was hot.
13:46 Speaker 05 I think I got nine job offers coming out of college.
13:49 Steven Rinella? Wow.
13:50 Speaker 05 And two of them were sales jobs.
13:51 Steven Rinella? Seriously?
13:52 Speaker 05 Yeah. So two were in sales, one was in the paper industry.
13:57 Steven Rinella? People coming looking for you.
13:58 Speaker 05 Yeah, me. Who doesn't like this guy?
14:00 Steven Rinella? I know, but yeah, that's just funny.
14:02 Speaker 05 I had a lot more.
14:03 Steven Rinella? I mean, if I got out of college and just waited for someone to come looking for me, they weren't coming.
14:07 Speaker 05 Right, right. The co-op helped.
14:09 Steven Rinella? That's great, yeah.
14:10 Speaker 05 Cause that's what people look for. They look for that experience. So I had it by working every other semester. The sales jobs came with a little bit more money. And the job I eventually took came with a sweet nineteen ninety-seven Chevy Astro van as a car. And that's what kicked it over the edge.
14:28 Steven Rinella? Like a take home car.
14:29 Speaker 05 That was it.
14:30 Steven Rinella? Got it.
14:31 Speaker 05 So that took me into, into paper. So I worked in paper, mostly in tissue and towel for a while. Some time in leather. Uh, and the source, obviously for paper is cellulose.
14:46 Steven Rinella? Okay.
14:46 Speaker 05 The source for hot dog casings is cellulose. So I knew of the company I worked for now, this case, from that, from that experience. And wanted to try something new. So that's what brought me into the hot dogs. So I went from Rod and William's half brother, kind of down this weird path.
15:03 Steven Rinella? The Astro van along the way. To being a hot dog magnate in the, in the process engineer at Atomic Hot Dogs.
15:10 Speaker 05 That's right.
15:10 Speaker 04 Nuclear hot dogs.
15:11 Steven Rinella? New dude. Nuclear hot dogs.
15:13 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah.
15:13 Steven Rinella? Uh, can we touch on the leather thing? Cause we're, right before we started, just very quickly touch on,
15:17 Speaker 05 Yeah.
15:17 Steven Rinella? before we started, we visited, uh, just as we were kind of gearing up.
15:22 Speaker 05 Mm-hmm.
15:22 Steven Rinella? And you were sharing with me that you've seen a lot of changes in the, the leather industry since the time you were in it. And that a big driver.
15:33 Steven Rinella? This is a pun. No, it's like a pun neighbor.
15:35 Speaker 05 Mm hmm.
15:35 Steven Rinella? A big driver of the leather industry is the automotive industry.
15:40 Speaker 05 That's right.
15:41 Steven Rinella? Did you touch on that?
15:41 Speaker 05 Yep. So that, yeah, the leather industry is run out of Italy because of the fashion roots.
15:47 Steven Rinella? Okay.
15:48 Speaker 05 So that's where everything's run. What drives a lot of the volume in leather is automobile, car seats. And it's just, just because of pure volume. You know, it takes a lot more leather to make a car seat than it does a boot.
16:03 Steven Rinella? You know, and when we discussed that, I was sharing that.
16:09 Steven Rinella? A friend of mine from high school, she, her, her, a friend of mine from high school, her mom was Bolivian. I don't know how it all happened, but she wound up marrying a dude from South Africa who was a leather buyer. And he bought leather for luxury auto. And again, this is going back to, this is going back to that, like, this, the time that I met him and that he was doing this would have been early 2000s. And he was buying all this leather down in South America. I think maybe, maybe we talked about Patagonia, but anyways, he's buying leather in South America. Barbed wire is not as prevalent down there. And he was talking
16:51 Steven Rinella? about how it's hard to find large pieces of perfect leather.
16:55 Speaker 05 Right.
16:56 Steven Rinella? That you would use to do a car seat, like unblemished leather for like premium auto.
17:00 Speaker 05 Right.
17:01 Steven Rinella? And, and you were telling about how that is, that that industry is in decline.
17:06 Speaker 05 Yeah, I mean, a, a, social pressure is, is a, is a big piece of it. You know, social media drives a lot of the younger generation.
17:15 Steven Rinella? Mm hmm.
17:16 Speaker 05 Um, the terms vegan leather is out there, which I think is, it's, it's kind of a weird term to me. Uh, but basically it's, it's making it out of plastics and things of that nature.
17:28 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
17:29 Speaker 05 Um, cause the concept is, is I don't want to kill a cow for the seats in my car.
17:37 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
17:39 Speaker 05 But that cow's not being killed for the seats in your car. Cow's being killed for the burger that you ate for lunch.
17:44 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
17:45 Speaker 05 Leather's a byproduct of that whole industry.
17:47 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
17:48 Speaker 05 So it's, what's a shame is a lot of the leather that's produced from the meat industry is going in landfills. It's being burned in boilers to produce energy and steam and never making it into a leather good, which is a shame. That's not proper use of the animal, in my opinion.
18:05 Steven Rinella? It is, yeah. And it's surprising that people wanted out of, um, that, that people want that material out of, uh,
18:13 Steven Rinella? uh, out of an oil or a plastic product.
18:15 Speaker 05 Right.
18:17 Steven Rinella? And then to put the really durable renewable stuff into the ground.
18:22 Speaker 05 That's right.
18:22 Steven Rinella? You know, back to hot dogs. So the cellulose deal.
18:27 Speaker 05 Sure.
18:27 Steven Rinella? You're dealing in paper.
18:28 Speaker 05 Mm-hmm.
18:29 Steven Rinella? Tell people, what, what, what is that when you say that? Did you say cellulose or something different?
18:33 Speaker 05 Cellulose.
18:34 Steven Rinella? Okay, explain that.
18:35 Speaker 05 Yeah, I mean, so, so I came from paper. I, I live in Mobile, Alabama. We're in the, the southern yellow pine forest. You know, lob lolly pines, longleaf pines, all of those types of trees. Um, and that's where I hunt too. I'm a huge, uh, I've got a buddy, uh, who owns 240 acres. I'm his work labor.
18:59 Steven Rinella? Okay.
18:59 Speaker 05 And he owns the land, so we, we, we hunt together. I cut a pine tree off the roof of the single wide trailer last weekend.
19:07 Steven Rinella? Got it. So you're like, you're like maintenance and habitat.
19:09 Speaker 05 That's right.
19:10 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
19:10 Speaker 05 That's right. So, yeah, we, we do all tractorless anyway. We got a whole thing going on.
19:16 Steven Rinella? Okay.
19:17 Speaker 05 But it's all farmed pine trees.
19:21 Steven Rinella? Okay.
19:21 Speaker 05 I mean, my truck is sitting in the airport parking lot right now, covered in yellow pollen right now from the, from the pine pollen. It's.
19:29 Speaker 05 So down in that area, the world used to be owned by a lot of paper companies.
19:33 Steven Rinella? Good.
19:35 Speaker 05 A lot of the paper companies got out of owning land. They they buy trees now.
19:41 Steven Rinella? Okay.
19:41 Speaker 05 Uh, there are a few warehouser, Rain Air Force Products. There's a few out there that that still own the land.
19:48 Steven Rinella? I wasn't aware, like, I I know that those places used to own these huge tracks. What was the one in, what was the outfit in Western Montana?
19:56 Speaker 05 It was a wirehouser.
19:58 Steven Rinella? Plum Creek and all that. Oh.
19:59 Speaker 05 So Plum Plum Creek. You know what I'm talking about? Yep.
20:03 Steven Rinella? Like all that stuff above the Clark Fork, when you're going down I 90, looking to the south.
20:06 Speaker 05 Probably International Paper. I think Plum Creek bought International Papers land. I think that's right.
20:12 Steven Rinella? But.
20:13 Speaker 05 I don't want somebody to get a new pair of boots on my mistake.
20:18 Steven Rinella? Either way, I didn't know that that was a trend. I I guess I can think of all kinds of places and people that have bought land that used to be timber company land, but I didn't recognize it as part of a general thing where they were like holding fewer asset, land assets.
20:31 Speaker 05 Definitely holding fewer land assets. International Paper, the largest packaging company in the world, I don't think owns any land assets other than where the plants are.
20:40 Speaker 05 You know, up in Canada, not so much like the, so the Irving family, I don't know if you know about the Irving family up in Canada, Robert and J D Irving. They're the most vertically integrated. They're like a poster story on vertical integration. They own the land. They said, well, what else can we do with this land? We can plant trees. We can make paper. We can, uh, mine oil. We can, um, well, we're building all these plants, so we're going to start a construction company.
21:09 Steven Rinella? Okay.
21:09 Speaker 05 Like they just keep bolting on stuff onto that company. They're one of the biggest landowners in Canada.
21:14 Steven Rinella? Okay.
21:16 Speaker 05 Yeah.
21:16 Steven Rinella? When, when we were working on.
21:21 Steven Rinella? Our Hyde Hunters audio book about the history of the Buffalo Hyde Hunters.
21:28 Steven Rinella? We, we, toward the end of that, we get into the, the, the tannery. The tanneries, like where these hides, where all these hides were going and what they were making out of them. And that was kind of a, a detail about those tanneries. Is that the tanneries were basically places that owned enormous tracts of hemlock.
21:49 Speaker 05 Mm hmm.
21:50 Steven Rinella? Right. And that was like, you centered your tannery around that and these places owned, I can't remember what it was. Absurd amounts of hemlock, not buying the trees from other people, but they owned the ground, you know?
22:00 Speaker 05 Yeah. And that's, that's where all the paper mills end up popping up is, is where's the wood basket? So there's a lot, paper industry in the Southeast US is big because that's where the wood basket is.
22:09 Steven Rinella? Okay.
22:10 Speaker 05 And it's sustainable forestry.
22:13 Steven Rinella? Yep.
22:14 Speaker 05 Um, and that sustainable forestry in the Southeast US goes to make toilet paper, packaging, and hot dog casings.
22:22 Steven Rinella? And they're like, they're moving, there's enough hot dog packet, there's enough hot dog casings getting made out of cellulose that you were aware of it when you were in the wood bins. But if you pie charted out who's using this, the hot dog chunks gotta be like, not even a, you can't even see, you know, when you look at a pie chart and the only thing you can see about one of the wedges is there's lines?
22:44 Speaker 05 Yeah.
22:45 Steven Rinella? But you can't tell what's in the line?
22:47 Speaker 05 I bet there's a very specific term for that and I'd love to know what it is.
22:50 Steven Rinella? Like the line is bigger than the share. Like the line is thicker than the share of hot dogs is what I'm trying to say.
22:58 Speaker 05 Correct. You're, you're not wrong. So, so
23:04 Speaker 05 there's a specific type of wood pulp that's used for making cellulose casings.
23:09 Steven Rinella? Okay.
23:10 Speaker 05 And it's, it's what's called dissolving pulp. So you dissolve it and regenerate it. High value chain.
23:17 Speaker 05 Dissolving pulp is used to make hot dog casings. It's also used to make dude wipes. It's also used to make diapers and feminine care products. It's also used to make athletic sportswear, rayons and things of that nature. Tencel is a brand name in that space.
23:38 Steven Rinella? Really?
23:39 Speaker 05 So that's the, that's one of the main things that I want to do coming on here is just to talk about, we work in the woods, cutting trees and hunting and doing all that kind of stuff. What happens when the trees leave our property? And that's what happens. Toilet paper, wet wipes, feminine care, diapers, all that kind of stuff comes out of those forests.
24:04 Steven Rinella? Before we go deeper into that, and I want to go deeper into that, can you explain, remember we started talking about roller dogs?
24:09 Speaker 05 Sure.
24:10 Steven Rinella? Cheap gas station hot dogs? Can you explain where a hot dog ends and begins? Like what is, not globally, I don't care about dudes in Germany or something, but like, when I go into a gas station and I see a roller dog, like what am I looking at?
24:24 Speaker 05 Right. Good question.
24:26 Steven Rinella? Or another, put another way, just to include a high, more people with awareness. If you're in New York City and you go to a corner and there's a dude with a stainless steel, he's got a cart and in it is a stainless steel tub.
24:39 Speaker 05 And you can feel the mist of the steam.
24:41 Steven Rinella? And you order a dog and he takes the lid off and it's a steamy, we call them water dogs, not roller dogs, we call those water dogs. And he dicks a hot, dips a hot dog out of a bucket of hot water.
24:50 Speaker 05 Right.
24:51 Steven Rinella? That hot dog.
24:52 Speaker 05 Yep.
24:53 Steven Rinella? What is it?
24:54 Speaker 05 Well, there are those hot dogs.
24:56 Steven Rinella? Okay.
24:58 Speaker 05 And then you go to the supermarket and it's a whole, you can get a pack of hot dogs for two bucks. You can get a pack of hot dogs for eight bucks.
25:08 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
25:08 Speaker 05 And so the difference in that range is all about what is it made out of? Does it have fillers? Does it have, you know, those types of things? So in its core form, a hot dog is made of salt.
25:23 Steven Rinella? Okay.
25:24 Speaker 05 Ice, lean protein and fat.
25:30 Steven Rinella? But what's it stuffed into?
25:32 Speaker 05 And it's stuffed into a 90% of the hot dogs in the US are stuffed into a cellulose based casing. So it's an inedible casing.
25:44 Steven Rinella? Uh huh.
25:44 Speaker 05 Um, that that that is stuffed into. We, in this case, actually invented that space.
25:50 Steven Rinella? Let me see one there.
25:51 Speaker 05 Back in 1930, we invented this guy.
25:57 Speaker 05 And that's, that's, that's on a sheared stick.
25:59 Steven Rinella? If I started walking, if Randall grabbed one and I grabbed one, and how far apart would we be when this was?
26:05 Speaker 05 That one is 200 feet.
26:07 Steven Rinella? Wow.
26:09 Speaker 05 Yeah. So that's a lot of dogs. Probably.
26:11 Steven Rinella? That's 200 feet of hot dogs?
26:12 Speaker 05 That's, that's probably 100, 100 hot dogs in there.
26:17 Steven Rinella? Okay, go on.
26:18 Speaker 05 Yeah, because there's waste, they, you know, they twist and so it takes up some space.
26:22 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
26:23 Speaker 05 Um, yeah, so we, we sell in lengths from 84 feet up to 200 foot.
26:28 Steven Rinella? And that's a wood product?
26:31 Speaker 05 That's a cellulose product.
26:32 Steven Rinella? That's cellulose product, okay.
26:33 Speaker 05 Which, one, one source of cellulose is wood.
26:36 Steven Rinella? Okay.
26:37 Speaker 05 Another source of cellulose is cotton linters.
26:40 Steven Rinella? Who?
26:41 Speaker 05 Cotton linters. Do you know what a cotton linter is? So it's used in, uh, money.
26:48 Steven Rinella? But that, that's a byproduct of cotton, right?
26:50 Speaker 05 It's, it's fiber that's inside the seed.
26:52 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
26:53 Speaker 05 Yes. So you can make that same product out of cotton linters, out of dissolving pulp from trees. Some, some interesting research going into using bamboo as a cellulose source.
27:04 Steven Rinella? Okay.
27:05 Speaker 05 Things of that nature. Um, the two predominant sources are cotton linters and, and wood pulp. He's trying to get me going on Eli Winter and the cotton gin and all that.
27:14 Steven Rinella? Yeah, don't take the bait. Don't take the bait.
27:17 Speaker 05 I'm not going to get into that. I think it's Whitney.
27:20 Steven Rinella? Whitney, Eli Winter.
27:21 Speaker 05 I don't think it's Winter.
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29:48 Steven Rinella? So, when we talked...
29:51 Speaker 04 One of the things that I was asking you about is when you buy a hot dog. Because the case, the casing that the hot dog is being stuffed into is inedible.
30:02 Speaker 05 Just there in the manufacturing process.
30:04 Speaker 04 And so you, so, so what happens like when you stuff the casing, we can get into emulsions and all that a little bit, but like. You just mentioned that this is inedible. So describe how we go from an inedible casing to me eating a hot dog.
30:18 Steven Rinella? But, but hold on, I gotta call, I gotta correct you on something.
30:22 Steven Rinella? That's the flavor profile of a hot dog is salt?
30:25 Speaker 05 No, but salt.
30:29 Speaker 05 Is the most important ingredient in hot dog.
30:31 Steven Rinella? Okay, but there's a little more in there.
30:32 Speaker 05 When, when we get to emulsion science, we'll talk about the importance of salt.
30:37 Steven Rinella? Okay, so pick up his deal.
30:39 Speaker 05 Yep, so. Hot dogs originally came from Germany called dachshund, dachshund sausages. That's why we turned that into hot dogs in the US.
30:49 Speaker 04 Really?
30:50 Speaker 05 Yeah.
30:51 Speaker 04 What was the word?
30:51 Speaker 05 Dachshund sausages.
30:53 Steven Rinella? See, I would think someone was making sausages out of those little dogs.
30:57 Speaker 04 Yeah.
30:58 Steven Rinella? Weiner.
30:59 Speaker 05 Fair enough. I think it was the shape, skinny, long.
31:01 Steven Rinella? Got it. Yeah, yeah.
31:04 Speaker 05 And they were made in natural casings. They would hang them in, in the butcher stores. I'm sure in Phil's Christmas play, he had some sausages hanging, hanging in the background.
31:16 Steven Rinella? I don't think so, man. I think that was a huge oversight on Phil's part.
31:22 Speaker 07 I didn't harass the prop department to get some sausages. Yeah.
31:25 Steven Rinella? Phil, but yeah, I don't remember there being sausages.
31:28 Speaker 07 There, I don't, I don't believe there were. There was just a big fake goose.
31:31 Speaker 05 You get no more.
31:32 Speaker 07 Small fake goose.
31:33 Speaker 05 Dickens, there's nothing more Dickens than hanging sausages.
31:36 Steven Rinella? Well, I would expect next, next year around Christmas time, I'd expect a call from Phil.
31:40 Speaker 07 I'll make some calls.
31:43 Speaker 05 So they were made natural casing. So what, what our founder. Did is he said, I've seen this new process in Europe. Called the viscose process. And we can create a permeable, low cost casing. For manufacturing hot dogs. And so that's what we did. And the key thing to a hot dog casing is. Before that, hot dogs were all different lengths, all different diameters, because you were, you were using a natural product. They're all different diameters, right? They don't have rules. When you can manufacture a casing product, you get a very uniform hot dog.
