Ep. 858: The Science and Magic of Hot Dogs

Summary

The MeatEater Podcast Ep. 858: John Carter

Date: April 6, 2026
Host: Steven Rinella
Guest: John Carter (Mechanical Engineer and Hot Dog Casing Expert)

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Overview and Main Theme

In this lively, in-depth episode, Steven Rinella welcomes John Carter, a mechanical engineer from Alabama and leading expert in the hot dog casing industry. The show takes listeners on a surprisingly rich journey through the science and manufacturing of hot dogs, delving into topics including sausage emulsions, casings, the origins and evolution of the “roller dog,” industrial food processing, and even the shifting economics of American forestry. The episode is full of humor, food nostalgia, and deeply technical yet accessible breakdowns of what really goes into making the classic American hot dog. Along the way, the team busts myths, discusses wild game experimentation, and explores what it would really take to make a gas-station style venison roller dog.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Episode Genesis: Why Hot Dogs?

• The idea sprang from previous MeatEater conversations about making hot dogs with wild game. Randall shares how John Carter’s bold, corrective email to the show about hot dog science led to his appearance.
  • Quote (Randall, 04:00): “He said, I know all about hot dogs, the science of hot dogs. And he said, I could guarantee you...”
• The desire: to make true “roller dogs”—the kind you find at a gas station, not just fancy wild game sausages disguised as hot dogs.
  • Quote (Steven, 07:09): “If I made that [venison roller dog], I'd be proud of myself. Ain't a hot dog.”

2. What Really Makes a Hot Dog a Hot Dog?

• The team clarifies that not all sausages called “hot dogs” by DIYers truly are. The baseline: uniformity, snap, and price point, not simply the fact that it’s a tube of meat.
  • Quote (John, 08:00): “It’s 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. That’s the goal.”

3. John Carter’s Road to Hot Dog Engineering

• John recounts his journey from physics class with Robin Williams’ half-brother to working in cellulose (paper/leather) industries, which led to a specialized focus on engineered casings for meat production.
  • Quote (John, 12:08): “Once you visit the University of Alabama, you go to the University of Alabama... Not throwing anything out for the school or anything. I’m not a paid endorser, but.”

4. Cellulose: From Forest to Franks (19:04–24:35)

• In-depth discussion on how cellulose derived from southern pine forests and cotton is crucial to hot dog casings, as well as diapers, wipes, rayon, etc. There’s a tiny but influential “slice” of this market used for hot dog casings.
  • Quote (John, 24:09): “Toilet paper, wet wipes, feminine care diapers, all that kind of stuff comes out of those forests.”

5. The Science and History of Hot Dog Casings (26:01–34:57)

• 90%+ of American hot dogs use cellulose-based (inedible, peelable) casings invented in the 1930s, allowing mass uniformity and cost savings.
• Cellulose comes primarily from wood pulp and cotton linters; new research into bamboo.
  • Quote (John, 26:03): “Ninety percent of the hot dogs in the US are stuffed into a cellulose based casing. So it’s an inedible casing...”

6. How Roller Dogs are Made – The Process (31:11–40:00)

• Casings are stuffed, linked, and smoked in huge uniform chains (“sticks” up to 200 feet).
• Key manufacturing steps:
  1. Stuffing with emulsified meat.
  2. Hanging and smoking (to cook and form protein “skin”).
  3. Casing is stripped, often with blades or water jets.
  • Quote (John, 36:11): “Like when you bite into a hot dog and there’s like a little skin hanging off, that's cross linked protein on the surface of the hot dog.”

7. Hot Dog Myths: Lips and Buttholes? (40:42–44:15)

• John busts the pervasive myth that hot dogs are made from “lips and A-holes,” pointing out most of the meat is butcher trim, occasional protein fillers, and rarely the nastier bits.
  • Quote (John, 41:35): “No, they’d be pleasantly surprised. I mean, so the lean, the lean is all from butcher trim... I haven’t seen lips and A holes on any shelf.”
  • Quote (Steven, 41:08): “Give me the worst case scenario. I mean, like, worst case. I mean, come on. That’s... incredible wordplay.”

8. The Emulsion Science of Hot Dogs (46:42–52:10, 54:31–70:51)

• What is an emulsion? In hot dogs, it’s fat particles stabilized by meat protein, created by grinding meat, extracting proteins with salt and ice, then combining with fat and blending into a uniform paste.
• Salient points:
  • Pork is the easiest to work with; chicken holds more water and is more profitable; venison is hardest due to its tight proteins and low fat.
  • The extraction/emulsification is a dance: you need just the right amount of protein to cover fat particles.
  • Temperature control is vital: ice keeps the mixture from prematurely gelling.
• Notable Quotes:
  • John (47:57): “An emulsion puts an emulsifier around those oil particles to stabilize it.”
  • John (50:30): “Step one is protein extraction. So I have to extract the proteins out of that meat. And I do that with salt.”
  • John (51:01): “Protein’s a polymer... I need to unwind and extract those proteins so that it’s ready to make an emulsion.”
  • John (54:06): “Overcooking venison has more to do with—you just lose any little bit of fat that was in there and you’re gonna make a really tough chew.”

9. Can You Truly Make a Venison Roller Dog? (57:32–68:08, 113:20–132:17)

• Team debates whether deer meat can ever make a truly indistinguishable gas-station-style roller dog.
• Venison presents real challenges: low fat, tight proteins, different pH, crumbly gel network.
  • John (57:39): “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? ...It’d be really hard.”
• Innovations suggested: use bear fat (better melting point than pork or deer fat), add mushroom powder and citrus fiber for texture/water retention, mind pH with phosphates.
  • John (117:28): “The more I looked at it, I think bear fat is the preferred fat for making a pure wild hot dog.”

10. Casing Technology—Past, Present, Future (95:06–104:25)

• John gives a fascinating history of casing inventions:
  • Shift from natural (hog/sheep) to innovative cellulose (VisKing), which revolutionized mass hot-dog production.
  • Touches on plastic casings for deli/bologna use and the appeal of their non-permeability for food safety.
  • Reflection on environmental pressures and the future of plastic in the meat industry.
  • Quote (John, 99:09): “So it was Vis King and Visqueen. We sold off the Visqueen (plastic sheeting).”

11. Food Safety, Regulatory, and “Scary Processing” Myths (90:00–91:12)

• Processing and inspection standards are stricter and cleaner than most assume; FDA often present for every shift.
  • John (91:03): “They’re coming in to do their checks and all that... it’s a clean process.”

12. Cultural Myths, Childhood Memories, and Hot Dog Enjoyment

• Lively reminisces about gas station roller dogs, school lunches, and the universal joy/fear of hot dogs.
  • Quote (Steven, 107:07): “I have very positive thoughts about dogs... I see a hot dog and I get happy.”
  • Quote (John, 109:33): “I don’t think I’ve ever been unhappy eating a hot dog. Like, it’s always a good thing... you’re doing something fun.”