32:23 Steven Rinella? Got it.
32:23 Speaker 05 And then you can package it. You don't have to hang it on the, in the store and cut links off. You can package it in a one pound package.
32:29 Steven Rinella? Mm hmm.
32:30 Speaker 05 So why this material was chosen is primary because of its annular rigidity. So it doesn't, it, it holds its shape. It doesn't expand. It does have some give so that they can stuff it to a certain pressure.
32:47 Steven Rinella? What'd you call that word again?
32:48 Speaker 05 Annular strength. So it's strength around the circle.
32:52 Steven Rinella? Yeah. In the old days, we would have called this episode annular rigidity.
32:58 Steven Rinella? We did, we, we switched to bad titles.
33:00 Speaker 05 All right.
33:00 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
33:01 Speaker 05 Perfect. Um, and it's permeable and that's the critical factor. It has to be permeable to smoke.
33:09 Steven Rinella? Hmm.
33:10 Speaker 05 Um, cause the majority of the skinless hot dogs, so that's what we sell in the U S right now. They're all skinless hot dogs. What happens is in the cooking process, smoke penetrates and cross links proteins at the surface of that hot dog. And forms its own skin out of cross link proteins. And that's what gives you a snap. So there is no skin on that hot dog. That's managed through smoking and, and, and cooking.
33:35 Steven Rinella? Okay. Hold on. I gotta back up for a minute.
33:39 Steven Rinella? Again, you go, well, let's do this. You go into a gas station because you go into a fourth of July party.
33:46 Speaker 05 Mm hmm.
33:46 Steven Rinella? And you're behind, you buy the cheapest sack of, how many comes in a typical?
33:52 Steven Rinella? We got one in our work freezer. Have you ever seen that block of hot dogs in the work freezer? I've, there's an open one. So how many is in a normal pack? Like, like an Oscar, what I don't want to name, yeah. Oscar Meyer, the worst, not the worst. The least expensive hot dog, no, not the worst, meaning best, the least expensive hot dog you can find.
34:12 Speaker 05 That wouldn't be the one you just mentioned.
34:13 Steven Rinella? Okay. But the lea, elite, the lea, the store brand least expensive hot dog you can find. There is no case on that hot dog.
34:22 Speaker 05 No.
34:23 Steven Rinella? But that hot dog has been smoked.
34:26 Speaker 05 Yes. Uh, some of them.
34:30 Steven Rinella? Cause when you look at, you know, when you look at the end.
34:32 Speaker 05 Yeah.
34:33 Steven Rinella? You see the little casing dimples.
34:35 Speaker 05 Yep. That's from that being twisted.
34:37 Speaker 04 This is what, this is what convinced me that this is a podcast.
34:40 Speaker 05 Yep.
34:41 Speaker 04 Like when you bite, when you bite into a hot dog and there's like a little skin hanging off.
34:47 Speaker 05 That's cross-linked protein on the surface of the hot dog.
34:49 Speaker 04 But it's no different materially than the rest of the filling.
34:52 Speaker 05 Correct.
34:53 Steven Rinella? What'd you call it?
34:54 Speaker 05 Cross-linked protein at the surface of the hot dog, just on the surface.
34:59 Steven Rinella? How do you get them out of his casing?
35:02 Speaker 05 So these are treated with Easy Peel. So it's got plant-based, um, glycerin and things like that to make them peel easy.
35:11 Steven Rinella? Okay.
35:12 Speaker 05 Yeah. So the first time I went into a plant, it was the coolest thing I've ever seen. A, it was unbelievably clean. The ingredients that went into that emulsifier were not what I was expecting.
35:25 Steven Rinella? You were expecting some Upton Sinclair stuff.
35:27 Speaker 05 I was.
35:28 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
35:28 Speaker 05 I was.
35:29 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
35:30 Speaker 05 And it's not that at all. You know, I watched these butcher guys and when they're squaring up a ribeye.
35:36 Steven Rinella? Hmm.
35:36 Speaker 05 You know, I'm just going to square this up. That goes in the trim pile and that goes, that's bought by the hot dog manufacturers and things of that nature. So, um, so yeah, the casing
35:50 Speaker 05 forms the hot dog. It hangs on a chain. It goes into the smokehouse.
35:56 Steven Rinella? Huh.
35:56 Speaker 05 It's smoked. It's cooked to its final temperature. They control humidity, temperature all through that to get the characteristics they want.
36:06 Speaker 05 Then the cooking is-
36:06 Steven Rinella? Hot smoke or cold smoke?
36:08 Speaker 05 Hot smoke. So yeah, they're cooking somewhere around a hundred and-
36:13 Speaker 05 Hundred and thirty degrees, something like that.
36:15 Steven Rinella? So they're cooking that son of a bitch in the smoker.
36:17 Speaker 05 You could take it out of the pack and eat a hot dog. It's fully cooked.
36:21 Steven Rinella? Just walk into that big old room, man. I'm trying to line that up here.
36:26 Speaker 05 The best hot dog I've ever had is right out of the oven, right out of the manufacturing oven.
36:30 Steven Rinella? I can, I can tell, man, because like my buddy, they, they milk cows. And you drink them, you know, they put in that super chiller.
36:37 Speaker 05 Yeah.
36:38 Steven Rinella? And you drink that milk right out of that chiller. I could picture getting a hot dog right out of that hot dog machine.
36:44 Speaker 05 Very good. And they, they kill the cook at the end with cold water. Then it goes into packaging. I mean, and, and so in these plants, it, it comes in as lean and fat. The two primary ingredients that are in there.
36:57 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
36:58 Speaker 05 It goes through the process and it's coming out as packages, ready to go to the store.
37:02 Steven Rinella? How come there's no bent hot dogs in them? Cause if it's draped over something. Like, you know, you make a brat, anything, breakfast links, like when I cook breakfast links in my lamb case breakfast links in a cast iron skillet, I spoon them like, you know, like you and your lady laying in bed at night, right? They're all like, cause they all got a bow to them.
37:22 Speaker 05 Right.
37:23 Steven Rinella? But a hot dog in a hot dog pack is straight as narrow.
37:27 Speaker 05 So when they're cooked, that, yes, they're hanging it over a chain, but it's 200 feet of those suckers twisted together.
37:34 Steven Rinella? Got it.
37:35 Speaker 05 And so they're hanging vertically.
37:36 Steven Rinella? And that weight is pulling them straight.
37:37 Speaker 05 That's right. That's right.
37:39 Steven Rinella? Got it.
37:40 Speaker 05 And then, so in packaging, the casing stripped off. It's either a water jet or a, or a blade or whatever. You'll see most, a lot of these casings have a black stripe on them.
37:49 Steven Rinella? What do you mean a water jet?
37:51 Speaker 05 So it's 30,000 PSI water. Um, that you can't even see it.
37:58 Steven Rinella? But how's it not obliterate the hot dog?
38:00 Speaker 05 Yeah, because it's controlled. I think mo- most of these are. Are slit and peeled.
38:06 Steven Rinella? Okay.
38:07 Speaker 05 So, you know, you'll see.
38:08 Steven Rinella? That I can visualize.
38:09 Speaker 05 When you cook a, when you cook a hot dog, like in a skillet, sometimes you'll see a perfect straight line open up on it.
38:16 Steven Rinella? He's telling me about that line, but I, I was lying and acting like I knew about it. But when you were talking about the line, I don't know the line.
38:23 Speaker 05 Yeah.
38:23 Steven Rinella? Yeah, you, you'll see, I always thought it was like an indentation from it being vacuum sealed with other hot dogs. So this is what I'm talking about. This is great. So you're telling me you're cooking up a hot dog at home around a stick over the 4th of July party? And you're seeing a li- a line.
38:38 Speaker 05 Sometimes, not all the time.
38:39 Steven Rinella? Sometimes, yeah. And that's from cutting that thing off?
38:42 Speaker 05 And, and it's cut and peeled. The photo eyes in the plant will look for that blue or this black stripe to make sure it was peeled
38:53 Speaker 05 during the manufacturing process. And so the peeler is the coolest piece of equipment in there. It looks like a machine gun.
38:59 Steven Rinella? Good.
39:00 Speaker 05 With hot dogs coming out instead of bullets. It's just.
39:04 Steven Rinella? Oh, if you could like have a gun like that, just come into a room. Yeah, everybody would be so happy in there.
39:11 Speaker 05 Very cool. And then it goes in, they get sorted and, and packaged, yeah, vacuum sealed. And then off to your grocery store.
39:20 Steven Rinella? You know, the, the, the thing, we were talking, we were joking earlier about Upton Sinclair and how clean it is in there. But like, you know, like people say of hot dogs, right? The old classic, like lips and a-holes, right?
39:30 Speaker 05 Right.
39:31 Steven Rinella? How much truth is there to that? Like what's going into a hot dog? Give me the worst case scenario.
39:40 Steven Rinella? I mean, like.
39:41 Speaker 07 Worst case? I mean, come on. That's incredible, incredible wordplay.
39:46 Speaker 05 Yeah.
39:47 Steven Rinella? Hon, you like the pun.
39:48 Speaker 07 Oh, yeah, that was a double whammy.
39:50 Steven Rinella? That was accidental. The worst case with a U. I know, I know, that was on accident.
39:54 Speaker 07 Sorry, go ahead.
39:56 Steven Rinella? Um.
39:58 Steven Rinella? Give me the, like, and you know, I know you're in the industry, man. You got it. You're a company man. But like, give me the worst, like, uh, like, give me an example, like, would people be pleasantly surprised? If they saw what's in their hot dogs or would they be like, oh, it's worse than I imagined?
40:13 Speaker 05 No, they'd be pleasantly surprised. I mean, so the lean, the lean is all from butcher trim.
40:20 Speaker 05 Um, you know, if they're wanting to get the cost point down.
40:24 Steven Rinella? Mm hmm.
40:25 Speaker 05 Um, for that $2 pack of hot dogs, it'll be different protein sources.
40:31 Steven Rinella? Okay.
40:32 Speaker 05 So they may put away protein or some, some other.
40:35 Steven Rinella? Oh, is that right?
40:36 Speaker 05 Yeah, some other protein source to get, to get the cost profile down and, and, you know, and people.
40:44 Steven Rinella? I had no idea.
40:45 Speaker 05 People.
40:45 Steven Rinella? So the same stuff you drink when you drink like a, or not the same, but like if you're drinking like a protein replacement.
40:51 Speaker 05 Sure.
40:51 Steven Rinella? Or a pro, like a replacement meal or a protein powder.
40:54 Speaker 05 Milk, protein, plant protein, soy.
40:56 Steven Rinella? You can jam that and do a hot dog.
40:58 Speaker 05 You could, um, in order to get a protein filler to get the price point down. And then, and the key point is, you know, originally I said, the consumer votes.
41:08 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
41:09 Speaker 05 Like they get the ultimate vote with their purchase. And so the consumer knows how much money I have in my wallet.
41:15 Steven Rinella? Uh huh.
41:16 Speaker 05 And what's the thing look like on the shelf?
41:18 Steven Rinella? Yeah, yeah.
41:19 Speaker 05 And so if they have a certain amount of money in their wallet, they're going to want a lower price point. And so you've, you, you still have to make a profit, right? So there are ways to do that.
41:26 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
41:27 Speaker 05 You get that protein with protein, um, additions.
41:33 Speaker 05 Um, yeah, but I haven't seen lips and a-holes on, on any, any shelf.
41:41 Steven Rinella? Would you, but here, let me now, let's do this. I believe you're kind of. But like, answer this one totally honestly.
41:48 Speaker 05 Okay.
41:48 Steven Rinella? If you had, would you be able to tell me?
41:52 Speaker 05 Yeah.
41:55 Steven Rinella? I believe him.
41:59 Steven Rinella? Uh, it doesn't bother me.
42:00 Speaker 05 It doesn't bother me either.
42:02 Steven Rinella? Cause if I went to a buddy's house and he made something and he's like, you'll never guess what I made that out of, you know?
42:08 Steven Rinella? I'd be like, I'll try it.
42:09 Speaker 05 Well, I mean, so there's a market for that stuff, right? If, if I'm in Alabama and I'm going in Alabama, we don't have the, the Canadian versus Michigan kind of competition you're talking about. If I roll into an Alabama gas station.
42:22 Steven Rinella? Not even on the border.
42:23 Speaker 05 Not on the border. I'm, I'm, I'm rolling through there. I'm going to see. The hot dog rollers, but right next to it, I'm going to see a jar of pickle pigs feet. I'm going to see a jar of pickle pig snouts. I'm going to like that.
42:37 Steven Rinella? Sure.
42:37 Speaker 05 There's a market for that stuff in it.
42:39 Steven Rinella? I see where you're going with this.
42:40 Speaker 04 Mm hmm.
42:42 Steven Rinella? And you think those snouts and those feet are not likely to be in those dogs?
42:48 Speaker 04 I think he knows that.
42:50 Speaker 05 Of the places I've been to.
42:51 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
42:52 Speaker 05 I haven't seen it.
42:53 Steven Rinella? And if you did, you'd tell me.
42:54 Speaker 05 And if I did, I'd tell you. So I've been to,
42:59 Speaker 05 you know, I've been to a lot of them.
43:01 Steven Rinella? Yeah. Um, Ryan, I know you're bursting with questions, but I got another one. Walk me through.
43:09 Steven Rinella? It seems like they call out a beef hot dog. Like, it seems like if it's a beef hot dog, they want to tell you that it's a beef hot dog. Right? And so they're sort of trying, they're like, they're, they're providing like, it's juxtaposed to what?
43:26 Speaker 05 Yeah, that so hot dogs are made out of beef, pork, or chicken, or combinations of the above.
43:33 Steven Rinella? I didn't know there's a chicken hot dog.
43:34 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah.
43:36 Steven Rinella? Really?
43:37 Speaker 05 Sure.
43:37 Steven Rinella? But the guys making those aren't like chicken hot dogs?
43:41 Speaker 05 They do.
43:41 Steven Rinella? Oh, they do?
43:42 Speaker 05 They do. Chicken, chicken and turkey.
43:44 Steven Rinella? Like, it seems like they're proud of a beef.
43:47 Speaker 04 Oh, yeah, all beef. I mean, that's like a branding thing, I think, is like.
43:50 Speaker 05 It is. It's a marketing thing that, that, that elicits,
43:55 Speaker 05 I think incorrectly, equality or whatever. I mean, and there are also religious
44:01 Speaker 05 pieces to it.
44:01 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
44:02 Speaker 05 Where you've, you've got to understand kosher and all that.
44:04 Steven Rinella? That's good. Yeah. Kosher root and, and, or what? So it's, is the halal?
44:08 Speaker 05 Halal is there.
44:09 Steven Rinella? Yeah, okay. All right. So, so you'd be like, if you were going into an area where you had,
44:17 Steven Rinella? you had Muslims, you had, you had Jews, you might see that there's a higher prevalence of just like labeled beef with the kosher.
44:25 Speaker 05 And it would have the stamp on there. So that's what they're all looking for is the triangle K or the halal or whatever.
44:30 Steven Rinella? Got it. Got it. So that, that drives that.
44:32 Speaker 05 But it does.
44:33 Steven Rinella? It doesn't mean that if it doesn't say, like, if they're not touting what it is, it's likely because it's what?
44:43 Speaker 05 You know, it's a standard pork hot dog is what I would expect. Yeah, I mean pork is pork is the easiest protein source to make it make a hot dog emulsion out of.
44:54 Speaker 04 Okay.
44:55 Speaker 05 Very forgiving, very easy to make. So in in the industry that that there's a saying that says pork makes sausage and chicken makes money.
45:09 Speaker 05 That'd be another that'd be a good name for the podcast, probably.
45:12 Speaker 04 Deer makes for deer makes for a big weekend.
45:14 Speaker 05 Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So chicken has a really high water holding capacity.
45:19 Speaker 04 Hmm.
45:20 Speaker 05 Yes. So you can you can put more water on the protein and sell more water.
45:24 Speaker 04 So with we've thrown around the word emulsion.
45:26 Speaker 05 Sure.
45:27 Speaker 04 And I pretend like I know what we're talking about. But scientifically speaking, what are we like?
45:32 Speaker 05 Yeah.
45:33 Speaker 04 I know I I sort of know when I see it, but what's going on there? And then how does different proteins? How do the different proteins factor into that?
45:41 Speaker 05 Yep.
45:42 Speaker 04 Because then you're talking about water content.
45:44 Speaker 05 So people hear the word emulsion and they think, oh, this is lab grown food.
45:51 Speaker 04 Hmm.
45:51 Speaker 05 You know, it has this scientific feel to it.
45:56 Speaker 05 You know, milk's an emulsion. There's all kinds of natural emulsions out there.
46:01 Speaker 04 How is milk an emulsion?
46:02 Speaker 05 What an emulsion is, is a fat particle that's stabilized with an emulsifier around it.
46:11 Speaker 05 So there are stabilized fats inside of milk.
46:15 Speaker 04 That's what emulsion means?
46:15 Speaker 05 Hmm.
46:16 Speaker 04 Hmm.
46:17 Speaker 05 You know, so if I make salad dressing, you know, an emulsion is I'm taking two things that won't mix.
46:22 Speaker 04 You know.
46:23 Speaker 05 I'm mixing them and stabilizing it. So salad dressing, oil and water, oil and vinegar, whatever it is. If I shake that up in 30 minutes, it's going to be separated again.
46:33 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
46:35 Speaker 05 So an emulsion puts an emulsifier around those oil particles to stabilize it.
46:41 Speaker 04 Okay, let's let's.
46:44 Steven Rinella? We make our own dressing and we buy a dressing like most American households.
46:48 Speaker 05 Right.
46:49 Steven Rinella? So when we make it, I have a little shaker. You, you, right?
46:53 Speaker 05 Yeah.
46:53 Steven Rinella? Shake it up, you're right. It's like perfect, but then you, you know, when you go get it the next time it's separated out.
46:58 Speaker 05 Right.
46:59 Steven Rinella? But then when you buy a whatever.
47:02 Speaker 04 Who's the guy that the actor?
47:05 Steven Rinella? Yeah, you buy some Paul Newman.
47:08 Steven Rinella? Um, it doesn't separate. So what would I need to be doing at home to make mine like his?