13. Toppings, Traditions, and Hot Dog Rituals

• Ketchup debates, eating technique, and the inevitability of getting condiments everywhere—especially at concessions or in the car.
  • Quote (Steven, 135:02): “There is no chance... that those condiments... you’re not going to have ketchup, mustard on your hands and on your clothes.”

14. Quirky Footnotes: Hot Dog Competitions, Industry Jokes, and More

• Jokes about inventing “Nuclear Hot Dogs,” foot-pedal-driven mustard dispensers in Europe, the weird fate of leather as a meat byproduct, and the horror of competitive eating contests.
  • Notable quote (John, 46:17): “Pork makes sausage and chicken makes money. That’d be a good name for the podcast.”
  • Quote (Randall, 137:49): “In Europe, at the hot dog stand, they have mustard with a foot pedal…”

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On the Essence of a Hot Dog:
  • John (08:12): “I want that hot dog price point. I want it to look and feel and taste like a traditional store bought hot dog.”
• On Hot Dog Science:
  • Steven (34:14): “Annular rigidity. In the old days we would call this episode annular rigidity.”
• On Wild Game Dogs:
  • John (117:28): “I think bear fat is the preferred fat for making a pure wild hot dog.”
• On Processing Fears:
  • John (91:03): “It’s a clean process.”
• On Hot Dog Joy:
  • Randall (109:45): “Like sunshine, a hot dog. 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.”
• On Hot Dog Bloopers:
  • Steven (135:33): “Even if you skip the condiment table and just took the dog and raw-dogged it, I swear you’re gonna walk out your car and there’s gonna be ketchup on you.”

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Important Timestamps

| Time | Segment/Topic | |--------|------------------------------------------------| | 03:16 | Introduction to John Carter & hot dog episode | | 07:09 | “Ain’t a hot dog” – defining the real thing | | 19:04 | Cellulose origins: forests, paper, and casings | | 26:01 | Anatomy of a hot dog casing, cellulose science | | 31:11 | Manufacturing steps: stuffing, smoking, peeling| | 40:42 | Hot dog myths: “lips and A-holes” truth | | 46:42 | The science of emulsion in hot dogs | | 54:06 | Why venison is tough for hot dogs | | 57:32 | Could you make a truly convincing venison dog? | | 117:28 | Bear fat as ideal for wild game hot dogs | | 125:25 | Seasonings and the “secret sauce” | | 128:12 | Smoking/cooking a venison dog, technical detail| | 131:15 | “Abstract artists who can’t do a bird” |

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Flow and Tone

• The conversation flows like a campfire chat between enthusiastic outdoorsmen and meat nerds, with trademark MeatEater humor peppering the technical talk.
• John Carter brings an understated Southern know-how and warmth, while Steven, Randall, and Corinne volley between geeky food science and playground nostalgia.
• The tone is irreverent, detailed, sometimes philosophical, and always accessible for curious listeners.

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Summary for First-Time Listeners

This episode is a master-class in what lies beneath the humble hot dog, blending deep technical expertise, food culture, and wild game adventure. If you’ve ever wondered how roller dogs are made, why homemade ones taste different, or wanted the inside scoop on “mystery meat” urban legends, this is a must-listen. Whether you’re a hunter, a home cook, or just a nostalgic former kid, you’ll come away with new appreciation for the science—and the fun—behind America’s favorite snack.

Transcript

[John Carter]

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[Steven Rinella]

Guaranteed Human.

[Corinne Morgan]

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[Steven Rinella]

This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug bitten and in my case, underwear.

[John Carter]

Listen, the Meat Eater Podcast.

[Corinne Morgan]

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[Steven Rinella]

All right, everybody, we're. 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.

[John Carter]

Mechanical engineer.

[Steven Rinella]

Mechanical engineer and hot dog expert John Carter from Alabama came on the show because we were talking. Randall is big. Explain how the whole thing happened. Randall, this is your. This is your deal.

[Randall]

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, whatever dot com. And it was rather bold in its tone. He said, I don't know what sort

[Steven Rinella]

of quack hack I believe hack you've

[Randall]

got lined up here. We didn't mention 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. And he said, I could guarantee you that I could give you. And 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.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Randall]

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 something. You thought you knew, I thought I knew all about. And so, yeah, here we find ourselves.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, because initially what was going on is I was talking about wanting to make a video about making roller dogs, Right. 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 with 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. I'm talking about roller dogs. Meaning when you go into a gas station and you find hot dogs at a. At a shockingly low price.

[John Carter]

Right.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay. There was a. If you're in Sioux City, like in Michigan, there's Sioux Ontario and Sioux Michigan.

[John Carter]

Right.

[Steven Rinella]

Sister cities separated by the St. Mary's River. The Canadians always want to pull into our gas station because 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 g. They fill up.

[John Carter]

Right.

[Steven Rinella]

Because America just has. Some things are cheaper in America. This place used to have four roller dogs. This is.

[Corinne Morgan]

I'm going back to early 90s. Four roller dogs for a dollar,

[Steven Rinella]

sometimes

[Corinne Morgan]

insane hot dog prices.

[John Carter]

It's impressive.

[Steven Rinella]

So if I'm like, how do you make a hot dog? 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 again and I don't want to hack on. This is a great. This is a sausage. If you can see in the camera, Philly, they can see this. Yes. There's a couple little scraps. Someone sent these in. They sent it under a package called roller dogs. It's a venison roller dogs.

[Corinne Morgan]

It's an elevated.

[Steven Rinella]

It's delicious. It's delicious. If I made that, I'd be proud of myself. Ain't a hot dog.

[John Carter]

Right?

[Steven Rinella]

Ain't a hot dog.

[Randall]

It's like if someone said, oh, I make an Oreo, but it's better than Oreos and it's. They have like a little chocolate cookie and there's some cream filler and another chocolate cookie. It might be a great cookie, but it's not gonna tickle all the. The Oreo notes.

[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.

[John Carter]

Yeah. When a consumer goes into a store, they make a purchase on. On two points. One, a wallet. What's the thing look like visually? Because you haven't tasted it yet. Right. 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?

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[John Carter]

And those are key points for the whole processed meat industry.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[John Carter]

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.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[John Carter]

That's the goal.

[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 ca. Like, sausage casing hot dog biz.

[John Carter]

It's a bizarre path. So, yeah, my senior year in high school, so I'm going to go all the way back to 1992.

[Steven Rinella]

That's the year you graduated.

[John Carter]

I did. Me too. Really?

[Steven Rinella]

Hell yeah.

[John Carter]

73.

[Steven Rinella]

I was back with hot dog roller dogs.

[Corinne Morgan]

That was like the kind of.

[Steven Rinella]

I view that as like the heyday of rolling. That's. We. That's what we ate for breakfast in high school. Yeah.

[John Carter]

We probably put on there the night before. And you're getting.

[Steven Rinella]

Getting the roller dog pull into. Yeah, you'd pull into the station, buy $5 worth of gas, $1 worth of hot dogs.

[John Carter]

That's a 27 to 28 to 29 millimeter.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Randall]

This is what got me. When we're talking about. When we're talking about the bore diameter of a.

[Steven Rinella]

Of a hot dog.

[Randall]

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 it was like 99 cents for two dogs and a small fountain drink.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[Randall]

And then you could spend the other dollar.

[Steven Rinella]

Small fountain drink. Yeah.

[Randall]

And you could spend the other dollar on a scratch off ticket. So it was like the best of both worlds. You knew what you were getting, and

[Corinne Morgan]

then you also didn't.

[Steven Rinella]

Fountain for a dollar. Yeah. You know, this has nothing to do with any man, but I just want to throw this in 1992, whatever we used to have. You ever hear a Hardee's? The restaurant Hardee's. We had a Hardee's near our high school.

[Corinne Morgan]

Hardee's was running this thing. It was.

[Steven Rinella]

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.

[Corinne Morgan]

All you could eat for A$99.

[Steven Rinella]

And it would be a foam. You'd go up to the counter and it'd give you a foam square and

[Corinne Morgan]

they just mound it with B and

[Steven Rinella]

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 it held true to their word. They would hand you another one of them foam trays just mounted with that, like, fake.

[Randall]

There's some.

[Steven Rinella]

It was like milk and flour.

[Randall]

There's some gen zers. Listening to this right now, wondering what

[John Carter]

sort of horrible world they're Inherited my first job at 16 years old. I was a chef.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[John Carter]

At a little restaurant called Shoney's.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, yeah. Not a cook. Chef. Okay.

[John Carter]

That's right. I was in charge of the breakfast bar.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[John Carter]

And we had all you can eat fried shrimp at Shoney. We'd roll out, 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 again.

[Steven Rinella]

You'd wear them out, you know, he'd wear them out. Yeah. They'd fit. They'd become physical exhausted before they became full from having to refresh their plate. Yeah.

[John Carter]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

All right, so your career. 1992. You graduate?

[John Carter]

92. I. I went to a physics class. Okay. My physics teacher in high school was Robin Williams half brother.

[Randall]

Really?

[John Carter]

His name was McLaurin Smith Williams Christian Brothers High School in Memphis, Tennessee.

[Steven Rinella]

Robin Williams half brother.

[John Carter]

Half looked just like him. Had the same sense of humor and

[Steven Rinella]

writing poetry on the chalkboard.

[John Carter]

It was awesome. So I, like. I became this guy that said, I want to be an engineer, because that one guy.

[Steven Rinella]

Huh.

[John Carter]

So I went in because he was

[Steven Rinella]

Robin Williams half brother, because he was inspiring in and of himself.

[John Carter]

Inspiring in and of himself. Yeah, yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

And he didn't have a lot of jingle. Like, his brother wasn't passing a lot of jingle off to him.

[John Carter]

No, 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. Look just like him.

[Steven Rinella]

That's great.

[Corinne Morgan]

He.

[John Carter]

So he wanted me to go to the University of Tennessee to be a nuclear engineer.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh.

[John Carter]

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

[Steven Rinella]

Alabama because of what I did.

[John Carter]

Just a beautiful campus.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[John Carter]

That's just an amazing opportunity. Not. Not. Not throwing anything out for the school or anything. I'm not a paid endorser, but.

[Steven Rinella]

Well, my boy, he's getting to the point where his mom's starting to harass him about his plans. I'll throw that one out to him.

[John Carter]

Visit Alabama. My daughter went there as well.

[Steven Rinella]

You know, it'd be good. You know what company you and you 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.

[John Carter]

It's a good idea.

[Steven Rinella]

Dude, that would be like a. We might have Nuclear Hot Dogs. We'd kill it on that.

[John Carter]

It's good brand.

[Randall]

We might have Missed the boat. I don't know.

[Steven Rinella]

I feel like there's already one call back.

[Randall]

There's got to be some guy out

[Steven Rinella]

there clear hot dogs. No, there's not.

[Randall]

I know. Atomic Burger.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, would they sue you?

[Randall]

No, I don't know.

[Steven Rinella]

Not they wouldn't sue. They might try a cease and desist. You just ignore it.

[John Carter]

Atomic and nuclear are pretty nuclear hustle dogs. Those are two totally different areas.

[Randall]

Let's look into that.

[John Carter]

Go on.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, we'll hash out the details on this later.

[John Carter]

Went to Alabama, graduated mechanical engineering. Whole plan was to be a process engineer. That was the plan. And upon graduation.

[Steven Rinella]

Tell us what that means.

[John Carter]

Yeah. So every plant, whether they make steel, they make hot dogs, they make paper, they make cars. Process engineers in them and they're response, they're responsible for optimizing the process, managing quality, improving the efficiency of the plant, things of that nature.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[John Carter]

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 called a co op program. So yeah, it took me six and a half years to graduate college, but it's because I worked every other semester, I promise, at a steel mill, a cast iron pipe manufacturing facility in Birmingham. And I was convinced that's what I was going to do and interviewed. The job market was hot in 92 or 97 when I graduated and I

[Steven Rinella]

didn't dip in on that,

[John Carter]

it was good. I think I ended up getting like fishing was hot. I think I got nine job offers coming out of college.

[Steven Rinella]

Wow.

[John Carter]

And two of them were sales jobs.

[Steven Rinella]

Seriously?

[John Carter]

Yeah. So two were in sales, one was in the paper industry.

[Corinne Morgan]

People coming looking for you?

[John Carter]

Yeah, me. Who doesn't like this guy?

[Steven Rinella]

I know, but it's just funny.

[John Carter]

I had a lot more, I mean

[Steven Rinella]

if I got on out of college and just waited for someone to come looking for me, they weren't coming.

[John Carter]

Right, right. The co op. Because 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 1997 Chevy Astro Van as a car. And that's what kicked it over the

[Steven Rinella]

edge like a take home car.

[John Carter]

That was it.

[Steven Rinella]

Got it.

[John Carter]

So that took me into, into paper. So I worked in paper mostly in tissue and towel for a while, some timing leather. And the source obviously for paper is cellulose. The source for hot dog casings is cellulose. So I knew of the company I work for now, Viscase, from that. From that experience and wanted to try something new. So that's what brought me into the hot dog. So I went from Robin Williams half brother, kind of down this weird path,

[Randall]

the Astro van, to being a hot

[Steven Rinella]

dog magnate in the process engineer at. AT Dogs.

[John Carter]

That's right.

[Steven Rinella]

Nuclear hot dog hot dogs.

[John Carter]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Can we touch on the leather thing? Because we. Right before we started. Just very quickly. Touch on. Before we started, we visited just as we were kind of gearing up 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. This is a pun. No, it's like a pun neighborhood. A big driver of the leather industry is the automotive industry.

[John Carter]

That's right.

[Steven Rinella]

Touch on that. Yeah.

[John Carter]

So that. Yeah, the leather industry is run out of Italy because of the fashion roots. Right. So that's where everything's run. What drives a lot of the volume and 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.