47:15 Speaker 05 That'd be similar to what we're going to talk about for hot dog emulsions. You gotta pull an emulsifier around that oil particle to keep those oil particles from getting together and agglomerating.
47:24 Steven Rinella? Okay.
47:25 Speaker 05 That's, that's what happens. So I, emulsions are, again, they're natural. I've, I've worked with emulsion, emulsions my entire career because I used to be in the chemical space. So we made lots of difomers and things of that nature that are stable emulsions. And that's the key. And in a hot dog,
47:46 Speaker 05 the oil particle is a fat.
47:50 Speaker 05 And the emulsifier that we're going to protect that fat from getting, getting together is protein.
47:57 Steven Rinella? Huh. So what is it in salad dressing?
48:00 Speaker 05 And salad dressing, I, you know, it may be, uh, there, there are all kinds of emulsion starches and things like that.
48:07 Steven Rinella? Got it.
48:07 Speaker 05 That can, that can stabilize.
48:09 Steven Rinella? But you could make one from the things you could buy at a grocery store.
48:12 Speaker 05 Yeah.
48:13 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
48:13 Speaker 05 Yeah. And the key is you gotta put tons of energy into it. So you gotta shake the bejesus out of that thing.
48:20 Steven Rinella? Oh.
48:21 Speaker 05 And when they make it, most likely, obviously they're not shaking individual jars at the Paul Newman factory.
48:29 Speaker 05 So what?
48:31 Steven Rinella? Yeah, they've got like an industrial edge.
48:35 Speaker 05 They've got a full on emulsifier pump.
48:37 Speaker 04 I was imagining guys on lunch break all going out for a smoke and their forearms are just massive.
48:43 Speaker 05 That's right. So there, there's back pressure on that pump. They're going to cycle it through that pump. You know, probably six, seven, eight, nine times, get the particle size of the oil down, stabilize it.
48:53 Steven Rinella? Okay.
48:54 Speaker 05 So, you know, same deal on a hot dog. Um, same process.
48:58 Steven Rinella? So what do you grind that? Walk me through making a dog. Like you got your, your lean meat.
49:03 Speaker 05 Yep.
49:03 Steven Rinella? And you're grinding it to, to like a liquid.
49:08 Speaker 05 Not really.
49:09 Steven Rinella? Okay.
49:10 Speaker 05 Well, I mean, I'm gonna grind it. I have a lot more than I'm gonna grind ground beef.
49:13 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
49:14 Speaker 05 I'm gonna grind.
49:14 Steven Rinella? A paste, let's say, not a liquid.
49:16 Speaker 05 So I'm gonna grind it to probably a fi- three to five millimeter plate, something like that.
49:23 Steven Rinella? Okay.
49:24 Speaker 05 Fine grind. Um, but step one is protein extraction. So I have to extract the proteins out of that meat.
49:36 Steven Rinella? Well, it is protein. What's left once you get the protein?
49:39 Speaker 05 So, but I've got to extract the individual pieces of protein. So pro- protein's a polymer, right? It's a, uh, you know, it's a bunch of amino acids that are stacked out into a polymer chain. And so I need to unwind and extract those proteins so that it's ready to make an emulsion. Because it's, yeah, it's a protein, but it's in the form of a muscle.
50:03 Steven Rinella? Uh huh.
50:03 Speaker 05 So I've got to get it out of that form of a muscle.
50:07 Steven Rinella? How you do that?
50:08 Speaker 05 And I do that with salt. So that's, that's why I argued that salt was the most important ingredient. So salt.
50:15 Steven Rinella? Not the flavor.
50:16 Speaker 05 Salt drives protein extraction. So, um, you know, again, key components, salt, lean protein, fat, and water.
50:29 Steven Rinella? Mm hmm.
50:29 Speaker 05 In the form of ice.
50:32 Speaker 05 Um, or traditionally it, because what I want to do is extract that protein, but I have to be very careful that I don't start to denature it.
50:41 Steven Rinella? Mm hmm.
50:41 Speaker 05 Because I want it to denature in the oven. That's when I want it to form into a gel and cook and solidify and have that texture that you want.
50:48 Steven Rinella? Okay.
50:49 Speaker 05 Can't have it denature in the processing spot. So I'm gonna add ice to keep the temperature down.
50:55 Steven Rinella? Got it, got it. I see.
50:57 Speaker 05 So there's, there's a, what is it? I gotta look at my notes. So there's a differential scanning calorimeter, calorimetry, calorimetry. That's a tough say that word five times.
51:10 Steven Rinella? Oh, try.
51:11 Speaker 05 It's DSC. That's what I know it as.
51:13 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
51:14 Speaker 05 It's, it's a graph, if you will, of the denaturing process of a protein. So pork has this really wide denaturing curve, kind of a low peak and, and comes off the other end.
51:27 Steven Rinella? Hmm.
51:28 Speaker 05 Really forgiving. Um, venison.
51:33 Speaker 05 Extremely narrow and extremely high peak. So what that means is if I let temperature get away from me and the manufacturing process, it's going to denature quick.
51:43 Speaker 04 Really?
51:45 Speaker 05 So that's why.
51:46 Speaker 04 Where's beef sit on that little scale?
51:48 Speaker 05 Uh, harder than pork. So pork is the easiest.
51:52 Speaker 04 Okay.
51:53 Speaker 05 Beef is harder.
51:57 Speaker 05 Both because of the DSC curve and then also just because the extractability of the proteins.
52:02 Speaker 04 And for, for like someone just who knows these meats from cooking in a kitchen, is that why, like, is that curve have to do with people saying like, don't overcook your venison? It's really easy to overcook your venison. Like that's, is there, is there?
52:18 Speaker 05 There's a piece.
52:18 Speaker 04 A relationship there?
52:19 Speaker 05 And you guys, we all know, right? It's, it's, there's very little inter muscular lipids or fat in venison. It's a highly active muscle. The proteins are packed really tight. So that's what makes them hard to extract.
52:36 Speaker 05 So I, you know, overcooking venison has more to do with you just lose any little bit of fat that was in there and you're going to make a really tough chew.
52:44 Speaker 04 Gotcha.
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53:16 Steven Rinella? If you spend a lot of time outdoors, you got dogs, you got kids, you know how hard it is to keep the floor of your rig clean. A thing we do in our, in our little fleet of vehicles that have at my household, if you go look, open the door on any one of them, they all got WeatherTech. We get a car, we throw the mats out and put in WeatherTech. That way, when there's a mess, it's like your kid's fault, your dog's fault, it's the weather's fault, doesn't matter. You take them suckers out and hose them off and you're back to being good as new. I'm telling you, if you got a vehicle, put WeatherTech in there, you're going to be happy you did it. And check this out. American-made floor liners and cargo liners, okay? They laugh in the face of all weather. Go take a look for yourself today at weathertech.com.
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54:41 Steven Rinella? Mole Tree AI detects when a buck is in front of your camera and can switch from photos to HD video and upload immediately, giving you maximum detail of your target buck. Receive images straight to your phone and monitor battery life from the Mole Tree app so you avoid spooking deer and only need to go to your hunting spot when it's time to hunt. You've done the work and watched his every move. Now, go notch your tag. Check out Mole Tree at moletree.com. So do you, I want to continue out with the mollifying, but just on this subject. Would you be able to make, would you be able to take deer meat?
55:24 Steven Rinella? Um, wild deer meat? Would you be able to take deer meat and make a dog that if I came in the gas station and grabbed it off the roller, I would just think I was having a roller dog? Or would I be like, something's different?
55:38 Speaker 05 You know, it's gonna have venison flavor, obviously. It's gonna have a wild flavor. But outside of that,
55:43 Steven Rinella? But the texture.
55:44 Speaker 05 I think that, I think we could get the texture and all of that stuff right. It'd be really hard.
55:52 Steven Rinella? Really?
55:52 Speaker 04 Yeah, there's, there's science to this.
55:54 Speaker 05 This, that, the DSC is the biggest driver. There's also pH of the muscle itself.
56:01 Steven Rinella? Okay.
56:02 Speaker 05 So Corinne mentioned that I should listen to the Red Cutter episode.
56:07 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
56:08 Speaker 05 And I did.
56:10 Steven Rinella? You ever hear of that guy before?
56:11 Speaker 05 No.
56:12 Steven Rinella? You didn't a lot to talk about.
56:13 Speaker 05 We would.
56:14 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
56:14 Speaker 05 Yeah, I mean, I,
56:17 Speaker 05 it's intimidating. I feel like I'm the least intellectual of all the, of all the guests you've had, but um,
56:22 Steven Rinella? No, you're not, no.
56:23 Speaker 05 Okay.
56:26 Steven Rinella? Don't worry about that.
56:28 Speaker 05 All right. Um, yeah, it was interesting. So everything he was focusing on was about
56:37 Speaker 05 the tooth and chew of the meat.
56:40 Steven Rinella? Good.
56:41 Speaker 05 Making hot dogs, it's
56:44 Speaker 05 it's different. It's all about protein extraction.
56:47 Steven Rinella? Okay.
56:47 Speaker 05 So he was talking about, um, the DFD meat, you know, you got, you called it red cutter. He called it dark cutter.
56:57 Steven Rinella? Mm hmm.
56:57 Speaker 05 Um, that stuff is really easy to extract proteins from it. So he may not like it, but I kind of do because it's a, it's, it's easy to extract protein.
57:07 Steven Rinella? From a dark cutter?
57:08 Speaker 05 Yep. Um, that being said, the, the flavor is different and all that kind of stuff.
57:15 Steven Rinella? Okay.
57:16 Speaker 05 So, and I'm just talking pure protein extraction. Um, but you taught, in that episode, you talked a little about pre and post rigor.
57:24 Steven Rinella? Yep.
57:26 Speaker 05 Um, it's easier to extract proteins to make a hot dog in pre rigor meat than it would be in a post rigor protein. You would never do that?
57:38 Steven Rinella? Really?
57:38 Speaker 05 Yeah.
57:40 Speaker 05 And it has most of what it has to do with pH. So as a, as a muscle riggers, the pH is going to drop.
57:48 Speaker 05 Um, if that animal was in stress when it was killed, that's going to have lactic acid building up. That's going to make the pH drop. And I can extract proteins better at a higher pH.
58:00 Steven Rinella? Hmm.
58:01 Speaker 05 So there are things you can chemically do, add phosphates, add some other stuff to get the proteins to extract. But that's all the stuff that you got against you when you're trying to make a venison hot dog. It's going to be low pH. It's got that real narrow band of the, the DSC curve.
58:17 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
58:18 Speaker 05 It can be done.
58:20 Steven Rinella? Deer meat has a different pH.
58:24 Speaker 05 A wild kill deer would have a different pH. I think so. I mean,
58:33 Speaker 05 Unless, I mean, I, I, I think if I was picking the perfect animal,
58:38 Speaker 05 I would pick a young doe. I would shoot it in the head.
58:42 Steven Rinella? Good.
58:44 Speaker 05 And I would contemplate field dressing and making hot dogs out of it that day.
58:49 Steven Rinella? Right then and there.
58:50 Speaker 04 Hmm.
58:51 Steven Rinella? Just get right to it.
58:51 Speaker 04 That sounds like an episode.
58:53 Speaker 05 But, but I mean, it's, I mean, that's a lot of hot dogs.
58:59 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
59:00 Speaker 04 You know, you just mentioned rigor man.
59:03 Steven Rinella? This has nothing to do with what we're talking about, but I was talking to a buddy of mine yesterday and he was telling me that he,
59:14 Steven Rinella? he's a fireman. And he's telling me, it's kind of hot weird how this whole thing came up, but
59:21 Steven Rinella? he's telling me they went to a nursing home one time.
59:25 Speaker 05 Mm hmm.
59:26 Steven Rinella? And there was a guy and they had called about a guy that he was on a pacemaker and on some kind of other respirator or something.
59:36 Steven Rinella? And they're like, they called about it. They, they couldn't tell what was going on with them. But he had a pulse.
59:42 Speaker 05 Hmm.
59:44 Steven Rinella? Um, but when he went to, he grabbed his arm, went lifted up and the guy was already in rigor.
59:50 Speaker 05 Where the pulse?
59:52 Steven Rinella? Because of, because of, I can't remember what he's explaining to people, like some, they had him on some sort of life support deal or something. That was still registering.
1:00:00 Speaker 05 Hmm.
1:00:02 Steven Rinella? And he's like, no. He's not with us anymore.
1:00:06 Speaker 04 Crazy.
1:00:06 Steven Rinella? Isn't that wild?
1:00:07 Speaker 05 Hmm. That is wild.
1:00:08 Speaker 04 Wish I'd remembered the story better. Back to hot dogs.
1:00:15 Steven Rinella? But back to hot dogs.
1:00:17 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:00:17 Steven Rinella? Yeah. Wish I'd remembered what he told me better. I was driving and my kid was trying to get a hold of me.
1:00:21 Speaker 04 Where does the, where does the water content come into play of these different meats?
1:00:28 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:00:28 Speaker 04 As far as like their ability to emulsify.
1:00:33 Speaker 05 Uh, I'd say it's less about water holding capacity. I mean, they've all got,
1:00:39 Speaker 05 I'll have to look it, look it up, but you know, sixty percent water or something, something in that muscle. Chicken can hold more water.
1:00:48 Speaker 04 Right.
1:00:49 Speaker 05 Um, oftentimes the manufacturer likes that because they can sell more water. And both in a chicken breast or, or in a chicken hot dog. Um, the more water that you put into the emulsion, you're stuffing up a watery substance into cellulose casing and that gets difficult to handle.
1:01:09 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:01:10 Speaker 05 You know, you, the more viscous the emulsion is when you, when you stuff it through the stuffing horn. Um, I think the casing will take it, it'll twist more. You'll get good link sizes and all that good stuff.
1:01:26 Speaker 05 Yeah, so I,
1:01:29 Speaker 05 I would say that water holding and water content is, is less of a concern. It's more about, you remember what I said, when you're making an emulsion, it's an oil particle surrounded by protein.
1:01:39 Speaker 04 Right.
1:01:40 Speaker 05 You want, you gotta know how much fat's coming in with your trim. So how much fat's already in your lean? How much fat am I adding for that thirty percent fat that's in a hot dog?
1:01:52 Speaker 04 Right.
1:01:53 Speaker 05 And that ratio needs to be right because you got too little protein. You're not going to completely cover that oil particle.
1:02:01 Speaker 04 Okay.
1:02:02 Speaker 05 You got too much protein and there's extra protein kind of swimming around and then.
1:02:06 Speaker 04 Yeah, this is what I remember from describing the one of the big challenges.
1:02:09 Speaker 05 Important process. I mean, yeah. The, the key steps and I, I,
1:02:17 Speaker 05 that I, I don't wanna, I've seen some of the homemade hot dog recipes and stuff like that on there. And I, I think what's missing out there is that it's two distinct processes. Step one is I want to extract my proteins.
1:02:34 Speaker 05 So in my kitchen, I would do that in a different piece of equipment. I'm not going to do that in a food processor.
1:02:39 Steven Rinella? Hmm.
1:02:39 Speaker 05 Cause that's going to heat it up.
1:02:41 Steven Rinella? Oh.
1:02:41 Speaker 05 And I'm going to start denaturing and, and that'll be a problem.
1:02:44 Steven Rinella? Okay. What are you going to do it in?
1:02:45 Speaker 05 I'd actually probably do it in a stand mixer. With a paddle. Um, a, a two to three, you know, plate grind, add my salt, add probably half my ice to keep the temperature down.
1:02:59 Steven Rinella? Good.
1:03:00 Speaker 05 And slowly extract the proteins and you'll know you're done when it stops being grainy. And start, it'll be extremely sticky.
1:03:09 Steven Rinella? Hmm.
1:03:10 Speaker 05 So it'll stick to your hand. You can pull individual fibers. Like if you pull it out like this, you'll see fibers kind of break.
1:03:15 Steven Rinella? Man, I could picture what you're talking about from having made some dogs in my day.
1:03:20 Speaker 05 Yeah. That's, that's what you're looking for.
1:03:22 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:03:23 Speaker 05 You're good to go. Your proteins are extracted. Then you emulsify.
1:03:26 Steven Rinella? So you know it's done by that. You're not, so it's a look thing, a look and feel.
1:03:30 Speaker 05 Yeah, look and feel thing.
1:03:31 Steven Rinella? Okay.
1:03:32 Speaker 05 And I mean, in the, in the industrial world, it's a, it's a recipe. Like they know I'm going to put this much ice in at this time. They've got specialized equipment that's both their, their chopper, they call it. That's where you do the protein extraction and chopper and emulsifier. It's all in the kind of same piece of equipment.
1:03:51 Steven Rinella? Got it.
1:03:52 Speaker 05 And then they're going to ship that to the stuffing plant to stuff.
1:03:57 Steven Rinella? When you, when you go to put that, when you get that hot dog all ready and he's ready to go in one of these here.
1:04:01 Speaker 05 Mm hmm.
1:04:02 Steven Rinella? Would you be able to pack it into a snowball or is it, or is it a little runnier than that?
1:04:06 Speaker 05 It's a little runnier than that.
1:04:07 Steven Rinella? Okay.
1:04:08 Speaker 05 Yep. Um.
1:04:13 Speaker 05 Yeah. I mean, it, but it's pasty. It's, it, you know, it, it, once you add the fat, it gets that white, kind of creamy appearance, right? Um, my, I don't know when you want to get into it, but kind of my concept for a venison hot dog, um, is, uh, I think it's.
1:04:37 Speaker 05 A, I'm using, in, in my concept, I was telling Randall before this, I'm using bear fat. Um, and the key thing is to understand what is that protein to fat content.
1:04:51 Steven Rinella? Hmm.
1:04:52 Speaker 05 And, and when I'm emulsifying it in the kitchen, dude, I'm not running it through that food processor for more than two minutes.
1:05:02 Steven Rinella? Okay. Cause of temperature.
1:05:04 Speaker 05 Cause if I go too, too hot, it, the temperature's gonna get away from me.
1:05:08 Steven Rinella? I'm, I got a question on the heat thing. I'm, I'm trying, if, if this is related or not. You ever, you ever smoke fish, smoked salmon, trout, whatever?
1:05:15 Speaker 05 Hmm.