[Steven Rinella]

Yo. And when we discussed that, I was sharing that a friend of mine from high school, she. 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 a bit. Anyways, he's buying leather in South America. Barb wire is not as prevalent down there. And he's talking about how it's hard to find large pieces of perfect leather.

[John Carter]

Right.

[Steven Rinella]

That you would use to do a car seat, like unblemished leather for, like, premium auto.

[John Carter]

Right.

[Steven Rinella]

And. And you were telling them about how that is. That that industry is in decline.

[John Carter]

Yeah, I mean, social pressure is. Is a. Is a big piece of it. You know, social media drives a lot of the younger generation. The terms vegan leather is out there with, I think is. It's. It's kind of a weird term to me, but basically it's. It's making it out of plastics and things of that nature. Because the concept is, is I don't want to kill a cow for the seats in My car.

[Steven Rinella]

Yep.

[John Carter]

But that cow's not being killed for the seats in your car. Cows being killed for the burger that you ate for lunch. Leather's a byproduct of that whole industry.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[John Carter]

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.

[Steven Rinella]

It is.

[Randall]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

It's surprising that people want it out of the. People want that material out of. Out of an oil or a plastic product.

[John Carter]

Right.

[Steven Rinella]

And then to put the really durable, renewable stuff into the ground.

[John Carter]

That's right.

[Steven Rinella]

You know. All right, back to hot dogs. So the cellulose deal.

[John Carter]

Sure.

[Steven Rinella]

You're dealing paper. Tell people. What is that? When you say that? Did you say cellulose or something different?

[John Carter]

Cellulose.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay. Explain that.

[John Carter]

Yeah, I mean, so. So I came from paper. I live in Mobile, Alabama. We're in the southern yellow pine forest. Loblolly pines, longleaf pines, all of those types of trees. And that's where I hunt, too. I'm a huge. I've got a buddy who owns 240 acres. I'm his work labor, and he owns land. So we hunt together. I cut a pine tree off the roof of the single wide trailer last weekend.

[Steven Rinella]

Got it. So you're like maintenance and habitat.

[John Carter]

That's right.

[Randall]

Yeah.

[John Carter]

Right. So, yeah, we. We do all tractor lists anyway. We got a whole thing going on.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[John Carter]

But it's all farmed pine trees.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[John Carter]

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 so down in that area of the world used to be owned by a lot of paper companies. A lot of the paper companies got out of owning land. They. They buy trees now.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[John Carter]

There are a few Warehouser, Rain air, forest products. There's a few out there that. That still own the land.

[Steven Rinella]

I wasn't aware, like, I. I know that those places used to own these huge tracks. What was the one? And what was the outfit in western Montana? This is Weyerhaeuser, Plum Creek and all that.

[John Carter]

Oh, so Plum. Plum Creek.

[Steven Rinella]

You know what I'm talking about?

[John Carter]

Yep.

[Steven Rinella]

Like all that stuff above the Clark Fork when you're going down I90 looking to the side. Yeah.

[John Carter]

But it's probably international paper. I think Plum Creek bought international papers. I think that's right. But I don't want somebody to get a new pair of boots on. My mistake.

[Steven Rinella]

Either way. I didn't know that that was a trend.

[Corinne Morgan]

I guess I can think of all

[Steven Rinella]

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.

[John Carter]

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. Mm. 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 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 mine oil. We can. Well, we're building all these plants, so we're going to start a construction company.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[John Carter]

Like, they just keep bolting on stuff onto that company. And they're one of the biggest landowners in Canada.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[John Carter]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

When. When we were working on

[Corinne Morgan]

our Hide

[Steven Rinella]

Hunters audiobook about the. The history of the buffalo hide hunters, we.

[John Carter]

We.

[Steven Rinella]

Toward the end of that, we get into the, The. The. The tannery. The tanneries, like where these high. 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 tracks of hemlock. 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 own the ground, you know.

[John Carter]

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 lot. Paper industry in the Southeast US Is big because that's where the wood basket. And it's sustainable forestry.

[Steven Rinella]

Yep.

[John Carter]

And that sustainable forestry in the Southeast US Goes to make toilet paper packaging and hot dog casings.

[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 chart it out who's using this? The hot dog chunks got to be like, not even.

[Corinne Morgan]

You can't even see, you know, when

[Steven Rinella]

you look at a pie chart. And the only thing you can see about one of the wedges is there's lines.

[Randall]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

But you can't tell what's in the line.

[Randall]

I bet there's a very specific term for that and I'd love to know what it is.

[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.

[John Carter]

Correct. You're not wrong. So. So there's a specific type of wood pulp that's used for making cellulose casings.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[John Carter]

And it's. It's what's called dissolving pulp. So you dissolve it and regenerate it. High value chain 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. Tinsel is a brand name in that space.

[Steven Rinella]

Really.

[John Carter]

So that's the. That's one of the main things that I wanted 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. Those forests.

[Steven Rinella]

Before we go deeper into that, and I want to go deeper into that. Can you explain. Remember how we started talking about roller dogs?

[John Carter]

Sure.

[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?

[John Carter]

Right. Good question. So.

[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.

[Randall]

And you can feel the mist of the steam.

[Steven Rinella]

And you order a dog and he takes the lid off and it's a steamy. We call them water, not roller dogs. We call those water dogs. And he dicks a hot. Dips a hot dog out of a bucket of hot water.

[John Carter]

Right.

[Steven Rinella]

That hot dog.

[John Carter]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

What is it?

[John Carter]

Well, there are those hot dogs.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[John Carter]

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. 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.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[John Carter]

Ice, lean protein, and fat.

[Steven Rinella]

But what's it stuffed into?

[John Carter]

And it's stuffed into a. Ninety percent of the hot dogs in the US Are stuffed into a cellulose based casing. So it's an inedible casing that. That, that is stuffed into. We, this case actually invented that space. So back in 1930, we invented this guy. And that's, that's, that's on a sheared stick.

[Steven Rinella]

If I started walking, if Randall grabbed one end and I grabbed one end, how far apart would we be when this was.

[John Carter]

That one is 200ft. Wow. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

So that's a lot of dogs.

[John Carter]

Probably.

[Corinne Morgan]

That's 200ft of hot dogs.

[John Carter]

That's. That's probably a hundred. 100 hot dogs in there.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay, Go on.

[John Carter]

Yeah. Because there's waste. They, you know, that they twist and so it takes up some space.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[John Carter]

Yep. So we sell in links from 84ft up to 200 foot.

[Steven Rinella]

And that's a wood product or that's not cellulose product. That's a cellulose product. Okay.

[John Carter]

Which one? One source of cellulose is wood.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[John Carter]

Another source of cellulose is cotton linters.

[Steven Rinella]

Who?

[John Carter]

Cotton linters. Do you know what a cotton linter is? So it's used in money, but that's

[Steven Rinella]

a byproduct of cotton. Right?

[John Carter]

It's. It's fiber that's inside the seed.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[John Carter]

Yes. So you can make that same product out of cotton lures out of dissolving pulp from trees. Some. Some interesting research going into using bamboo as a cellular source.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[John Carter]

Things of that nature. The two predominant sources are cotton liners and wood pulp.

[Steven Rinella]

He's trying to get me going on Eli Winter and the cotton gin and all that.

[Randall]

Yeah. Don't take the bait. Don't take the bait.

[Steven Rinella]

I'm not gonna get into that.

[John Carter]

I think it's Whitney. I don't think it's Winter.

[Corinne Morgan]

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[Steven Rinella]

All rights reserved.

[Corinne Morgan]

This show is sponsored in part by Liquid iv. I was down in the Bahamas on a spearfishing trip. You don't associate being wet with like exertion and sweating, but man, you're working your butt off when you're spear fishing. I'd climb back up in the boat, slam me a bottle of Liquid iv, rest for a minute and I would come back fighting strong every time. Liquid IV is clinically demonstrated to hydrate faster than water alone. And right now you can get 20% off your first order with code Me Eater at checkout. Powered by Liquid IV Hydro Science. An optimized ratio of electrolytes, essential vitamins and clinically tested nutrients turn ordinary water into extraordinary hydration. Compared to water, Liquid IV delivers longer lasting hydration and retains hydration for up to 4 hours. Explore delicious sugar free options including white peach, lemon, lime, rainbow sherbet and more. I'm telling you, next time you're feeling whooped or thirsty or dried out, drink a Liquid iv. I'm telling you you're going to feel better. Stay hydrated for every adventure. Get on the go Hydration from Liquid IV Tear Pour live More go to liquid I.com and get 20% off your first purchase with code Meat Eater at checkout. That's 20% off your first purchase with Code Me Eater@liquid I.com so when we

[Randall]

talked, one of the things that I was asking you about is when you buy a hot dog, because the casing that the hot dog is being stuffed into is inedible just there in the manufacturing process. And so you. So what happens, like, when you stuff the casing? We can get into emulsions and all that in 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.

[Steven Rinella]

But home. I got to call, I got to correct you on something. That's the flavor profile of a hot dog is salt.

[John Carter]

No, but salt is the most important ingredient in hot dog.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay. There's a little more in there.

[John Carter]

When we get to emulsion science, we'll talk about the importance of salt.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay, so pick up his deal.

[John Carter]

Yeah. So hot dogs originally came from Germany called dachshund. Dachshund sausages. That's why we turned that into hot dogs in the U.S. really? Yeah.

[Corinne Morgan]

What was the word?

[John Carter]

Dachshund sausages.

[Steven Rinella]

See, I would think someone's making sausages out of those little dogs. Yeah, yeah.

[Randall]

Wiener.

[John Carter]

Fair enough.

[Randall]

Wiener dog.

[John Carter]

I think it was the shape. Skinny, long.

[Steven Rinella]

Got it. Yeah, yeah.

[John Carter]

And they were made in natural casings. They would hang them in the butcher stores. I'm sure in Phil's Christmas play, he had some sausages hanging. Hanging in the background.

[Steven Rinella]

I don't think so. I think that was a huge oversight on Phil's part. I didn't harass the prop department to get some sausages. Yeah, Phil. But yeah, I don't remember there being sausages. I don't. I don't believe there were.

[John Carter]

There was just a big fake goose. You get no more small fake goose dickens. There's nothing more dickens than hanging sausages.

[Steven Rinella]

Well, I would expect next. Next year, around Christmas time, I'd expect a call from Phil. I'll make some calls.

[John Carter]

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.

[Steven Rinella]

Got it.

[John Carter]

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 on a £1 package. So why this material was chosen is primary because of its annular rigidity. So it doesn't, it holds its shape, it doesn't expand. It does have some give so that they can stuff it to a certain pressure.

[Steven Rinella]

What did you call that word again?

[John Carter]

Annular strength. So it's strength around a circle.

[Steven Rinella]

And the old days we would call this episode annular rigidity. We switched to bad titles.

[John Carter]

All right. Yeah, perfect. And it's permeable. And that's the critical factor. It has to be permeable to smoke because the majority of the skinless hot dogs, so that's what we sell in the US Right now, they're all skinless hot dogs. What happens is in the cooking process, smoke penetrates, it cross links proteins at the surface of that hot dog and forms its own skin out of cross linked 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.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay, hold on, I got a backs up for a minute again. You go, well, let's do this. You go into a gas station because you're going to a fourth of July party and you're buying. You buy the cheapest sack of how many comes in a typical. We got one in our work freezer.

[Randall]

Have you ever seen that block of

[Steven Rinella]

hot dogs in the work freezer? Yeah, I've.

[Randall]

There's an open one

[Steven Rinella]

like, like an Oscar. What I don't want to name. Yeah. Oscar Meyer.

[Corinne Morgan]

The worst.

[Steven Rinella]

Not the worst. The least expensive hot dog. No, not the worst meaning best. The least expensive hot dog you can find.

[John Carter]

It wouldn't be the one you just mentioned, but. Okay.

[Steven Rinella]

But the elite, the, the store brand, least expensive hot dog you can find.

[Corinne Morgan]

There is no case on that hot dog.

[Steven Rinella]

No, but that hot dog has been smoked.

[John Carter]

Yes, some of them.

[Steven Rinella]

Because when you look at, you know when you look at the end. Yeah. You see the little casing dimples?

[John Carter]

Yep. That's from that being twisted.

[Randall]

This is what, this is what convinced me that this is a podcast.

[John Carter]

Yeah.

[Randall]

Like when you bite, when you bite into a hot dog and there's like a little skin hanging off, that's cross

[John Carter]

link protein on the surface of the hot dog.

[Randall]

But it's no different materially than the rest of the filling.

[John Carter]

Correct. Would you call it cross link protein at the surface of the hot dog? Just on the surface.

[Steven Rinella]

How do you get him out of his casing?

[John Carter]

So these are treated with easy peel. So it's got Plant based glycerin and things like that to make them peel easy.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[John Carter]

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.

[Steven Rinella]

You were expecting some Upton Sinclair stuff.

[John Carter]

I was, yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

I was, yeah.

[John Carter]

And it's not that at all. You know, I watch these butcher guys and when they're squaring up a ribeye, 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 yeah, the casing forms the hot dog, it hangs on a chain, it goes into the smokehouse, it's smoked, it's cooked to its final temperature. They control humidity, temperature all through that to get the characteristics they want. Then the cooking.

[Steven Rinella]

Hot smoke or cold smoke?

[John Carter]

Hot smoke. So yeah, they're cooking somewhere around 100 and 130 degrees, something like that.

[Steven Rinella]

So they're cooking that son of a. In the smoker.

[John Carter]

You could take it out of the pack and eat a hot dog. It's fully cooked.

[Steven Rinella]

I just walk into that big old room, man.

[Randall]

I'm trying to line that up here.

[John Carter]

The best hot dog I've ever had is right out of the oven. Right out of the manufacturing oven.

[Steven Rinella]

I can tell, man, because like my buddy, they milk cows and you drink them, you know, they put in that super chiller.

[John Carter]

Yeah.

[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.