1:05:16 Steven Rinella? You ever notice, really doesn't matter what kind of fish you're smoking. If you get it, if you get it too hot, too fast during the smoking process, it puts off that white.
1:05:27 Speaker 05 Hmm.
1:05:29 Steven Rinella? I don't know, foamy goo.
1:05:31 Speaker 05 You're melting fat.
1:05:32 Steven Rinella? And it's like, oh, you, you, you overdid it.
1:05:35 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:05:36 Steven Rinella? Like too much heat, too quick.
1:05:38 Speaker 05 Right.
1:05:38 Steven Rinella? That, that's what that is, is melted fat?
1:05:40 Speaker 05 Yep.
1:05:40 Steven Rinella? Okay. Is that the same as what you're talking about? So that's, that's a different problem.
1:05:44 Speaker 05 Totally different problem.
1:05:45 Steven Rinella? Okay.
1:05:45 Speaker 05 This has more to do with taking off the denaturing process to form that protein gel that is a hot dog before it's in the oven.
1:05:55 Steven Rinella? Okay.
1:05:56 Speaker 05 I need it to happen in the oven or in the smoker.
1:06:00 Steven Rinella? Got it.
1:06:01 Speaker 04 So the, the, the problem then, if you, if you get that heat going, there, it's, is it that it's not going to bind to the fat? Like, like you said, there's two separate steps. There's one, denaturing the protein and then.
1:06:16 Speaker 05 Extracting the protein.
1:06:17 Speaker 04 I'm sorry, extracting the protein and you don't want to avoid denaturing it.
1:06:21 Speaker 05 Hmm.
1:06:21 Speaker 04 And then two is the actual emulsifying.
1:06:24 Speaker 05 Right.
1:06:24 Speaker 04 Process.
1:06:26 Speaker 05 Yeah. So I mean, think of it as, as that protein's going to gel and firm up.
1:06:30 Steven Rinella? Hmm.
1:06:31 Speaker 05 Before you've made it into emulsion.
1:06:33 Steven Rinella? Okay.
1:06:33 Speaker 05 So it's not individual pieces of protein to wrap around that fat. It's not available anymore because it's gelled up and, and solidified, if you will.
1:06:43 Steven Rinella? Right. Got it.
1:06:44 Speaker 05 Yep. Yep. And that's the emulsifying process is, is, is more ice.
1:06:52 Speaker 05 Um, lots of times pre emulsified fat. So I want to beat up the fat so I get the size of fat particle that I want. I want one to ten microns or something like that. And then I'm going to wrap that protein emulsion around it.
1:07:08 Steven Rinella? Okay.
1:07:08 Speaker 05 Or that protein, sorry, extracted protein around it to make an emulsion.
1:07:13 Steven Rinella? And that's from the food processor. That's where you're be applying the energy to it.
1:07:17 Speaker 05 Serious, serious energy.
1:07:19 Steven Rinella? Yeah. When someone gets baloney.
1:07:22 Speaker 05 Yep.
1:07:22 Steven Rinella? That's emulsified.
1:07:23 Speaker 05 Yep.
1:07:24 Steven Rinella? A brat is not emulsified.
1:07:25 Speaker 05 Correct.
1:07:26 Steven Rinella? When you go and get lunch meat at a, at a deli counter. Mm hmm. Albertson, Safeway, whatever, and you get like a, like a turkey lunch meat.
1:07:35 Speaker 05 Mm hmm.
1:07:36 Steven Rinella? Some of that's emulsified. But some of it's just turkey breast.
1:07:41 Speaker 05 Right. Yeah, so.
1:07:43 Steven Rinella? Like what, where else do people see emulsification?
1:07:45 Speaker 05 Say, hot dogs, baloney, mortadella, all those types of products. Go through an emulsification step.
1:07:56 Speaker 05 I'd say deli meats are approaching it. But not necessarily, they're not necessarily all the way there. So to make a deli meat. You wanna, um, you're going to take pieces of, you know, whatever meat you're wanting to make. We'll say turkey.
1:08:12 Steven Rinella? Mm hmm.
1:08:13 Speaker 05 Um, I want to break down the surface of each one of those individual chunks. Um, using enzymes, uh, salt things. So it's, so it's kind of like an emulsifying step, but you're not emulsifying it. Um, once you get the edges of that surface, surface sticky.
1:08:31 Steven Rinella? Mm hmm.
1:08:32 Speaker 05 You're going to press it.
1:08:35 Speaker 05 And make, and, and it's going to basically glue it all together.
1:08:38 Steven Rinella? Okay.
1:08:39 Speaker 05 So it makes, you know, you either do that in a round casing, which those over there, that's baloney casing. The red ones.
1:08:49 Steven Rinella? How long is this if we and Randall started walking apart?
1:08:52 Speaker 05 A lot longer. Yeah.
1:08:54 Steven Rinella? It's a lot of bologna.
1:08:56 Speaker 05 It's a lot of bologna. That's kind of a standard, you know, round deli meat casing. It's made out of plastic.
1:09:04 Steven Rinella? Yeah, yeah.
1:09:04 Speaker 05 It's got, uh, you know, some bologna's that plastic stays on, some of it, they, they, they leave it on for the consumer to peel off.
1:09:13 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:09:13 Speaker 05 So you got something to run in between your teeth.
1:09:15 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:09:15 Speaker 05 Clean them off. And then, and then some of them peel them off in the manufacturing process. But I'd say.
1:09:22 Steven Rinella? Keep asking questions. I got, I got to see if I can get my, this, this relates. I'm gonna see if I get my wife to send me something.
1:09:27 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:09:28 Steven Rinella? I'm gonna show you something.
1:09:28 Speaker 05 It's a, it, so it, you know, a sandwich meat, a deli meat.
1:09:33 Steven Rinella? Right.
1:09:34 Speaker 05 Is not quite an emulsion. It's more of individually separated meat that's pressed and formed.
1:09:41 Steven Rinella? Mm-hmm.
1:09:41 Speaker 05 And so we either leave it round.
1:09:44 Steven Rinella? Right.
1:09:44 Speaker 05 And, and what they call a chub.
1:09:46 Steven Rinella? Mm-hmm.
1:09:46 Speaker 05 So, you know, a deli chub would just be a perfectly round clipped with like hog rings basically on each end.
1:09:52 Steven Rinella? Is that a technical term?
1:09:53 Speaker 05 Yep.
1:09:54 Steven Rinella? I always just call them loafs. I like, when I see it in the case, I would describe it as loaf, but chub's much better.
1:09:59 Speaker 05 Chub. Um, you can, you can put them in a mold to make them square. You've seen the square hams.
1:10:06 Steven Rinella? Yeah. Yeah. Like when you buy a little pack, when you, when you buy a little pack for, to take home to make sandwiches.
1:10:12 Speaker 05 Yep. It's a square.
1:10:13 Steven Rinella? It's a very square piece of ham.
1:10:15 Speaker 05 So that starts off in a round form and it's put in a mold.
1:10:17 Steven Rinella? Mm-hmm.
1:10:18 Speaker 05 When it's broken, when it's, when it's, uh, cooked.
1:10:21 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:10:22 Speaker 05 And then some hams, back in the nineties, there were more of those. There's the D-shaped ham.
1:10:28 Steven Rinella? Oh, yeah.
1:10:28 Speaker 05 So it's flat on one side and kind of arced on the other side. Yeah.
1:10:31 Steven Rinella? You know what, you know what? I wonder if the industry is still into, cause I still use it, that stretchy net.
1:10:36 Speaker 05 Yep.
1:10:37 Steven Rinella? Do you guys still use that stuff?
1:10:38 Speaker 05 We, uh, we actually sell those. So, yeah, I didn't bring any, but, and, and most of that, so it's, it's elastic netting.
1:10:45 Steven Rinella? You buy a roll that lasts your whole lifetime.
1:10:47 Speaker 05 And, and it's used to put just surface characteristics on the, whatever you're wanting to do.
1:10:51 Steven Rinella? Oh.
1:10:52 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:10:52 Steven Rinella? You think that's how you guys think of it?
1:10:54 Speaker 05 That's what I think of it as.
1:10:55 Steven Rinella? But you know, I got one of those big stuffers.
1:10:57 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:10:58 Steven Rinella? That bought, like a big giant cylinder.
1:11:00 Speaker 05 Okay.
1:11:01 Steven Rinella? And you, you load that netting on the end of that tube and you can take a duck or a pheasant or anything like that and cram it through there. And it comes out wrapped up, trust in that little net.
1:11:12 Speaker 05 It's like buying a Christmas tree.
1:11:14 Speaker 04 Yeah, Christmas tree.
1:11:14 Steven Rinella? Yeah, and then when you, but when you brine and smoke it or whatever, you know what I mean? If you smoke a duck or something, he goes like this.
1:11:20 Speaker 05 Keeps them all together.
1:11:21 Steven Rinella? Yeah, well, if you, if you mesh them, he stays all like a little ball.
1:11:28 Speaker 05 Yep.
1:11:28 Steven Rinella? And the, the marks look cool.
1:11:31 Speaker 05 It does make some cool marks.
1:11:32 Speaker 04 You were telling me when we talked on the phone about using cellulose products to impart flavor and color to, I think specifically like lunch meats and stuff, but in theory you could do that with the duck, right?
1:11:48 Speaker 05 Good.
1:11:50 Speaker 04 It kind of prints, like, explain that.
1:11:52 Speaker 05 So, yeah, the, the guy over here, that's, that's smoke treated, so we have transfer cases.
1:11:57 Steven Rinella? That thing smells good.
1:12:00 Speaker 05 So, yeah, the guys, they said, I was getting the printed stuff, they, we made that in our printer down in Mexico.
1:12:09 Speaker 05 At our, at our plant, and he was sending those, I said, can you put some smoke stuff in there? And he goes, you sure you want me to do that?
1:12:16 Steven Rinella? Smell of the whole lobby when you come in there.
1:12:18 Speaker 05 So I, I brought it and it sat in, sat in my kitchen for a while, my wife walks in the first time, she's like, what have you been cooking in here? It's like, yeah, it's my hot dog casing, so it's.
1:12:28 Steven Rinella? What's the electric blue one you got there?
1:12:31 Speaker 05 So, that size is probably for a, for like a cocktail weenie.
1:12:36 Steven Rinella? Oh, yeah, hell, yeah.
1:12:38 Speaker 05 So it's 18, 19 millimeter. They've got.
1:12:42 Steven Rinella? Why is it electric blue?
1:12:43 Speaker 05 It's electric blue because this customer has a visualization system that looks for that blue color.
1:12:49 Steven Rinella? Oh, to make sure they got it all off.
1:12:51 Speaker 05 To make sure they got it off.
1:12:51 Steven Rinella? Interesting.
1:12:53 Speaker 05 Yeah, or most hot dog manufacturers have, that looks for the black stripe. So they're looking for that black stripe.
1:13:02 Speaker 04 Is that, that's automated? Like they're, they're sorting?
1:13:05 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah.
1:13:06 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:13:06 Speaker 05 Just making sure that it's all, it's all gone.
1:13:10 Steven Rinella? Got it.
1:13:10 Speaker 05 Yep. So you were asking about transfer. So we've got smoke transfer is if if I'm gonna make a product, but I'm not gonna run it through a smokehouse.
1:13:19 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:13:20 Speaker 05 But I want it to have a smoke flavor. You'd buy a casing with smoke transfer. Um, there are also color transfers. The biggest in the hot dog world is uh, is dark cherry. For making the red hot dog.
1:13:36 Steven Rinella? Mm hmm.
1:13:38 Speaker 05 So they're big up in Massachusetts.
1:13:40 Steven Rinella? Yeah, but what does that come from? Like call them like, didn't they used to call them red hots and stuff?
1:13:44 Speaker 05 Yeah, there's a brand.
1:13:45 Steven Rinella? But why the redness? That was just a branding thing.
1:13:49 Speaker 05 Yeah. So I mean, you're gonna add, these dogs have probably a little bit of sodium nitrate in to give it that pink color.
1:13:55 Steven Rinella? Mm hmm.
1:13:56 Speaker 05 That's what does that. Sodium nitrate also kills botulism and all the the bad stuff. It's probably got some phosphate in it to help get the pH up, pH discussion. I'll talk about that in my venison recipe.
1:14:12 Steven Rinella? Okay.
1:14:13 Speaker 05 Um, yeah, it it's a cultural thing. I can, I can say that in the US, the majority of our dark cherry red casings and and that that color does transfer from the casing to the hot dog.
1:14:28 Steven Rinella? Mm hmm.
1:14:30 Speaker 05 We also have caramel colors, mostly in plastic and fibrous that transfers a caramel color on the outside of the lunch meat.
1:14:39 Steven Rinella? God, yeah.
1:14:40 Speaker 05 You know, you see that rind?
1:14:41 Steven Rinella? It looks like it was.
1:14:42 Speaker 05 Some of that, you know, a lot of that smoke, right?
1:14:46 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:14:46 Speaker 05 Cause it's a smoked ham and and that color comes from smoke. Um, but, you know, I've said it a couple of times, the consumer votes, you know, votes and their vote is with their wallet and their eyes.
1:14:58 Steven Rinella? Until they're hooked.
1:14:59 Speaker 05 And until they're hooked.
1:15:00 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:15:00 Speaker 05 Till they have a flavor, a flavor hook, right?
1:15:02 Steven Rinella? Sure, yeah.
1:15:03 Speaker 05 And I wanna see that kind of, as a human being, I wanna see a nice ring on the outside of my deli meat, cause it looks well put together, right?
1:15:11 Steven Rinella? Do you, do you happen to know?
1:15:15 Steven Rinella? In barbecue.
1:15:16 Speaker 05 Mm hmm.
1:15:17 Steven Rinella? So they go like Texas barbecue, whatever. People want to see that smoke ring. And then there's talk about how deeply penetrated that smoke ring is. What is happening? Like, what is that ring?
1:15:28 Speaker 05 Well, that's.
1:15:29 Steven Rinella? Why does it make that color?
1:15:31 Speaker 05 So it's it's very similar to how we make hot dog, right? We said it goes into the smokehouse and the surface is. It's myosin. So the protein, once you've extracted the protein out, it's in form of myosin.
1:15:44 Steven Rinella? Okay.
1:15:45 Speaker 05 Heat will make myosin migrate to the surface. And the smoke makes it crosslink.
1:15:54 Speaker 05 So that's what makes the skin on a hot dog.
1:15:56 Steven Rinella? Uh huh.
1:15:57 Speaker 05 And that's what makes a smoke ring. I mean, my my argument is. I want the biggest smoke ring I can I can get.
1:16:06 Steven Rinella? Okay.
1:16:07 Speaker 05 When I'm smoking a butt. Um.
1:16:10 Steven Rinella? Not a cigarette butt, but like a.
1:16:12 Speaker 05 Correct.
1:16:12 Steven Rinella? But.
1:16:12 Speaker 05 A Boston butt. I'm from Alabama. That's what we call them. Yeah, Boston.
1:16:17 Steven Rinella? What's it called?
1:16:18 Speaker 05 Just a butt.
1:16:19 Steven Rinella? No, you said a word.
1:16:20 Speaker 05 Pork butt.
1:16:21 Steven Rinella? No, you just said that's what we call it where?
1:16:23 Speaker 05 Oh, in Alabama.
1:16:24 Steven Rinella? Oh, okay.
1:16:24 Speaker 05 Now, yeah, that's not.
1:16:25 Steven Rinella? Yeah, smoking a butt.
1:16:26 Speaker 05 My wife's gonna get on to me. She's gonna say I've been mumbling. So she's she's she's in she's in the biz.
1:16:33 Steven Rinella? She's listening. I'm trying to get a hold of my wife. She's ignoring me.
1:16:35 Speaker 05 She's in your biz. So she's.
1:16:38 Speaker 05 Good God, the the comments that I got preparing for this from her is don't mumble. Don't use the word awesome. Don't do this. Don't do that. She gave me all kinds of good advice.
1:16:47 Steven Rinella? Sounds like she loves you.
1:16:48 Speaker 04 I've been listening for awesome.
1:16:50 Speaker 05 That's right.
1:16:50 Speaker 04 You haven't said it once until now.
1:16:52 Speaker 05 That's awesome. Thanks.
1:16:55 Steven Rinella? So so that, okay, that that ring, tell me again, I want to memorize this.
1:17:00 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:17:01 Steven Rinella? The the ring from smoking is it something is being drawn toward the surface.
1:17:05 Speaker 05 Myosin being drawn drawn to the surface.
1:17:07 Steven Rinella? Okay.
1:17:09 Speaker 05 And then the smoke crosslinks it to make that.
1:17:14 Speaker 05 That ring.
1:17:15 Steven Rinella? Okay.
1:17:16 Speaker 05 Um, and on a hot dog to make that.
1:17:18 Steven Rinella? You couldn't theoretically do it to the point where that was through and through. It'll always diminish toward the center.
1:17:25 Speaker 05 I don't think you could because smoke penetration on a piece of meat.
1:17:33 Speaker 05 If you put a Boston butt on a smoker.
1:17:36 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:17:36 Speaker 05 You only need to leave it on there for the first hour. After that, it's done.
1:17:40 Steven Rinella? The smoke is.
1:17:41 Speaker 05 It's not going to absorb any more smoke. It's not going to get any more of a smoke ring on it.
1:17:45 Steven Rinella? That's when it's just heat from there on out.
1:17:47 Speaker 05 After that, you might as well throw it in the oven.
1:17:49 Steven Rinella? Hmm. Is that right?
1:17:50 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:17:53 Speaker 05 I think it's hour two, depending on your temperature, right?
1:17:55 Steven Rinella? Hmm. No kidding.
1:17:56 Speaker 05 Yeah. And that's me as a Alabama barbecue guy, not as a casing expert.
1:18:04 Steven Rinella? Yeah, you guys got that good white sauce though, huh?
1:18:06 Speaker 05 Alabama white sauce is pretty good. I ate, I ate at a place here in town last night and they had Alabama white sauce.
1:18:11 Steven Rinella? I know right where you were, man. Did you get it on the chicken?
1:18:13 Speaker 05 I did. I got, I ended up getting the pulled pork because I wanted to see if you guys got it figured out.
1:18:18 Steven Rinella? Does it start with an A?
1:18:19 Speaker 05 Started with a B.
1:18:23 Steven Rinella? You weren't at Ale Works.