[John Carter]

Very good. And they kill the cook at the end with cold water. Then it goes into packaging. I mean, and so in these plants, it comes in as lean and fat. Two primary ingredients that are in there.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[John Carter]

It goes through the process and it's coming out as packages ready to go to the store.

[Steven Rinella]

How come there's no bent hot dogs in a. Because 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 cased breakfast links in a cast iron skillet, I spoon them like, you know, like you and your lady laying in bed at night.

[John Carter]

Right.

[Steven Rinella]

They're all like. Because they all got a bow to them.

[John Carter]

Right.

[Steven Rinella]

But a hot dog in a hot dog pack is straight as narrow.

[John Carter]

So when they're cooked, yes, they're hanging it over a chain, but it's 200ft of those suckers twisted together.

[Steven Rinella]

Got it.

[John Carter]

And so they're hanging vertically.

[Steven Rinella]

That weight is pulling them straight.

[John Carter]

That's right. That's right.

[Steven Rinella]

Got it.

[John Carter]

And then so in packaging, the casing stripped off, it's either a water jet or a blade or whatever you'll see most. A lot of these casings have a black stripe on them.

[Steven Rinella]

What do you mean, a water jet?

[John Carter]

So it's 30,000 psi water that you can't even see it.

[Steven Rinella]

But how's it not obliterate the hot dog?

[John Carter]

Because it's controlled. Most of these are. Are slit and peeled.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[John Carter]

So, you know, you'll see that I can visualize 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.

[Steven Rinella]

He's telling me about that line, but I was lying and acting like I knew about it. But when you were talking about the line. I don't know the line. Yeah, yeah, you'll see.

[Randall]

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.

[Steven Rinella]

So you tell me you're cooking up a hot dog at home or on a stick over to 4th of July party and you're seeing a line.

[John Carter]

Sometimes.

[Randall]

Sometimes, yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

And that's from cutting that thing off.

[John Carter]

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 during the manufacturing process. And so the peeler is the coolest piece of equipment in there. It looks like a machine gun with hot dogs coming out instead of bullets. It's just.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, if you could, like, have a gun like that. Yeah. Come into a room, everybody would be

[Randall]

so happy in there.

[John Carter]

Very cool. Then it goes in, they get sorted and, and packaged. Yeah. Vacuum sealed and then off to your grocery store.

[Steven Rinella]

You know, the, 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.

[John Carter]

Right, right.

[Steven Rinella]

How much truth is there to that? Like, what's going into a hot dog? Give me the worst case scenario. I mean, like, worst case. I mean, come on. That's incredible. Incredible wordplay.

[John Carter]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Han, you like the pun? Oh, yeah. That was a double whammy. The worst case with the you that was on accident.

[John Carter]

Sorry, go ahead,

[Steven Rinella]

give me the like. And, you know, I know you're in the industry, man. You got, you're a company man. But like, give me the worst, like 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?

[John Carter]

No, they'd be pleasantly surprised. I mean, so the lean, the lean is all from butcher trim. You know, if they're wanting to get the cost point down for that $2 pack of hot dogs, there'll be different protein sources.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[John Carter]

So they may put away protein or some, some other.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, is that right?

[John Carter]

Yeah, some other protein source to get, to get the cost profile down. And, and you know, and people.

[Steven Rinella]

I had no idea people were so the same stuff you drink when you drink. Like, or not the same, but like, if you're drinking like a protein replacement.

[John Carter]

Sure.

[Steven Rinella]

Or like a replacement meal or protein

[John Carter]

powder, milk, protein, plant protein.

[Steven Rinella]

Soyou can jam that into a hot dog.

[John Carter]

You could. In order to get a protein filler to get the price point down. And then the key point is, you know, originally I said the consumer votes.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[John Carter]

Like, they get the ultimate vote with their purchase. And so the consumer knows how much money I have in my wallet and what's the thing look like on the shelf.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, yeah.

[John Carter]

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 still have to make a profit. Right. So there are ways to do that. Yeah. Protein with protein additions. Yeah, but I haven't seen lips and a holes on, on any, any shelf.

[Steven Rinella]

Let me. Now let's do this. I believe you kind of. But, like, answer this one totally honestly.

[John Carter]

Okay.

[Steven Rinella]

If you had, would you be able to tell me?

[John Carter]

Yeah,

[Randall]

I believe him.

[Steven Rinella]

It doesn't bother me.

[John Carter]

It doesn't bother me either.

[Steven Rinella]

Because 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, I'd be like, I'll try it.

[John Carter]

Well, I mean, so there's a market for that stuff. Right. If, if I'm in Alabama and I'm going out, we don't have the, the Canadian verse, Michigan kind of competition you're talking about. If I roll into an Alabama gas station, not even on the border, not on the border. I'm rolling through there. I'm gonna see the hot dog rollers, but right next to it, I'm gonna see a jar of pickled pig's feet. I'm gonna see a jar of pickled pig snouts. I'm gonna like, sure, there's a market for that. Stuff in it.

[Steven Rinella]

I see where you're going with it on its own. And you think those snouts and those feet are not likely to be in those dogs.

[Randall]

I think he knows that of the

[John Carter]

places I've been to, I haven't seen it.

[Steven Rinella]

And if you did, you'd tell me.

[John Carter]

And if I did, I'd tell you. So I've been to, you know, I've been to a lot of them.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. Rain, I know you're bursting with questions, but I got another one. Walk me through. 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?

[John Carter]

Yeah, that. So hot dogs are made out of beef, pork, or chicken or combinations of the above.

[Steven Rinella]

I didn't know there was a chicken hot dog.

[John Carter]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Really?

[John Carter]

Sure.

[Steven Rinella]

But the guys making those aren't like chicken hot dogs. They do. Oh, they do.

[John Carter]

They do. Chicken, chicken, and turkey.

[Steven Rinella]

Like, it seems like they're proud of a beef.

[Randall]

Oh, yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

All beef.

[Randall]

I mean, that's like a branding thing, I think, is like an old hot dog that.

[John Carter]

That it elicits, I think, incorrectly. Equality or whatever. I mean, there are also religious pieces to it.

[Randall]

Yeah.

[John Carter]

Where you've got to understand kosher.

[Steven Rinella]

That's good.

[John Carter]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Kash root and. Or what? So it's the halal all.

[John Carter]

Is there?

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. Okay. All right. So. So you'd be like, if you were going into an area where you had. You had Muslims. Yeah. You had Jews. You might see that there's a higher prevalence of just, like, labeled beef with

[John Carter]

the kosher, 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.

[Steven Rinella]

Got it. So that. That drives that.

[John Carter]

But it does.

[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,

[John Carter]

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.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[John Carter]

Very forgiving, Very easy to make. So in. In the industry that there's a saying that says pork makes sausage and chicken makes money. That'd be another. That'd be a good name for the podcast.

[Steven Rinella]

Probably makes for deer makes for a big weekend.

[John Carter]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah. So chicken has a really high water holding capacity.

[Randall]

Yeah. So.

[John Carter]

So you can. You can put more water on the protein and sell more water.

[Randall]

So we've. We've thrown around the word emulsion.

[John Carter]

Sure.

[Randall]

And I pretend like I know what we're talking about, but scientifically speaking, what are we like. Yeah, 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? Yeah, because then you're talking about water content.

[John Carter]

So people hear the word emulsion and they think, oh, this is lab grown food. You know, it has this scientific feel to it. You know, milk's an emulsion. There's all kinds of natural emulsions out there.

[Steven Rinella]

How is milk an emulsion?

[John Carter]

What an emulsion is is a fat particle that's stabilized with an emulsifier around it. So there are stabilized fats inside of milk.

[Steven Rinella]

That's what emulsion means.

[John Carter]

So if I make salad dressing, an emulsion is. I'm taking two things that won't mix. 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.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[John Carter]

Okay. So an emulsion puts an emulsifier around those oil particles to stabilize it.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay. Let's. Let's. We make our own dressing. And we buy a dressing like most American households.

[John Carter]

Right.

[Steven Rinella]

So when we make it, I have a little shaker you can. Right, yeah. 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.

[John Carter]

Right.

[Steven Rinella]

But then when you buy. Whatever. Who's the guy that the actor ate?

[Randall]

All Newman.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. You buy some Paul Newman. It doesn't separate. So what would I need to be doing at home to make mine like his?

[John Carter]

That'll be similar to what we're going to talk about for hot dog emulsions. You got to pull an emulsifier around that oil particle to keep those oil particles from getting together and agglomerating.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[John Carter]

Because that's what happens. So emulsions are, again, they're natural. I've worked with emulsion emulsions my entire career because I used to be in the chemical space. So we made lots of defoamers and things of that nature that are stable emulsions. And that's the key in a hot dog, the oil Particle is a fat. And the emulsifier that we're gonna protect that fat from getting. Getting together is protein.

[Steven Rinella]

Huh.

[John Carter]

So what is it in salad dressing and salad dressing? I, you know, it may be there are all kinds of emulsion, starches and things like that that can, that can stabilize.

[Steven Rinella]

But you could make one from the things you could buy at a grocery store.

[John Carter]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And the key is you got to put tons of energy into it. So you got to shake the bejesus out of that thing.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh.

[John Carter]

And when they make it, most likely, obviously they're not shaking individual jars at the Paul Newman factory. I assume so. What?

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, I never thought. Yeah, they got like an industrial edge.

[John Carter]

They've got a full on emulsifier pump.

[Randall]

I was imagining guys on lunch break all going out for a smoke and their forearms are just massive.

[John Carter]

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, the oil down, stabilize it.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[John Carter]

So, you know, same deal on a hot dog, same process.

[Steven Rinella]

So when you grind at walk me through making a dog, like you got your, your lean meat.

[John Carter]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

And you're grinding it to, to like a liquid.

[John Carter]

Not really. Okay, well, I mean, I'm gonna grind it a hell of a lot more than I'm gonna grind ground beef.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[John Carter]

I'm gonna ground a paste, let's say, not a liquid. So I'm going to grind it to probably a 3 to 5 millimeter plate, something like that. Pretty fine grind. But step one is protein extraction. So I have to extract the proteins out of that meat.

[Steven Rinella]

Well, it is protein. What's left once you get the proteins.

[John Carter]

So. But I've got to extract the individual pieces of protein. So protein's a polymer, Right. It's a, 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. So I've got to get it out of that form of a muscle.

[Steven Rinella]

How do you do that?

[John Carter]

And I do that with salt. So really that's why I argued that salt was the most important ingredient, so not the flavor. Salt drives protein extraction. So, you know, again, key components, salt, lean protein, fat and water in the form of ice are 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 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.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[John Carter]

Can't have it denature in the processing spot. So I'm going to add ice to keep the temperature down.

[Steven Rinella]

Got it, Got it. I see.

[John Carter]

So there's. There's a. What is it? I gotta look at my notes. So there's a differential scanning, colorimetry. Colorimetry, calorimetry. That's a tough. Say that word five times. Dsc. That's what I know it as. 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 comes off the other end really forgiving venison. 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. Really. So that's why.

[Steven Rinella]

Where's beef sit on that little scale harder than pork?

[John Carter]

So pork is the easiest. Beef is harder, both because of the DSC curve and then also just because the extractability of the proteins.

[Randall]

Okay, 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 a.

[John Carter]

There's a piece. A relationship there, you guys, we all know, right? There's very little intermuscular lipids or fat. It's a highly active muscle. The proteins are packed really tight, so that's what makes them hard to extract. So overcooking venison has more to do with. You just lose any little bit of fat that was in there and you're gonna make a really tough chew.

[Randall]

Gotcha.

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[Steven Rinella]

All rights reserved.

[Corinne Morgan]

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[Steven Rinella]

to continue on with the emulsifying, but just on this subject Would you be able to make.

[Corinne Morgan]

Would you be able to take deer meat?

[John Carter]

Mm.

[Corinne Morgan]

Wild deer meat.

[Steven Rinella]

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?

[John Carter]

You know, it's gonna have a venison flavor, obviously it's gonna have a wild flavor, but outside of that. But the texture, I think that, I think we could get the texture and all of that stuff. Right. It'd be really hard.

[Steven Rinella]

Really?

[Randall]

Yeah.

[John Carter]

There's.

[Randall]

There's science to this.

[John Carter]

This, that the DSC is the biggest driver. There's also ph of the muscle itself.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[John Carter]

So. Yeah. Corinne mentioned that I should listen to the, the Red Cutter episode.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[John Carter]

And I.

[Steven Rinella]

Did you ever hear that guy before?

[John Carter]

No.

[Steven Rinella]

You'd have a lot to talk about.

[John Carter]

We would. Yeah. I mean, I. It's intimidating. I feel like I'm the least intellectual of all the, of all the guests you've had. But no, you know. Okay, good.

[Steven Rinella]

Don't worry about that.

[John Carter]

All right. Yeah. It was interesting. So everything he was focusing on was about the tooth and chew of the meat.

[Steven Rinella]

Good.

[John Carter]

Making hot dogs, it's. It's different. It's all about protein extraction.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[John Carter]

So he was talking about the DFD meat. You know, you got, you called it red cutter, he called it dark cutter. That stuff, it's 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 put extract proteins from a dark cutter. Yeah. That being said, the, the flavor is different and all that kind of stuff.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[John Carter]

So. And I'm just talking pure protein extraction. But you taught in that episode, you talked a little about pre and post rigor.

[Steven Rinella]

Yep.

[John Carter]

It's easier to extract proteins to make a hot dog and pre rigger meat than it would be in a post rigor protein. You would never do that. Yeah. 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. 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 physical. 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 DSC curve. It can be done.

[Steven Rinella]

Deer meat has a different ph.

[John Carter]

A wild killed deer would have a different ph. I think so. I mean, unless. I mean, I. I think if I was picking the perfect animal, I would pick a young doe, I would shoot it in the head.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[John Carter]

And I would contemplate field dressing and making hot dogs out of it that

[Steven Rinella]

day right then and there. Just get right to it.