1:18:24 Speaker 05 No, it's a restaurant that is named after.
1:18:26 Steven Rinella? See, our family, man, our go to is Ale Works, dude.
1:18:29 Speaker 05 Okay.
1:18:29 Steven Rinella? Just.
1:18:30 Speaker 05 I didn't know the town. It was close, it was close to the hotel.
1:18:32 Steven Rinella? We're a big booth family.
1:18:33 Speaker 05 Okay.
1:18:33 Steven Rinella? Like to be in the booth.
1:18:34 Speaker 04 They do have big booths.
1:18:36 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:18:37 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:18:38 Steven Rinella? Going there, you're kind of in your own little zone, man. I mean, you're like in your own little private area, man.
1:18:43 Speaker 05 Yeah, I've got it.
1:18:43 Steven Rinella? Big booth.
1:18:44 Speaker 05 My wife's four nine, so she's a little bitty and.
1:18:50 Steven Rinella? Oh, your wife's four nine?
1:18:51 Speaker 05 So I've got to be.
1:18:54 Speaker 05 She's small.
1:18:55 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:18:55 Speaker 05 She's small. And so we, um, I, we have to be careful about where we eat.
1:19:01 Steven Rinella? Because she won't reach up to the counter.
1:19:03 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:19:05 Speaker 05 So when we go there, they said, do you want to sit?
1:19:07 Speaker 04 Get the booster.
1:19:08 Speaker 05 Do you want to sit at a high, high, one of the high tables or one of the regular table, regular table?
1:19:13 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:19:14 Speaker 05 It's just because their feet dangle.
1:19:15 Speaker 04 I have the, I have the opposite problem. I want to find a place where the table isn't too close to the back of the booth.
1:19:21 Speaker 05 Why is that?
1:19:22 Speaker 04 So that I can fit in without my shirt hanging over.
1:19:25 Steven Rinella? You don't like getting all in there and you're getting a braided.
1:19:27 Speaker 04 Wedging yourself in there.
1:19:29 Steven Rinella? Trying to climb in there.
1:19:30 Speaker 05 If you, if you wouldn't eat eight hot dogs during.
1:19:34 Speaker 05 We need to talk like, so do I need to get you in like the, the big contest up in New York?
1:19:42 Speaker 04 Could you?
1:19:43 Speaker 05 I could.
1:19:44 Speaker 04 Do you have that in?
1:19:44 Steven Rinella? The competitive hot dog contest? Are we really gonna?
1:19:47 Speaker 05 Joey Chestnut won. It was 70.5 hot dogs last.
1:19:50 Steven Rinella? Listen, man, that is, you're not into that, are you?
1:19:54 Steven Rinella? That is a, that is just, that is grotesque.
1:19:57 Speaker 05 Soaking them in water and.
1:19:59 Steven Rinella? Just, yeah.
1:19:59 Speaker 04 Are you into that? No, no, I, I would do it. I would do a contest where you're just eating normal hot dogs like you'd.
1:20:06 Steven Rinella? Just like if you're eating them to enjoy them. If it was a hot dog enjoyment contest?
1:20:11 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:20:11 Steven Rinella? And they could like hook dudes up to like a pleasure meter?
1:20:15 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:20:16 Steven Rinella? Yeah. And then who can score the highest pleasure?
1:20:19 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:20:19 Steven Rinella? Those hot dogs.
1:20:20 Speaker 04 Go to a neurology lab somewhere.
1:20:22 Steven Rinella? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Something like that. A pleasure measurer.
1:20:25 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:20:25 Steven Rinella? There's probably some way, like what, what do you get when you go for a hike? You get a bunch of endorphins?
1:20:29 Speaker 04 Mm hmm.
1:20:30 Steven Rinella? I mean, are you getting endorphins or are you getting like, it's like, because there's got to be like a guilt. There's like, you get hit by guilt.
1:20:36 Speaker 05 Right.
1:20:37 Steven Rinella? And endorphins. And so like those, the guilt and the endorphins are.
1:20:41 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's probably, it's probably like the butt at some point, like the two meat and you just can't go any further.
1:20:49 Speaker 05 He'd measure salivary flow and all that kind of stuff.
1:20:51 Steven Rinella? Yeah, exactly.
1:20:52 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:20:53 Steven Rinella? But I don't know. How do you measure guilt? You know, because I want to see that in.
1:20:56 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah.
1:20:57 Speaker 05 Be like the darting of the eyes.
1:20:58 Speaker 04 You could read it on my face, I think. How, do we, I mean, could you talk about baloney for just a second?
1:21:07 Speaker 05 I can.
1:21:07 Speaker 04 Because I've always like, if you'd asked me when I was five years old.
1:21:10 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:21:11 Speaker 04 I could have told you like baloney and hot dogs are cousins.
1:21:15 Speaker 05 They're closer than cousins.
1:21:17 Speaker 04 Then that's what I wanted. Yeah. So that's, that's sort of what I'm, yeah. So, so tell me like.
1:21:22 Speaker 05 I mean, baloney is an emulsion that's, that's cooked in a, in a casing.
1:21:26 Speaker 04 Right.
1:21:27 Steven Rinella? Is it smoked?
1:21:28 Speaker 05 Uh, no. I.
1:21:31 Speaker 05 I don't know if there's smoke. I mean, I like frying bologna.
1:21:35 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:21:35 Speaker 05 And I like smoking. Have you seen the video of the guys getting a chub of bologna and smoking it on a smoker?
1:21:40 Steven Rinella? Getting a what?
1:21:42 Speaker 05 A whole chub of bologna. So it's the whole.
1:21:44 Steven Rinella? What is the word you're saying?
1:21:45 Speaker 05 Chub.
1:21:46 Steven Rinella? You are saying that.
1:21:47 Speaker 04 You missed this when you're, when you're texting.
1:21:49 Steven Rinella? Oh.
1:21:50 Speaker 04 That's the technical term for those loafs of meat you see in the deli counter. Is it chub?
1:21:55 Steven Rinella? Really?
1:21:55 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:21:57 Steven Rinella? So this is for loading chubs right here?
1:22:01 Steven Rinella? Is that what this is?
1:22:02 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:22:03 Steven Rinella? No, I did miss that.
1:22:04 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:22:04 Steven Rinella? I remembered that, man.
1:22:06 Speaker 05 But yeah, I've seen some, some cool videos of guys that buy the whole thing from the deli.
1:22:11 Steven Rinella? And smoke it.
1:22:11 Speaker 05 A bologna and smoke it.
1:22:13 Steven Rinella? Is it good?
1:22:13 Speaker 05 And that looks outstanding. I've never done it.
1:22:15 Steven Rinella? That's a great idea, man.
1:22:16 Speaker 05 I want to try it.
1:22:17 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:22:17 Speaker 05 Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, it's the exact same process. You extract proteins.
1:22:22 Steven Rinella? Mm hmm.
1:22:23 Speaker 05 Control temperature, add fat, add your flavor profile. So that's the one piece is there's very specific spices and things you use to get a frankfurter.
1:22:34 Steven Rinella? Right.
1:22:35 Speaker 05 Profile.
1:22:36 Steven Rinella? Right. And you were mentioning some of those earlier.
1:22:38 Speaker 05 Yeah. I think there's nutmeg, coriander. There's some, there's some things.
1:22:42 Steven Rinella? In a roller dog?
1:22:44 Speaker 05 In a classic, more New York style, Chicago style, like when you think frankfurter, that's what, that's what's in there.
1:22:54 Steven Rinella? Okay.
1:22:54 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:22:55 Steven Rinella? So if you took.
1:22:56 Speaker 05 There's also garlic and onion powder, you know, all the kind of standard spices.
1:23:01 Steven Rinella? In a normal dog?
1:23:02 Speaker 05 But every, yeah. And, and I would say that every single manufacturer, that's the secret sauce, right?
1:23:08 Steven Rinella? I got you. They have their own.
1:23:10 Speaker 05 That's their own mix.
1:23:11 Steven Rinella? Yeah. Um, on this bologna question.
1:23:15 Speaker 05 Mm hmm.
1:23:16 Steven Rinella? Could you mix, like if you mix up a batch of, like you mix up a hot dog emulsion?
1:23:22 Speaker 05 Mm hmm.
1:23:23 Steven Rinella? Could you just decide, I'm gonna throw it into a bologna casing and then be like, it's bologna now?
1:23:29 Speaker 05 Different formulas.
1:23:30 Steven Rinella? Okay.
1:23:30 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:23:31 Steven Rinella? Got it. Not, so it's not the same.
1:23:33 Speaker 05 Right. Right. I would say the manufacturing process is the same. Obviously the stuffing equipment is.
1:23:40 Speaker 05 Much, much larger than on a, on a hot dog and a slower process.
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1:26:10 Steven Rinella? I want, I want to touch on processed chicken for a minute. Is that an area you're familiar with?
1:26:14 Speaker 05 Mildly. I ask and I'll answer if I can.
1:26:16 Steven Rinella? So, people will point out, they'll, they'll be like, like, uh, uh, did, uh, certain major fast food chains will have their chicken products, okay? Chicken finger items.
1:26:34 Steven Rinella? Nuggets, whatever. Okay? And people will say, well, but, but that, that was made from a slurry.
1:26:42 Speaker 05 Mechanically separated chicken, is that?
1:26:44 Steven Rinella? Yeah. Is, what, what is that? Like, like, how do you do that, but then get it to be that it's like, you can hold on to it and it's got a breading on it?
1:26:54 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:26:54 Steven Rinella? Cause it's not like a chunk of a chicken cut out and fried.
1:26:58 Speaker 05 Yeah, I mean, I, I'd say it's, it's probably closer to the deli meat processing that we, that we were talking about where you, um, free up proteins on the edge of that chicken with enzymes and other things. And then you press it into a mold.
1:27:12 Steven Rinella? Okay.
1:27:12 Speaker 05 And it basically glues it all together. Um, you know, you can, you can look at a sandwich meat and see, does it have fat veining in it? Or does it not?
1:27:23 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:27:24 Speaker 05 And if it's got fat and fat mania, it's a whole muscle cut, right?
1:27:27 Steven Rinella? Okay.
1:27:27 Speaker 05 Just cut right off.
1:27:28 Steven Rinella? Mm hmm.
1:27:28 Speaker 05 Or if, if it doesn't, it was, it went through some level of processing.
1:27:32 Steven Rinella? Got it.
1:27:33 Speaker 05 But again, I think the thing I'm trying to con- convey is that the processing,
1:27:39 Speaker 05 it's not scary. It's not, you know, it's not this conglomerate of stuff we're sweeping off the floor.
1:27:46 Steven Rinella? Mm hmm.
1:27:47 Speaker 05 You know, I mean, I saw, you see in front of every one of these places, FDA parking.
1:27:52 Steven Rinella? Mm hmm.
1:27:52 Speaker 05 And I asked one of the guys, I said, how, how often are these guys in? Said, once or twice a day.
1:27:57 Steven Rinella? Oh, okay.
1:27:58 Speaker 05 Like every day?
1:27:59 Steven Rinella? Yeah, yeah.
1:28:00 Speaker 05 Every shift? So they're coming in to do their checks and all that kind of stuff. And it's, it's a clean process.
1:28:06 Steven Rinella? So sausage making falls under FDA? It's not USDA?
1:28:11 Speaker 05 Right.
1:28:12 Steven Rinella? Got it. Cause like butchering is USDA, but, or like, you know, like a USDA inspector.
1:28:17 Speaker 05 Yeah, I'm not, I don't, I don't know a whole lot about the certifications and all that. That was just a question I asked.
1:28:22 Steven Rinella? Okay.
1:28:22 Speaker 05 How often are these guys in? They're basically checking temperatures and conditions and all that kind of stuff.
1:28:28 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:28:28 Speaker 05 Um, yeah, I mean, and so to call that. Those fast food chain chicken processing a slurry. I don't know that I would call it that.
1:28:38 Steven Rinella? Yeah, I think that's meant to dog on it. That's meant to make it look bad.
1:28:41 Speaker 05 I mean, I think it's it it's potentially, there there's a range, right? There's a whole muscle cut that I'm just slicing off the bird.
1:28:51 Speaker 05 Then there's I'm I'm making sure I'm using whole use of the animal. So I'm gonna combine the trimmings to make deli meat. Or it you start migrating into the emulsion space. I'm gonna make it emulsion and cook it.
1:29:08 Steven Rinella? Yeah, it's the same as like if you had a when you grind your deer, when you grind all your, you know, offcuts, whatever, the grind pile. Somebody go like, well, that, you know, that burger eating came from the deers. All different parts of the deer. That was never on the deer in that form, right? It's just a different.
1:29:26 Speaker 05 Just ensuring you complete use of the animal.
1:29:28 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:29:30 Speaker 05 Yeah. My father-in-law constantly says, well, you know what the most valuable weight of a chicken is? What's the most valuable thing on a chicken by weight? As he says this, I've heard it 300,000 times from him.
1:29:43 Steven Rinella? By weight?
1:29:44 Speaker 05 By weight.
1:29:46 Steven Rinella? His liver?
1:29:48 Speaker 05 Feathers.
1:29:50 Steven Rinella? Is that right?
1:29:51 Speaker 05 Yeah, because they're extremely light. And they're they're highly valuable. They make uh feedstock proteins and all kinds of stuff.
1:30:00 Steven Rinella? Out of feathers.
1:30:00 Speaker 05 Stuff out of the feathers, yeah. And I would say stuff them in pillows and whatnot.
1:30:05 Steven Rinella? You know what's crazy is um on that subject, I can't remember if I sent this to you.
1:30:12 Steven Rinella? Does these archaeologists have developed this technique now? Where they can go look at uh
1:30:20 Steven Rinella? ancient grave sites? Okay, where you just now you you dig it up and you think it was just bones? They've developed these techniques where they can identify down to uh genus and family generally. What feathers
1:30:38 Steven Rinella? were in that grave? Totally, you'd never discern it. The human eye would never be able to discern it.
1:30:42 Speaker 05 Just from the dirt?
1:30:43 Steven Rinella? Yeah. Within the within the soil and they can there there is this whole thing, these these 5,000-year-old burial sites in Sweden? And then a mount. Just the thing we would never known about these people is that that just the must have been like elaborate headdresses, capes and things out of feathers where there's these burials that they got a half dozen different, they're finding that they're buried with a half dozen different kinds of
1:31:12 Speaker 05 Species
1:31:12 Steven Rinella? Hawk, owl, grouse, waterfowl.
1:31:17 Speaker 05 Wow.
1:31:18 Steven Rinella? All in these like feathers in these, in these sites that previous people thought of as just bones. So like when you look at the, when you, when you look at archaeology, you'll often see that though, like let's say this whole room was an archaeological site. Some dude might come in and do one square meter, but then he's like, you leave the rest. Like that's why.
1:31:41 Speaker 05 So you've got something.
1:31:43 Steven Rinella? Yeah. Cause also sometimes down the road, some dude's like, no, man, I could take that dirt and tell you what he was buried, like what he was wearing when he was buried.
1:31:49 Speaker 05 Interesting.
1:31:50 Steven Rinella? You know, so you're like that, that level of restraint, like leave, you know, like leave it. Cause dudes in the future will be able to do amazing, you know, in ways you can't imagine, you know what I mean?
1:32:00 Speaker 05 Right.
1:32:01 Steven Rinella? But just thinking about that, what made me think of that, as you're saying that they, that, that, that those feathers are utilized.
1:32:06 Speaker 05 Mm hmm. That's the goal. Everything's utilized. But yeah, that's, that's absolutely amazing. The technology that you have to do to, to figure out the DNA, I guess.
1:32:17 Steven Rinella? And they, and they look at, a lot of these people are laid on their side and they can look at where, so like, you know, they'll find that there's a lot of stuff around the shoulder area. There's stuff around the head area. There's stuff on the elbow area. You know, where they had adornment.
1:32:32 Speaker 05 Mm hmm.
1:32:33 Steven Rinella? Feather adornment on them.
1:32:35 Speaker 05 And I think it's like they died and this was the burial process.
1:32:38 Steven Rinella? Yeah. Ceremonial burials, ceremonial burials. Yeah. Um, how much, how much have you dealt with normal casings? Natural casings?
1:32:47 Speaker 05 Natural casings? I, you know, a decent amount. I mean, so we don't, we don't supply them. So the natural casings are in the form of hog, sheep or collagen.
1:32:55 Steven Rinella? Yeah. Well, it's something about hog, hog casings. One time we took a wild hog. We're hunting down in Florida. I took a wild hog and I got out. I don't know, man. Like you could have stretched it from me to that wall over there. I guess from one, from one of these walls to the other wall. Wasn't that long, probably. Now I'm lying. It was half that distance.
1:33:19 Steven Rinella? Invert soaked it in vinegar, soaked it in a mild vinegar solution, water and vinegar. Just loosen it up.
1:33:25 Speaker 05 Okay.
1:33:25 Steven Rinella? Inverted the whole thing.
1:33:28 Speaker 05 Turn it inside out.
1:33:28 Steven Rinella? Cause it's all fatty on the inside.
1:33:30 Speaker 05 Right.
1:33:31 Steven Rinella? And then we just very gently scraped it and scraped it and scraped it until we had like what you would buy. When you bought natural casings and then made brats out of it. What's funny about it, it was the toughest. Like, I don't know where we went wrong.
1:33:48 Speaker 05 Did you salt it?
1:33:50 Steven Rinella? Uh.
1:33:51 Speaker 05 So that's part of the process.
1:33:52 Steven Rinella? It was a, you bit that brat dude, you were fighting that brat, trying to get your bite off. And I was like, man, there's something we didn't do, you know, I mean, there's something we did like oversight we made, you know?
1:34:02 Speaker 05 Sure. Yeah, the guy that founded our company, his uncle ran a natural casing company.
1:34:08 Steven Rinella? Okay.
1:34:09 Speaker 05 And it was called Oppenheimer casings, I think. And they, he went, um.
1:34:14 Steven Rinella? Like a whole nuclear deal here.
1:34:16 Speaker 05 So that's what I originally thought, cause he originally sold some of his land to the, uh, to the US government, some sort of nuclear. You know, it was all around that same time. I said, I said, is this the Oppenheimer, like Oppenheimer? No, no, different Oppenheimer.
1:34:31 Steven Rinella? No one knew he was a big hot dog man.
1:34:33 Speaker 05 So.
1:34:34 Steven Rinella? Brat man, yeah.
1:34:35 Speaker 05 So I'll take it. So he, he went to Europe, saw this, this viscous process. Hey, I think we can make inedible.
1:34:43 Speaker 05 Um, hot dog casings out of this. And his uncle said, no, we're, we're in the natural casing business. We're not going to diversify.
1:34:51 Steven Rinella? Hmm.
1:34:52 Speaker 05 And he said, okay, I will. And so he left, start his own company. I mean, that, the guts that it would have to take to leave the family business.
1:35:02 Steven Rinella? Yeah, it's good. I don't think Phil caught it. Phil didn't catch it, but it was good.
1:35:08 Steven Rinella? And then, so that is.
1:35:09 Speaker 05 And so then he starts a company called it Vis King.
1:35:12 Steven Rinella? Mm hmm. Vis King.
1:35:14 Speaker 05 K I N G. The Vis for Vis, the viscose process.
1:35:18 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:35:18 Speaker 05 This thing, it's regenerated cellulose.
1:35:22 Speaker 05 King, I'm not sure why, the first brand name, these casings are, we still carry the same brand called No Jax, so you got Kings and Jax.
1:35:31 Steven Rinella? Oh.
1:35:33 Speaker 05 So, there's rumors going around, he was a big card guy, you know? And, and so then he decided to differ, you know, he was all about, um, expanding the business, going to new, different areas. So he took us to plastics. And the original brand, so you got Kings, Jax, was Visqueen.
1:35:54 Steven Rinella? Oh.
1:35:55 Speaker 05 Huh. And so I, I still call, plastic sheets Visqueen.
1:35:59 Steven Rinella? Sure.
1:36:00 Speaker 05 Like, I still call it that.
1:36:01 Steven Rinella? Yeah, I do.
1:36:02 Speaker 05 I had no idea why.
1:36:03 Steven Rinella? No, I didn't know why either.
1:36:05 Speaker 05 Until I came to work for this company. So it was Visqueen and Visqueen. We, we sold off the Visqueen.
1:36:10 Steven Rinella? Yeah, like it's an entry level ground cloth when you're camping.
1:36:13 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:36:13 Steven Rinella? It's Visqueen, you know, Visqueen ground cloth.
1:36:17 Speaker 05 I still call it that.
1:36:18 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:36:18 Speaker 05 So that's where I came from, is that plastic films. You know, and so he kinda came in at the right time. So it was, it was the twenties, he's coming with a new technology to make, making sausages lower cost for the consumer.
1:36:33 Steven Rinella? Got it. Cause the casing, the natural casing was expensive.
1:36:37 Speaker 05 It was more expensive. Then the Great Depression hits.
1:36:41 Speaker 05 And every single family's got beans and franks on their dinner table.
1:36:44 Steven Rinella? Okay.
1:36:45 Speaker 05 You know, during the depression.
1:36:46 Steven Rinella? Mm-hmm.
1:36:47 Speaker 05 And it was just, starting a business, I've tried it, you've, you've done it, it, it's hard, and it's all about timing. Like this guy had the right idea at the right time to revolutionize the hot dog industry. Cause there was no skinless hot dog until he invented these.
1:37:04 Steven Rinella? And that was around what year?
1:37:05 Speaker 05 Nineteen twenty-eight, I think? And then we, he, uh, the company invented the shearing process, which is actually a term that we stole from, from a, the seaming industry, there's a shearing stitch.
1:37:20 Steven Rinella? Mm-hmm.
1:37:21 Speaker 05 Bunches fabric together, and that's, what he saw is when he'd go to a butcher, they were wadding the casing up on the horn.
1:37:29 Steven Rinella? Yep.
1:37:30 Speaker 05 To, to make sausage. He's like, why don't we do that for them? And so he invented.
1:37:35 Steven Rinella? Oh, come and preload it.
1:37:36 Speaker 05 And there's a lot of science that goes into how you make that.
1:37:39 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:37:40 Speaker 05 Like how it's twisted. So when you shear it, you, you, it's not just wadding it up on itself, right? It's twisted and shoved and twisted and shoved to get the folds in the right so that you can get the maximum amount of stuff on that.
1:37:54 Steven Rinella? Huh.
1:37:55 Speaker 05 So there's a lot of, a lot of science to it. So it's pretty cool.
1:37:58 Steven Rinella? Now, where do you see it going? Like with people kind of starting to trip out about, uh, when people starting to trip out about plastic and ingesting plastic and plastic and food and stuff? Do you picture there'd be people moving away from that?
1:38:10 Speaker 05 I, you know, it's possible. So this is cellulose. It's not, but, but we do sell plastic casings, the ones I got. I, I think that.
1:38:17 Steven Rinella? Yeah. You're talking when you go to any deli and go to any deli in the world, not in the world, go to any deli in this country, man. And you go to the deli counter, it's plastic wrap meat, you know?
1:38:25 Speaker 05 It's a shrink wrap. I mean, so the, the one piece on why you would use a plastic casing is it's a, it's non-permeable. And so it adds perfect protection to whatever's inside it.
1:38:38 Steven Rinella? Oh.
1:38:39 Speaker 05 So, so what are the, you gotta weigh the pros and cons. Do I want?
1:38:44 Steven Rinella? That's an interesting point.
1:38:46 Speaker 05 Bacteria making its way into my food product?
1:38:50 Steven Rinella? Mm-hmm.
1:38:50 Speaker 05 Or do I want plastic?
1:38:52 Steven Rinella? Is that kind, that's kind of the selling point on that?
1:38:54 Speaker 05 Yeah. I mean, that's a.
1:38:55 Steven Rinella? It's a non-permeable.
1:38:56 Speaker 05 It's a non-permeable barrier. And I mean, those things are used to package pet food. You know, you see the new fresh,
1:39:04 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:39:04 Speaker 05 fresh versions of pet, pet products that are in their fridge.
1:39:08 Steven Rinella? Yeah, that's interesting, man. I never thought of it, like the trade-off on it, that it is, that it's like protecting stuff getting in it.
1:39:13 Speaker 05 That's right.
1:39:14 Steven Rinella? I mean, it's obvious, but I just hadn't really put any thought to it.
1:39:16 Speaker 05 I think the, I think the big, the big piece is you just gotta make sure that, how does it peel? Do you get it all off? What, what is that? I mean, I, I, believe me, I get it. I microwave,
1:39:28 Speaker 05 I used to microwave stuff in those plastic containers until my wife started yelling at me.
1:39:33 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:39:33 Speaker 05 Right?
1:39:33 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:39:34 Speaker 05 I get it. When you store spaghetti sauce in a plastic container, it's stained red for the rest of its life.
1:39:39 Steven Rinella? Yeah. See, this is the deal. Like, I don't really know. Like, I don't know. And we'll get, uh, we'll get all kinds of emails from people in the plastics industry when I say this, but I don't really know. But I'm always telling my kids, we're laughing about like, when my dad was in the army, they'd give you your C ration came with three cigarettes. Okay? So I'm always telling them like,
1:39:59 Steven Rinella? They'll come home and they'll be like, can you believe people used to do X, Y, or Z? You know, that they used to bleed, like the doctors would bleed you with leeches to try to cure you of whatever. And we'll always have a laugh and I'm saying, but I said, and you know, I don't know what they are. We're doing all kinds of things right now.
1:40:18 Speaker 05 Right.
1:40:18 Steven Rinella? That like this doesn't end. We're doing all kinds of things right now that in 50 years, 75 years.
1:40:23 Speaker 05 Can you believe that?
1:40:24 Steven Rinella? People will say, can you believe they were?
1:40:30 Speaker 05 Using radiation to treat cancer.
1:40:31 Steven Rinella? Yeah. And it'd be like, I don't know.
1:40:34 Speaker 05 Right.
1:40:35 Steven Rinella? I don't know. And I'm saying, I don't know that it'll be this or not, but they might say, can you believe? Those people were putting um leftover food in in Tupperware containers of X, Y, and Z model. And putting it in a microwave and then eating the hot contents. Like, I don't know that that's it, but there's some thing. And so I'm like, so good if I was to give them a suggestion. I was like, if you can afford to not do things that feel to you like maybe it's gonna be one of those kind of things.
1:41:09 Steven Rinella? You know?
1:41:10 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:41:10 Steven Rinella? And don't, but I'm like, it won't be in the future that they're saying, can you believe they were eating deer meat and garden vegetables? It's just like not gonna be, that won't be it.
1:41:19 Speaker 05 Right.
1:41:20 Steven Rinella? It'll be some different thing.
1:41:22 Speaker 05 Yeah, and I I've.
1:41:26 Speaker 05 The way I look at it is, I, you know, I know how I behave at home.
1:41:31 Steven Rinella? Oh.
1:41:32 Speaker 05 But I, but I also know how lots of other people behave. Like if I look at a river and see all the plastic junk floating in a river.
1:41:40 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:41:40 Speaker 05 And that eventually gets to the water plant, eventually makes it through a pump, eventually gets ground up again. You know, so if I get microplastics in my blood, is it, is it because of the way I microwaved my leftovers? Or is it because some guy kept throwing plastic water bottles into the river?
1:41:57 Steven Rinella? Hundred percent. Yeah, that's, I I had, there and I was having a conversation with someone there, asked me if like Great Lakes fish are like really safe to eat. Because of the heavy metals issue. And I'm like, man, when you die, it won't because you were eating Great Lakes fish. It's like, it'll be something, it'll be something different to get you, but it ain't gonna be that, you know?
1:42:17 Speaker 05 It's, it's mercury down in where I live.
1:42:20 Steven Rinella? Yeah, you're, yeah, so you know, it, it, it's true. It's, it's a super fair point.
1:42:24 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:42:25 Steven Rinella? You can't head it off.
1:42:26 Speaker 05 Yep.
1:42:27 Speaker 04 One, one question I had earlier, you mentioned the, the cost thing in the Great Depression.
1:42:33 Speaker 05 Mm hmm.
1:42:33 Speaker 04 You'd sent me an email and I showed this to Steve with some early ads.
1:42:37 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:42:37 Speaker 04 For hot dogs.
1:42:38 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah.
1:42:39 Speaker 04 And one of them was some kid. These two kids eating lunch together and one guy, one kid's got two hot dogs and the other guy's got one. And he says, he says, your mom gives you two? And the kid goes, yeah, they're caseless.
1:42:56 Speaker 04 And we sat there and we're puzzling over like, what do you think that allows him to eat two? Remember this?
1:43:02 Steven Rinella? Yeah. So the other kid's like, mom was being a tight ass or something?
1:43:05 Speaker 04 Yeah. So we were like, maybe they're suspicious of the casing or, or, you know, like.
1:43:09 Steven Rinella? But he means it was.
1:43:10 Speaker 04 But he means it's cheap so he can get two hot dogs for lunch.
1:43:13 Speaker 05 I mean, that's, that's the key.
1:43:15 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:43:15 Speaker 05 Consumer votes with his wallet and with his eyeballs.
1:43:18 Speaker 04 Yeah, I'd been, I'd been meaning to ask you about that and it clicked for me when you were talking about the Great Depression.
1:43:23 Speaker 05 Some of those ads were just so hilarious.
1:43:27 Speaker 04 Oh, yeah.
1:43:27 Speaker 05 Like, you know, it's, it's similar thing. We look back at our advertising back then. It was.
1:43:33 Steven Rinella? There's an ammo ad we used to pass around. There's an ammo ad where it's a dude doing a grip and grin with a mountain gorilla. You ever see that ammo ad?
1:43:41 Speaker 04 Um, oh yeah, here's, there it is.
1:43:43 Steven Rinella? Yep.
1:43:44 Speaker 04 Your mom lets you eat two wieners?
1:43:46 Steven Rinella? How come your mom lets you eat two wieners? No skins.
1:43:53 Speaker 05 Bill's a lucky guy.
1:43:54 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:43:55 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:43:55 Steven Rinella? He's killing mom's smart. You know, like Randall has like positive thoughts about dogs.
1:44:00 Speaker 05 That's right.
1:44:01 Steven Rinella? I have very positive thoughts about dogs, you know? Um.
1:44:05 Speaker 05 About the hot dog?
1:44:06 Steven Rinella? Yeah, like, yeah, like, like I look, I see a hot dog and I get, I get happy. Like when I tell a hot dog story, it's a, it's a positive story, you know? Now my wife, she's got bad hot dog stories. Cause you know, like.
1:44:21 Steven Rinella? You know, when you're a kid in, in, at a certain age, it's kind of like fifth grade, sixth grade, you become, it's awesome. You get introduced to the idea of like that there's kids that get everything they want and there's kids that don't get everything they want.
1:44:32 Speaker 05 Mm hmm.
1:44:33 Steven Rinella? So it'd be that like this kid, like Randall's got Nikes. So in my school, he would have been a snob.
1:44:39 Speaker 05 Right.
1:44:39 Steven Rinella? Right. And he would bully kids whose mom wouldn't get them Nikes. Right?
1:44:46 Speaker 05 Right.
1:44:46 Steven Rinella? This is like a thing. So I thought I was poor, but my mom and dad just wouldn't waste money. They were actually quite well off relative. Like we were like middle class people.
1:44:57 Speaker 05 Sure.
1:44:58 Steven Rinella? And a lot of, and a lot of our community was not middle class, but I thought we were poor because I couldn't get anything cool. Now my wife would have to get sent to school. You know, remember those like thermos containers?
1:45:10 Speaker 05 Sure.
1:45:11 Steven Rinella? Her mom would put boiling water, her mom would put boiling water in one of those thermos containers and jam a couple of dogs down in there and send her to school with that for her lunch. So at lunchtime, all these other kids are eating like Doritos or whatever. Or like, you remember when those crackers came out and you get the cheese and it comes with a little knife and all that?
1:45:27 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:45:28 Steven Rinella? They'd have all that garbage and she'd have to crack open that thermos and pull out those lukewarm dogs and eat them.
1:45:34 Speaker 05 And everybody watches the steam and just go.
1:45:36 Steven Rinella? Yeah. So in her mind, dogs are a bummer.
1:45:39 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:45:39 Steven Rinella? It reminds her of like.
1:45:41 Speaker 05 So that.
1:45:42 Steven Rinella? Being at the lunchroom, eating those lukewarm dogs when everybody else is eating cool stuff.
1:45:46 Speaker 05 She's.
1:45:47 Steven Rinella? Right?
1:45:47 Speaker 05 She's not the only one that got sent to the cafeteria with a thermos with hot dogs in it. So.
1:45:53 Steven Rinella? That was the thing.
1:45:53 Speaker 05 I, I.
1:45:54 Steven Rinella? I told her I'm not familiar with that preparation.
1:45:56 Speaker 05 Oh, yeah.
1:45:58 Speaker 05 And that, yeah, it's pre microwave, right?
1:46:00 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:46:00 Speaker 05 You gotta have something to keep it warm. I got sent to school with a thermos full of hot dogs a day or two as well.
1:46:06 Steven Rinella? So when she sees a dog, when she sees a roller dog, she's bummed.
1:46:11 Speaker 05 Okay.
1:46:12 Steven Rinella? She needs to go to therapy about it.
1:46:13 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:46:14 Steven Rinella? Cause the other day we were at my daughter's volleyball tournament. They had a concession stand up there. I went up there. She got like a diet Pepsi or something dumb like that. And I got two dogs.
1:46:23 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:46:25 Speaker 04 She didn't even ask me for a bite of my dogs.
1:46:27 Speaker 05 I don't think I've ever been unhappy eating a hot dog. Like, it's always a good thing. Like, you're over a campfire. You're at a ballgame. You're doing, normally doing something fun.
1:46:38 Speaker 04 No, that's how I feel about it. Fueling up the truck. Yeah, like sunshine, a hot dog.
1:46:46 Speaker 04 A beer and a hot dog. Like, campfire, hot dog. It does something in my brain. Where it's this positive association and I'm like, life is good. Yeah, no one's ever kicking the shit out of you when you're having a hot dog.
1:47:00 Speaker 04 Never. Takes me back to the trenches.
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1:49:32 Steven Rinella? All right, so tell us, here, we've been teasing it. Tell us, tell us the ultimate, like, like, walk listeners through. You know what we should do? Maybe we should launch it right now if people are interested. If anyone out there wants to try to send in
1:49:51 Steven Rinella? a deer meat roller dog. Sure. Please. Please. We'll eat them. Mm-hmm. You know, I'm gonna do, I don't think that people that have poison and stuff, I don't think they use it like that. Yeah. I don't think they're gonna send us the poison. Like dudes with poison. Deliberately. Yeah, and I could be like, oh, I'm gonna... Make a roller dog.
1:50:10 Speaker 04 This is how I'm finally gonna get.
1:50:11 Steven Rinella? Making a roller dog and then I'm gonna put my, my poison into it and send it to them.
1:50:15 Speaker 04 He's got all of his charts on the wall of how he's finally gonna get Steve Rinella and then he hears this on the podcast. He goes, ah, I'll just poison the dog.
1:50:22 Steven Rinella? All I gotta do now is figure out how to make a great hot dog and then I just put my poison in there and I'll kill him. So I just don't see that being a risk. So if people want to listen and make a great roller dog out of deer meat, but then you can't trick us and send us one made out of.
1:50:37 Speaker 04 Poison.
1:50:37 Steven Rinella? No.
1:50:38 Speaker 04 Oh, pork, pork, yeah.
1:50:39 Steven Rinella? Pork poison.
1:50:40 Speaker 04 Yeah, talk about, when you, when you describe the, the hot dog.
1:50:44 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:50:45 Speaker 04 This theory of a venison hot dog. Can you go back over just briefly, like the challenges and how you, and the steps that you're taking here to address those challenges?
1:50:57 Speaker 05 So the steps are.
1:50:58 Steven Rinella? I like how he puts his glasses on.
1:50:59 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:51:00 Speaker 05 You like that?
1:51:00 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:51:01 Speaker 05 I can't see anything. I can't see anything without them. Um, steps are protein extraction, then emulsification, temperature control, then smoking, right? That's how every hot dog's made.
1:51:13 Steven Rinella? Okay.
1:51:14 Speaker 05 Um, you know, so there is, there's a hot dog recipe on, on your website. For, for, for a red snapper venison.
1:51:24 Steven Rinella? Yep.
1:51:24 Speaker 05 Hot dog.
1:51:26 Speaker 07 Thanks for moving that mic, Randall.
1:51:27 Speaker 05 So I, I live.
1:51:30 Steven Rinella? What'd you think of that recipe?
1:51:32 Speaker 05 I thought it was good. I think it's got some.
1:51:34 Steven Rinella? Don't choose your words carefully here.
1:51:36 Speaker 05 It's got problems.
1:51:37 Steven Rinella? Okay, there we go. That's what I'm trying to get to.
1:51:39 Speaker 05 He, he, uh, I wear eight and a half in my Tacova, so I'll point out all the mistakes with this recipe. Eight and a half. Uh, so basically he's shoving together all the ingredients for emulsion. He rightfully points out, I gotta control temperature. So he like pre-fo, pre-fridged the meat and all this kind of stuff. But he made the emulsion and then put it in, in a freezer. So he's like making an emulsion. And then put it in the refrigerator for a day, hoping that the proteins extract, hoping and praying. Hmm.
1:52:17 Steven Rinella? Does it say that in the
1:52:18 Speaker 05 Right.
1:52:20 Speaker 05 It did not. So in my mind, let's, let's extract the proteins right. Let's use salt. Let's use ice. Let's do it in a stand mixer. Extract the proteins right till it's super tacky.
1:52:31 Steven Rinella? Good.
1:52:32 Speaker 05 And then make hot dog.
1:52:34 Steven Rinella? Okay.
1:52:35 Speaker 05 And I live on the Gulf Coast of Alabama and calling it a red snapper venison hot dog. I sent that to my son. He's like, that sounds disgusting.
1:52:44 Steven Rinella? Oh, yeah.
1:52:45 Speaker 05 He's thinking it's a, it's a fish shoved together with
1:52:47 Steven Rinella? Fish and deer meat put into a hot
1:52:49 Speaker 05 Doesn't sound very good.
1:52:52 Speaker 05 So, yeah, I mean, if I was, uh, so what I wanted to do was investigate and, and the one thing he does in that recipe is he supplements pork trim and pork, pork fat as his fat source. Mm hmm. And I'm, I'm saying that's cheating. That's not what we're wanting to do.
1:53:11 Steven Rinella? Yeah. Yeah. No, that's, yeah.
1:53:14 Speaker 05 So. I looked
1:53:16 Steven Rinella? He's just making a hot, he's just trying to make a hot dog.
1:53:18 Speaker 05 I looked through all the fat options out there. Mm hmm. Deer fat, A, there's not enough of it. It's waxy. It's got a super high melting point. Mm hmm. It's out the door.
1:53:31 Speaker 05 Wild pig fat? Hmm. Maybe. I mean, it's pork, right? Mm hmm. You want to get it off the back, not off some of the more active areas.
1:53:41 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:53:43 Speaker 05 The more I looked at it, I think bear fat is the preferred fat for making a pure wild hot dog.
1:53:50 Steven Rinella? Really?
1:53:51 Speaker 05 Cause of its melting point. And it behaves more like pork and I think it'd be a cool flavor.
1:53:57 Steven Rinella? And not rendered, cubed, like cube fat.
1:54:00 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
1:54:02 Steven Rinella? We had a couple of jars of rendered right there, but yeah, not rendered.
1:54:05 Speaker 05 Yeah. I mean, so I mean, ultimately, when you're making a hot dog, you're trying to get that fat particle to one to 10 microns. So it could just, I, I don't think you'd want to spin up rendered, rendered fat. I think you're going to want to take cube,
1:54:18 Steven Rinella? Cube.
1:54:19 Speaker 05 Cube fat. I want to pre blend the fat.
1:54:25 Speaker 05 Extract the proteins separately.
1:54:27 Steven Rinella? Okay.
1:54:28 Speaker 05 Then put them together.
1:54:29 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:54:31 Speaker 05 Um. A couple other weird.
1:54:34 Steven Rinella? What would be the ratio there?
1:54:36 Speaker 05 So I would use sixty-five to seventy percent venison.
1:54:41 Steven Rinella? Okay.
1:54:41 Speaker 05 Lean venison, eighteen to twenty-two percent bear fat. Very specific number. I think that's where you, that's the range. You're gonna be like twenty percent.
1:54:51 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:54:52 Speaker 05 Um. The, the biggest balance of the formula would be ice. So you're talking ten, twelve, fifteen percent ice.
1:55:02 Steven Rinella? Hmm. Hmm.
1:55:03 Speaker 05 Uh, that's the other thing.
1:55:04 Steven Rinella? In what form? Shaved?
1:55:07 Speaker 05 Uh, it's gonna get shaved in the emulsifying process, you know. A, you, it's, it's all gotta be gone before you start stuffing. It all needs to be water before you start stuffing. Ice crystals, there's, there's, it's too dangerous. There's, there's things like listeria and things that can, that can happen when you've got crystallized ice in a, in a processed meat.
1:55:30 Steven Rinella? Is that right?
1:55:30 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:55:31 Steven Rinella? Hmm.
1:55:32 Speaker 05 Um, so that, that's one thing you've gotta, got, uh, make sure it's all melted out.
1:55:38 Steven Rinella? Okay.
1:55:40 Speaker 05 But, you know, he mentioned using cold water. Okay, let's take it one step further and use ice. It's the coldest water you can get.
1:55:48 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:55:48 Speaker 05 Right? Um, I think there's some other cool stuff we could add. Mushroom powder, citrus fiber.
1:55:56 Steven Rinella? Now, why mushroom powder?
1:55:57 Speaker 05 So mushroom powder will, according to my sophisticated research, will give a better gel network. Cause what happens with venison is it's a real crumbly gel network. It's gonna wanna crumble.
1:56:14 Steven Rinella? Hmm.
1:56:14 Speaker 05 I, if I overcooked my smoked sausage, it gets crumbly.
1:56:17 Steven Rinella? Yeah. Yeah.
1:56:19 Speaker 05 Um, and mushroom powder will help that. And it adds kind of a cool flavor.
1:56:24 Steven Rinella? Okay.
1:56:25 Speaker 05 Um. Citrus fiber's gonna help with emulsion stability, viscosity, uh, water binding. There's some, some all kinds of cool things that that would do.
1:56:36 Steven Rinella? Good.
1:56:36 Speaker 05 I was trying to maintain like.
1:56:40 Speaker 05 Pure to the, the roots of what we're trying to accomplish here.
1:56:43 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:56:44 Speaker 05 Um, you know, we could add, I, I think with venison, we may have to add some phosphates to help get the pH down. We talked about that when the deers, um, especially if it was, had lots of lactic acid during death.
1:57:00 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:57:00 Speaker 05 So, you know, you, if you're my buddy Joe and every deer you shoot runs for 300 yards.
1:57:06 Steven Rinella? Mm hmm.
1:57:06 Speaker 05 You know, I, they normally drop.
1:57:07 Steven Rinella? That's Joe's style.
1:57:09 Speaker 05 Joe's style.
1:57:10 Steven Rinella? He likes to be over on the neighbor's place.
1:57:11 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:57:13 Steven Rinella? Long dramatic blood trail.
1:57:14 Speaker 05 That's right.
1:57:16 Steven Rinella? He likes those emotional highs and lows.
1:57:18 Speaker 05 He does. I'm going to use 130 grain bullets. It'll run even further.
1:57:22 Steven Rinella? Mm hmm.
1:57:23 Speaker 05 I stick with the 180.
1:57:24 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
1:57:25 Speaker 05 Anyway, he's going to give me grief for that. Um, yeah, I want it to die quick. So, but, but I can use phosphates to get that pH up.
1:57:34 Steven Rinella? Hmm.
1:57:35 Speaker 05 To help with the extraction process. And, and I mean, you're a butcher. When you're getting smoked sausage from a butcher, if you're not doing it yourself, there's probably some phosphate in there. There's probably some sodium nitrate in there to get that cool pink color.
1:57:47 Steven Rinella? What form does that phosphate come in when you buy it?
1:57:50 Speaker 05 Uh, I had it written down. I can't remember off the top of my head.
1:57:53 Steven Rinella? And what, what is it? What are they drawing it from?
1:57:55 Speaker 05 I think it's pyrophosphate. I think it's hexametaphosphate. Um, you mean, what's the feedstock for it?
1:58:03 Steven Rinella? What, what is it? What is it at? What is it as the form that like the earth produces it or whatever?
1:58:10 Speaker 05 Uh, so the, the earth produces, you know, it's, it's mineral form, right? Um, there's all kinds of, I know a little bit about phosphate manufacturer that it's, it's, it's very energy heavy.
1:58:27 Steven Rinella? Mm hmm.
1:58:28 Speaker 05 Most of it's done outside the US.
1:58:30 Steven Rinella? Okay.
1:58:31 Speaker 05 And phosphate furnaces for taking yellow phosphate and, and making it into products that we use like TSP and.
1:58:39 Steven Rinella? So it's the same phosphate that would be, uh.
1:58:43 Speaker 04 Like in fireworks or whatever.
1:58:44 Speaker 05 Sure.
1:58:45 Speaker 04 Okay.
1:58:46 Speaker 05 It's a phosphate, phosphate.
1:58:47 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:58:48 Speaker 05 Yeah. I think, I think.
1:58:50 Speaker 04 Or gunpowder is phosphate.
1:58:51 Speaker 05 Right. Yep. And or, yeah, nitrocellulose and, you know, other stuff and gunpowder. The first company I worked for into the paper industry was a company called Hercules. It was known as Hercules Powder Company. You've probably seen the old ads for Hercules Powder Company. Had a guy with a club and but they made gunpowder out of nitrocellulose.
1:59:15 Speaker 04 Okay.
1:59:15 Speaker 05 They get out of tree stumps.
1:59:17 Speaker 04 Oh.
1:59:18 Speaker 05 Yeah. And eventually that turned into uh, paper chemicals.
1:59:22 Speaker 04 Got it.
1:59:22 Speaker 05 They were a DuPont child.
1:59:25 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:59:26 Speaker 05 There's a bunch of them out there. Companies that spun off from DuPont.
1:59:29 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:59:30 Speaker 05 Yep.
1:59:32 Speaker 04 Would you, you mentioned when we were talking on the phone, add it like having, as you talked about earlier, having to supplement with like a whey protein potentially. Is that something that you thought more about?
1:59:45 Speaker 05 Nah, yeah, I mean, I think we just gotta do the math.
1:59:48 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:59:49 Speaker 05 I mean, it's, it's all about.
1:59:50 Speaker 04 That's simple.
1:59:51 Speaker 05 It's, I mean, and that's what all these folks do is they, they do the math. Like, how much lean protein do I have? How much of that is extractable protein? You know, it'll be trial and error. Like, you guys come to our food lab and we can trial and error it, right? Uh, because I gotta know how much of that specific, there's, there's not venison hot dogs flying off the shelves, right? They're not, they're not everywhere. So we're gonna have to learn about how much of the protein can I extract?
2:00:19 Speaker 04 Mm-hmm.
2:00:20 Speaker 05 And therefore, what's my protein to fat ratio? Cause that's the secret sauce, right?
2:00:25 Speaker 04 Right.
2:00:25 Speaker 05 I wanna have, again, an emulsion is an, an oil particle that's surrounded with some sort of stabilizer. And the stabilizer in a hot dog emulsion is meat protein.
2:00:39 Speaker 04 Mm-hmm. Good.
2:00:41 Speaker 05 And basically that keeps the oil particles repelling each other. There's some other cool stuff we can do, like partially denaturing it allows the protein to unfold. It gets a hydrophilic and a hydrophobic tail.
2:00:56 Speaker 05 So hydrophilic loves water, so it points away from the fat. Hydrophobic loves oil, so it's gonna point in towards the fat and it makes a more stable emulsion.
2:01:06 Speaker 04 Really?
2:01:07 Speaker 05 Yeah.
2:01:09 Steven Rinella? You can go deep in hot dogs.
2:01:11 Speaker 04 People say hot dogs are lowbrow.
2:01:13 Steven Rinella? I know.
2:01:13 Speaker 05 It's highbrow, man. There's a lot of science. I mean,
2:01:18 Speaker 05 yeah, I mean, so like one of our, one of our salespeople has a meat science degree. So it's, it's, uh, some serious stuff.
2:01:29 Steven Rinella? Okay, on that, on that dog there that you're working up, the venison dog, tell me the part where we start flavoring it.
2:01:38 Steven Rinella? Like the seasoning.
2:01:40 Speaker 05 Yeah, I mean, I, so the, the traditional frankfurter flavors, we talked about them. It's nutmeg, coriander, some of those. The other ones are kind of your standard seasonings that as wild game cooks, we put in a lot of stuff like onion, salt, onion powder, garlic, um, those, those types of flavors. You know, it all depends on what you want. There's, there's black pepper.
2:02:10 Speaker 05 Yeah, it, it, it's what are you shooting for?
2:02:12 Steven Rinella? Yeah. So like those boys at Oscar Mayer, they have their own seasoning blend.
2:02:18 Speaker 05 And
2:02:18 Steven Rinella? that no one knows.
2:02:19 Speaker 05 I don't know it.
2:02:21 Speaker 05 I wouldn't want to know it.
2:02:22 Steven Rinella? What?
2:02:24 Speaker 05 Because then they'd have to kill me.
2:02:27 Steven Rinella? Hung you down, yeah.
2:02:28 Speaker 05 That's right.
2:02:30 Steven Rinella? Man, I want so bad. She's not writing me back.
2:02:33 Speaker 05 Yeah.
2:02:33 Steven Rinella? My wife made these cookies that
2:02:37 Steven Rinella? it's like, it looks like a giant sausage, but it's a cookie. And when you slice it, it's like you're slicing more to Della.
2:02:43 Speaker 05 It's got the white, well, it's probably the, the white chocolate, white.
2:02:47 Steven Rinella? Everything in there, dude, you would think like from across the room, you'd swear you're looking at a sliced up more to Della sausage, but those cookies.
2:02:53 Speaker 05 Yeah.
2:02:53 Steven Rinella? Kids didn't like them. But it was, I was trying to get her to send me a picture of it, but.
2:02:59 Speaker 05 They didn't like the flavor? They didn't like the presentation?
2:03:01 Steven Rinella? No, they didn't care for the cookie. They didn't get the joke. They didn't get the joke. The joke was lost on them. They were just rating it as a cookie and as a cookie that thought it scored low.
2:03:12 Speaker 05 Did you used to have olive loaf? You're banging around.
2:03:16 Steven Rinella? Oh, yeah.
2:03:16 Speaker 05 You've seen olive loaf?
2:03:17 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
2:03:18 Speaker 05 That's another one of those, probably fits in the emulsion category.
2:03:21 Steven Rinella? You know what my old man was big into is, uh, and this, this is definitely an emulsion.
2:03:25 Speaker 05 Yeah.
2:03:25 Steven Rinella? Is my old man was big into liverwurst.
2:03:28 Speaker 05 Yeah.
2:03:29 Steven Rinella? He'd buy, I believe he'd buy Oscar Mayer liverwurst that had the yellow wrap on it. Right?
2:03:35 Speaker 05 Had the plastics on it.
2:03:37 Steven Rinella? Play it, came in plastic, yellow wrap. You'd get mad if you got into it.
2:03:40 Speaker 05 Mm hmm.
2:03:41 Steven Rinella? Um, that was his sand dough, man. That onion on rye bread.
2:03:46 Speaker 05 You know, there is one company that I'll mention. I said I wasn't going to come in and mention any brands, but I'm going to mention it because it intrigues me and I want to try it really bad. And I wonder what took so long. But my social media has been covered up with spam hot dogs. So, so spam's coming, you know, Hormel's coming out with a spam hot dog.
2:04:07 Steven Rinella? Hmm, interesting.
2:04:08 Speaker 05 And I gotta try that.
2:04:09 Steven Rinella? They grab you by the boo boo dog?
2:04:10 Speaker 05 That sounds pretty cool.
2:04:12 Steven Rinella? Real curious, yeah.
2:04:13 Speaker 05 Yeah.
2:04:14 Steven Rinella? Huh.
2:04:14 Speaker 05 Yeah.
2:04:15 Steven Rinella? Alright.
2:04:20 Steven Rinella? That it?
2:04:21 Speaker 05 What else?
2:04:22 Steven Rinella? Well, you're gonna, when someone tries this, walk someone through the smoking process.
2:04:26 Speaker 05 Yeah, so I, I think with venison, we're going to have to take the smoking process very slow.
2:04:35 Steven Rinella? Okay.
2:04:35 Speaker 05 Because that DSC curve that I talked about, we want to baby it through that gel network formation.
2:04:43 Steven Rinella? Okay. By slow, you mean lower temp?
2:04:46 Speaker 05 Low temp.
2:04:46 Steven Rinella? Lower, longer.
2:04:47 Speaker 05 I probably want to get the humidity up so you know you put an oil, or sorry, an oil, a water pan in your smoker.
2:04:52 Steven Rinella? Okay.
2:04:53 Speaker 05 I'd probably do that for this. And I'd hang them in, in like a vertical, you know, whatever, electric smoker or charcoal smoker.
2:05:01 Steven Rinella? Ballpark it, like what temp and how long? Cause you're taking a raw, this, this, this hot dog has not been cooked. You're hanging a raw hot dog in a smoker. How long and how hot?
2:05:11 Speaker 05 I'd start at 120.
2:05:13 Steven Rinella? Okay.
2:05:15 Speaker 05 I'd probably increase it 10 degrees over a period of time. And, and you know, I'm talking hours. Potentially, I mean, when a hot dog's made in a hot dog plant, it's, it's not hours. It's a shorter period of time, but you've got to get to that 155, 160. With chicken, it's 165. There are obviously the safety points that you gotta cook it to. But I would baby it through those early stages until that gel starts to set up. And, you know, I think we've been talking about the science of, and using words like emulsions, protein gel network. And it feels like, again, that I'm making food in a Petri jar, but this is all natural stuff.
2:05:57 Speaker 05 We learn from the natural world on how to, how to make this, make the materials.
2:06:02 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
2:06:03 Speaker 05 And, yeah, I mean, I'm convinced that the primary reason of venison hot dog, I think everything that's on the market as a venison dog would be pretty close to sausage and not close to a frankfurter.
2:06:16 Steven Rinella? Yep.
2:06:17 Speaker 05 And that's because that protein extraction is so hard. We just have to, to baby it, keep it cool. And then the smoking, start at 120, work your way up. Till you got a dog, you know, I probably have one wiener that would be sacrificial. He'd be the one I'd be checking temperature on.
2:06:35 Steven Rinella? Got it. That's interesting you say that that's why venison dogs.
2:06:41 Steven Rinella? What, what you were just telling me about venison dogs on the market? Have you ever seen the movie French Dispatch?
2:06:46 Speaker 05 No.
2:06:46 Steven Rinella? Okay, there's a dude in this movie, he's like, he's an art dealer.
2:06:49 Speaker 05 Yeah.
2:06:50 Steven Rinella? This ties into hot dogs. He's an art dealer and he's dealing in abstract art. And he says, the only way you can tell if abstract's art, art is good, is you gotta ask the artist to do you a regular painting.
2:07:05 Steven Rinella? So I'll ask him to do me a bird. If he can do a great bird, then you know he's doing abstract because he chooses to. If he can't do a great bird, he's doing abstract because he's not talented enough to do regular art. So with the venison dog thing, when people are getting, it's just interesting, when people are getting clever with these venison dogs.
2:07:29 Steven Rinella? They might be abstract artists who can't do a bird. Right?
2:07:35 Speaker 05 Good point.
2:07:35 Steven Rinella? So they're like, they're acting like they're trying to elevate the game, but it's like, no, you're not elevating the game. You can't do a roller dog.
2:07:45 Steven Rinella? That's why you're doing.
2:07:46 Speaker 05 Right.
2:07:48 Steven Rinella? We need to do. We need to do a bird. I know. So I would go to a fancy dog guy, a fancy roller dog or a fancy hot dog guy and do the same test. Be like, okay, okay. If your hot dog's so great, make me a roller dog.
2:08:01 Speaker 05 Make me a roller dog out of Venice.
2:08:03 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
2:08:04 Speaker 05 Yeah.
2:08:05 Steven Rinella? And if you can do that, then I'll believe you that your dog is great. But if you can't do it.
2:08:09 Speaker 05 Yeah.
2:08:10 Steven Rinella? You can't do a bird. That's why you're doing abstract.
2:08:13 Speaker 05 Yeah. And that was, that was one of the questions that, that Corinne asked me during the pre thing. She said, well, when you make, when you make hot dogs at home and
2:08:25 Speaker 05 yeah, it's much easier to go to the store and buy a hot dog for five bucks a pack. Then to make hot dogs at home. Like you're kinda.
2:08:32 Steven Rinella? Yeah. Yeah. That's a weird deal, right?
2:08:34 Speaker 05 It's a really weird deal. Like, am I gonna take a whole animal? I mean, granted in Alabama, I think I did the math on it. I can kill 203 deer a year.
2:08:49 Speaker 05 So the state.
2:08:50 Steven Rinella? We're in a one bucks.
2:08:55 Speaker 05 We've got, there are more deer in Alabama than there are alligators in Florida. There's tons of them. They're just not the gigantic ones that y'all have here. But am I gonna take a deer and just kind of commit to making some dang hot dogs out of this animal?
2:09:12 Steven Rinella? Our buddy made some and he pointed that out. Cal. Yeah. Cal made them and he pointed out, he's like, okay, let's say you do get real good and you make a whole bunch of gas station, hot dogs out of deer meat. Then what do you got?
2:09:31 Steven Rinella? This is a very valid point, because I want two.
2:09:36 Steven Rinella? I don't need thousands of them.
2:09:37 Speaker 04 If there was ever.
2:09:38 Speaker 05 You're gonna do this to make two hot dogs.
2:09:40 Speaker 04 If there was ever a year to do it, it's the 250th anniversary of this fine nation.
2:09:45 Steven Rinella? That's a good point, man. How better to commemorate? Yeah, how better to commemorate?
2:09:48 Speaker 05 Yeah, I'm fully expecting this year to be a bang up year for the dog.
2:09:55 Steven Rinella? It could be a big dog year.
2:09:57 Speaker 05 In general, I think it's gonna be a big dog year.
2:09:59 Steven Rinella? The conditions are right now. I just had a couple on. I had a couple on Saturday, man, and they were delicious.
2:10:07 Speaker 05 That's my, yeah, that's my go to deer camp. Like, like lunch is, is hot dogs.
2:10:13 Steven Rinella? I was telling my kids, I was like, man, I don't think you're supposed to put ketchup on those technically, you know, they don't, they put ketchup on them.
2:10:18 Speaker 05 I got a problem with that.
2:10:20 Steven Rinella? You put ketchup on them?
2:10:21 Speaker 05 No, no.
2:10:22 Steven Rinella? Yeah, they didn't want to hear about that.
2:10:24 Speaker 05 Yeah, my wife puts mayonnaise on hers and I got a major problem with that.
2:10:28 Steven Rinella? I was observing the other day to my buddy, uh, when I was eating those dogs. You know when you get those, like you, let's say you're at a vent, you're at like a concession stand?
2:10:36 Speaker 05 Right.
2:10:37 Steven Rinella? And they give you a dog and it's on that little.
2:10:39 Speaker 04 Like the coffee filter type tray thing?
2:10:42 Steven Rinella? Yeah, it's like a little, like a waxed kind of tray. So you get, you get your dog at the counter and you settle up and then they, somewhere nearby, they got like the condiment station. And maybe the dog's in a foil wrap or two.
2:10:58 Speaker 05 Could be.
2:10:58 Steven Rinella? Okay, so you get it out of there, you go over to the condiment deal and you start applying everything. There is no chance. Like you cannot do it, that that, that those condiments, that, that when you're sitting there on your, on the, what do you, the bleacher?
2:11:17 Speaker 05 Yeah, right.
2:11:17 Steven Rinella? You're sitting there on the bleacher, there is no chance that you're not gonna have ketchup and mustard on your hands and on your clothes.
2:11:24 Speaker 05 Right.
2:11:25 Steven Rinella? It like, it can't happen. I was just observing this on Saturday to somebody.
2:11:32 Speaker 05 Have you seen?
2:11:32 Steven Rinella? In your car? You get out of the gas station, you get in your car? There is gonna be. Yeah. Even if you skip the condiment table. And just took the dog. And raw dogged it. I swear you're gonna walk out of your car and there's gonna be ketchup on you.
2:11:46 Speaker 05 Yeah.
2:11:46 Steven Rinella? And you need to go near the ketchup.
2:11:48 Speaker 04 That's how you know you had a good time.
2:11:49 Speaker 05 That's right.
2:11:50 Speaker 04 Half of Sydney's phone camera roll is just images of me with mustard somewhere it shouldn't have been.
2:11:57 Speaker 05 Well, I've, I've been known to, um, to eat ribs in the car. And that's a similar.
2:12:02 Speaker 04 Yeah.
2:12:02 Speaker 05 A similar problem. Real messy driving food. You can eat them, check their.
2:12:07 Steven Rinella? Yeah, I never eat ribs on the road. You know what boudin is?
2:12:10 Speaker 05 I do.
2:12:10 Steven Rinella? Yeah. What I had an idea with boudin would be.
2:12:14 Steven Rinella? I was thinking about you'd get a receptacle of hot sauce. Up on the top of your car. Like where the roll bar would be or whatever. And a, and a, and a.
2:12:25 Steven Rinella? Hose down through the car. So the picture that you're driving, right? Here's your steering wheel and everything. And right here is a little valve, a squeeze valve. So when you're eating boudin, you can, you can.
2:12:39 Speaker 05 Just beat her out a little bit.
2:12:40 Steven Rinella? You can, you can, right out of that reservoir, you just dribble.
2:12:44 Speaker 04 It's perfect because you only need two hands to do it.
2:12:48 Steven Rinella? Well, that's because you drive with your knee. You're right. Well, maybe you'd get it such that you could like a foot pedal.
2:12:54 Speaker 04 Yeah.
2:12:55 Steven Rinella? There's a foot pedal.
2:12:56 Speaker 04 You know, that's what in, in Europe, in Europe, at the outside of the hot dog stand, they have mustard with a foot pedal. Brilliant. So you can hold a drink and a dog and dress your dog with your foot pedal.
2:13:08 Steven Rinella? That's what they do in Europe?
2:13:09 Speaker 04 At least where the last, the last hot dogs, well, I, I noticed that it was not everywhere.
2:13:14 Steven Rinella? That's incredible.
2:13:15 Speaker 05 The big hand pump.
2:13:17 Steven Rinella? Yeah. You'd be standing there holding your drink.
2:13:19 Speaker 04 The foot, the foot pump.
2:13:20 Steven Rinella? Kids drink.
2:13:21 Speaker 04 Yeah.
2:13:21 Steven Rinella? Your dog.
2:13:21 Speaker 04 And I was standing there looking at it, wondering where I should slap it, like trying to balance my beer on my hand with the dog in my hand. And this woman came up and she's pointing at the ground and I had no idea what she's pointing at.
2:13:32 Steven Rinella? She didn't speak American.
2:13:33 Speaker 04 And then, and then I saw the pedal and I thought, my God, they are better than us.
2:13:38 Speaker 05 Well, they stole that from the porta potty industry, right? You know, the recycling hand wash sink is where they.
2:13:44 Speaker 04 It's smart, it's smart.
2:13:45 Steven Rinella? Yeah, it's like you people might not be willing to help us out in our current conflict. However, you have a great way of getting mustard. You found a great way to get mustard onto my dogs. So if we ever want to do this, so if we want to do our hot dog deal,
2:14:00 Speaker 05 Sure.
2:14:00 Steven Rinella? We gotta come find you guys all the way in France. That's where the big bad lab is.
2:14:05 Speaker 05 That's where the lab is. Yeah.
2:14:09 Speaker 05 Obviously, there are tons of boutique customers here in the US that had the same equipment, but you don't have to get, you don't have the, the free rein of a lab to experiment and do all the
2:14:21 Steven Rinella? They've got to let you in there with us because you got to be there with us when we do these dogs.
2:14:25 Speaker 05 That's right. Um, I, who knows, you're probably going to get a bunch of requests.
2:14:31 Steven Rinella? Well, it'd be tough bar for them because they'd have to be able to now write in and be like, that guy.
2:14:38 Speaker 05 Was a hat.
2:14:38 Steven Rinella? That guy's a hat. So if a dude, if a big hot dog guy out there can come in and look at your resume.
2:14:47 Speaker 05 Pressure's on.
2:14:48 Steven Rinella? Yeah. And be like, he's no hot dog man. I'm a hot dog man.
2:14:52 Speaker 05 I'm a casing man. I'll say that. I'm more of a casing man than a hot dog man, but, um, but you kind of have to, you got to know the process.
2:15:03 Steven Rinella? But I'd look at, like, let's say you're an electrical, electric vehicle guy.
2:15:07 Speaker 05 Sure.
2:15:07 Steven Rinella? Someone's like, I'm more of a battery man.
2:15:10 Speaker 05 Yeah.
2:15:10 Steven Rinella? Yeah. Than electrical, but I'm like, but that's, that's what we're after here.
2:15:14 Speaker 05 That's the heart of the
2:15:14 Steven Rinella? That's what we're after, you know. So being a casing man, I don't think detracts from you being a hot dog man. It's like the, the battery guy at a EV place.
2:15:22 Speaker 04 Yeah. I, I think you're safe until I get an email from the, the podcast email forwarding thing and it says, oscar at oscarmeyer.com. That's the only,
2:15:31 Speaker 05 That's right.
2:15:31 Speaker 04 That's the only guy who's going to trump your credentials here. So.
2:15:35 Speaker 05 For the record, you guys are the one that keep bringing up that brand, not me. That's fun.
2:15:40 Steven Rinella? Well, you know, the problem is, you know, why we keep bringing that band up is to be honest with you, I can't think of another hot dog outfit.
2:15:46 Speaker 04 Ballpark Nathan's.
2:15:47 Steven Rinella? Oh, what am I saying?
2:15:48 Speaker 04 Yeah.
2:15:48 Steven Rinella? Oh, okay. Nathan's. Phil, can you scratch every time we said that?
2:15:52 Speaker 04 If Nathan, or if Nathan himself emails me.
2:15:56 Steven Rinella? Nathan at Nathan's.
2:15:58 Speaker 05 They're all customers.
2:15:58 Steven Rinella? We'll stop, we'll stop mentioning hot dog brands now.
2:16:01 Speaker 05 Yep. You haven't mentioned one that's not a customer yet.
2:16:04 Steven Rinella? Oh. What was the other one?
2:16:06 Speaker 04 Ballpark.
2:16:07 Steven Rinella? Yeah. So ball at ballpark. Take that call.
2:16:12 Speaker 05 Nathan's famous as who sponsors the.
2:16:15 Steven Rinella? Yeah. Oh, yeah.
2:16:16 Speaker 05 The big event.
2:16:16 Steven Rinella? I don't get that, man. I don't think that they should do that.
2:16:22 Speaker 04 It's probably their best marketing.
2:16:24 Steven Rinella? I don't think that that's a good idea. You know what? You know who's got another bad idea?
2:16:29 Speaker 05 Yeah, it's Wenzel's.
2:16:33 Steven Rinella? You're not a paint man, are you?
2:16:34 Speaker 05 Uh, no.
2:16:35 Steven Rinella? Okay. Who's that paint outfit that their logo is the earth getting covered up with paint? Sherwin-Williams, I think. It says, "Cover the earth."
2:16:48 Steven Rinella? I'm not kidding you. Phil, pull that up. It says like, "Cover the earth." Their logo is the planet.
2:16:55 Speaker 04 Being consumed by the.
2:16:57 Steven Rinella? Dumping on top of the planet and the paint is dripping off down around like 45th parallel south.
2:17:05 Speaker 04 I guess I can envision it, but I never really put that together.
2:17:12 Steven Rinella? And then Nathan's doing that hot dog eating contest. I think it's bad business. These people would sell a lot more paint if they got rid of that paint logo.
2:17:20 Speaker 05 I thought you were gonna go into other eating contests.
2:17:24 Steven Rinella? This, yeah. Did these guys miss the whole Earth Day cra- like the whole Earth Day era? Like dude, I don't look at that and get all hot for some paint. Do you know what I'm saying? Imagine if that was like Exxon's logo?
2:17:42 Speaker 05 Not a sponsor.
2:17:44 Steven Rinella? Yeah. And that Nathan's hot dog eating contest, I think they should back out of that. That grosses me out, man.
2:17:51 Speaker 05 There's an oyster eating, raw oyster eating contest in, uh, in Mobile.
2:17:56 Steven Rinella? Pleasure or volume?
2:17:58 Speaker 05 It's, it's volume.
2:18:01 Speaker 05 So you gotta get your name on the board and I'm gonna, I'm gonna go dark for a minute. There is, the guy that's at the top of the board
2:18:10 Speaker 05 got sick halfway through it.
2:18:11 Steven Rinella? You'll say.
2:18:14 Speaker 05 In one of those Lexan deals.
2:18:17 Steven Rinella? Oh, yeah. Oh, that kind of sick.
2:18:18 Speaker 05 They said, all right, you're out. He goes, no, I want to get on the board. If I go ahead and eat that, can I, can I fire it back up? And they said, sure.
2:18:32 Speaker 05 So he re-ingested.
2:18:33 Steven Rinella? Oh, no.
2:18:36 Speaker 05 For the sole point of getting his name at the top of the, top of the horse. Some people have their.
2:18:43 Steven Rinella? It's good to have something you're passionate about.
2:18:44 Speaker 05 Something they're passionate for. That's tough.
2:18:48 Speaker 04 Do you want me to pull the video of that?
2:18:52 Steven Rinella? This is on Phil's phone.
2:18:57 Steven Rinella? Man, I appreciate you coming on the show.
2:18:59 Speaker 05 I enjoyed it.
2:18:59 Steven Rinella? I do. See, we were, we're definitely interested in doing that trip. But like, kind of word got around the office a little bit and it's generated a handful of eye rolls. Just to be frank.
2:19:11 Speaker 05 I get it.
2:19:15 Steven Rinella? Cause people like, hold on, no, why?
2:19:20 Steven Rinella? Someone brought up like, would you be doing other things there too? We're like, no, just making the hot dogs.
2:19:27 Speaker 05 I'll, I'll look for a domestic option. I'm sure.
2:19:29 Steven Rinella? Little worky things you'd be doing while you're there? And we were like, no, no. We're thinking about getting some coffee.
2:19:35 Speaker 04 Seems pretty straightforward.
2:19:36 Speaker 05 Some bread. They do bread well.
2:19:39 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
2:19:42 Speaker 05 Yeah. I mean, getting, so Beauvais is, is like a, a short cab ride from Paris. Getting from here to Paris. It's pretty easy.
2:19:52 Steven Rinella? I do have a little for another, I just realized for another, for, there's a writing project where I do have to do a little site visit.
2:20:00 Speaker 04 Yeah.
2:20:01 Steven Rinella? I do have a France.
2:20:02 Speaker 04 Yeah, that's a great point.
2:20:05 Steven Rinella? We're good.
2:20:05 Speaker 04 All right.
2:20:06 Steven Rinella? I just thought of it. It just hit me.
2:20:11 Steven Rinella? Okay, thanks for coming on the show.
2:20:12 Speaker 05 Yeah, I've enjoyed it.
2:20:13 Steven Rinella? No, that's good, man. This I learned. You know, you know what's gonna happen now, though? People I hang out with are gonna have to endure me when they're eating dogs for me to be like, man, you know?
2:20:23 Speaker 05 Protein extraction.
2:20:25 Steven Rinella? Yeah, if you're curious about what you're eating there, I'll be happy to. I don't remember what day we spoke, but Sydney had like a bad first 45 minutes when she got home from work. It was just like, you know this part of the hot dog where the line is? No, I don't.
2:20:41 Speaker 05 And that was the key, just to make it
2:20:43 Steven Rinella? Mm hmm.
2:20:44 Speaker 05 one pound packs.
2:20:45 Steven Rinella? Yeah.
2:20:45 Speaker 05 Easy for the consumer.
2:20:47 Steven Rinella? Mm hmm. Love it. Thank you, John. Thank you, man.
2:20:50 Speaker 05 Enjoyed it. Thank you.
2:20:51 Steven Rinella? Yep.
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