[Randall]

That sounds like an episode.

[John Carter]

But. But I mean, it's. I mean, that's a lot of hot dogs. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

You know, you just mentioned rigor, man. This has nothing to do what we're talking about, but I was talking to a buddy of mine yesterday and he was telling me that he, He's a fireman and he's telling me it's kind of weird how this whole thing came up, but he told me they went to a nursing home one time 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. And they're like, they called about it. They couldn't tell what was going on with him, but he had a pulse. But when he went, he grabbed his arm, went to lift it up, and the guy was already in rigor where the pulse. Because of. Because of. I can't remember what he's explaining to me, but like some, they had him on some sort of life support deal or something that was still registering. And he's like, no, he's not with us anymore.

[Randall]

Crazy.

[Steven Rinella]

Isn't that wild?

[John Carter]

That is wild.

[Steven Rinella]

Wish I'd remembered the story better. Back to hot dog, But back to hot dogs.

[John Carter]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. I wish I'd remember what he told me better. I was driving, my kid was trying to get a hold of me.

[Randall]

Where does the water content come into play of these different meats?

[John Carter]

Yeah.

[Randall]

As far as, like their ability to emulsify,

[John Carter]

I'd say it's less about water holding capacity. I mean, they've all got. I'll have to look at. Look it up, but you know, 60% water or something. Something in that muscle chicken can hold more water.

[Steven Rinella]

Right.

[John Carter]

Oftentimes the manufacturer likes that because they can sell more water and both in a chicken breast or, or in a chicken hot dog, the more water that you put into the emulsion, you're stuffing up a watery substance in the cellulose casing and that gets difficult to handle.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[Randall]

Yeah.

[John Carter]

You know, the More viscous the emulsion is. When you, when you stuff it through the stuffing horn, I think the casing will take it. It'll twist more. You'll get good link sizes and all that. Good stuff. Yeah. So I, 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.

[Randall]

Right.

[John Carter]

You want. You got to 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? 30 fat that's in a hot dog.

[Randall]

Right.

[John Carter]

And that ratio needs to be right because you got too little protein. You're not going to completely cover that oil particle.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[John Carter]

You got too much protein and there's extra protein kind of swimming around.

[Steven Rinella]

And.

[Randall]

Yeah, this is what I remember from

[John Carter]

describing one of the big challenges, important process. I mean, yeah, the, the key steps and that I don't want to. I've seen some of the homemade hot dog recipes and stuff like that on there, and I think what's missing out there is that it's two distinct processes. Step one is I want to extract my proteins. 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 because that's going to heat it up and I'm going to start denaturing and. And that'll be a problem.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay. What are you gonna do it in?

[John Carter]

I'd actually probably do it in a stand mixer with a paddle. A two to three, you know, plate grind, add my salt, add probably half my ice to keep the temperature down.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[John Carter]

And slowly extract the proteins, and you'll know you're done. When it stops being grainy and start. It'll be extremely sticky, 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.

[Steven Rinella]

Man, I could picture what you're talking about from having made some dogs in my day. Yeah, that's.

[John Carter]

That's what you're looking for.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[John Carter]

You're good to go. Your proteins are extracted, then you emulsify.

[Steven Rinella]

So, you know, it's done by that, you know. So it's a look thing. A look and feel.

[John Carter]

Yeah, look and feel thing.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[John Carter]

And I mean, in the, in the industrial world, it's a, it's a recipe. Like, they know I'm going to get 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.

[Steven Rinella]

Got it.

[John Carter]

And then they're going to ship that to the stuffing plant to stuff.

[Steven Rinella]

When you. When you go to put that. When you get that hot dog already and he's ready to go in one of these here, would you be able to pack it into a snowball? Or is it. Or is it a little runnier than that?

[John Carter]

It's a little runnier than that.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[John Carter]

Yeah. Yeah. I mean it. But it's pasty. It's. It. You know, it. Once you add the fat, it gets that white kind of creamy appearance. Right? My. I don't know when you want to get into it, but kind of my concept for a venison hot dog is. I think it's a. I'm using in my concept. I was telling Randall before this, I'm using bear fat. And the key thing is to understand what is that protein to fat content. 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.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay. Because of temperature.

[John Carter]

Because if I go too. Too hot at the temperature's gonna get away from me.

[Steven Rinella]

On the. I got a question on the heat thing. I'm trying if this is related or not. You ever smoke fish, Smoke salmon, trout, whatever 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, I don't know, foamy goo.

[John Carter]

You're melting fat and it's like.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, you. You. You overdid it.

[John Carter]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Like too much heat too quick.

[John Carter]

Right?

[Steven Rinella]

That. That's what that is, is melted fat.

[John Carter]

Yep.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay. Is that the same as what you're talking about? So that's a different problem.

[John Carter]

Totally different problem.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[John Carter]

This has more to do with. Taken off the denaturing process to form that protein gel that is a hot dog before it's in the oven.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[John Carter]

I needed to happen in the oven or in the smoker.

[Steven Rinella]

Got it.

[Randall]

So 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 extracting the protein. Sorry, Extracting the protein. And you want to av. Denaturing it and then 2 is the actual emulsifying.

[John Carter]

Right.

[Randall]

Process.

[John Carter]

Yeah. So, I mean, think of it as. As that protein is going to gel and firm up before you've made it into emulsion.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[John Carter]

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.

[Steven Rinella]

Right, Got it.

[John Carter]

Yeah. Yeah. And that's the emulsifying process. Is. Is. Is more ice. 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 1 to 10 microns or something like that. And then I'm going to wrap that protein emulsion around it, or that protein, sorry, extracted protein around it to make an emulsion.

[Randall]

And that's from the food processor. That's where you're applying the energy to it.

[John Carter]

Serious, serious energy.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. When someone gets baloney.

[John Carter]

Yep.

[Steven Rinella]

That's emulsified.

[John Carter]

Yep.

[Steven Rinella]

A brat is not emulsified.

[John Carter]

Correct.

[Steven Rinella]

When you go and get lunch meat at a. At a deli counter, Albertson, Safeway, whatever, and you get like a. Like a turkey lunch meat, some of that's emulsified, but some of it's just turkey breast.

[John Carter]

Right? Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

So like, where else do people see emulsification?

[John Carter]

Say hot dogs, baloney, mortadella, all those types of products go through an emulsification step. 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 want to. You're going to take pieces of, you know, whatever meat you're wanting to make. We'll say turkey. I want to break down the surface of each one of those individual chunks using enzymes, salt, things. So it's. So it's kind of like an emulsifying step, but you're not emulsifying it. Once you get the edges of that surface sticky. Mm. You're gonna press it and make. And it's going to basically glue it all together.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[John Carter]

So it makes, you know, you either do that in a round casing, which. Those over there, that's baloney casing. The red ones.

[Steven Rinella]

How long is this? If we and Randall started walking apart?

[John Carter]

A lot longer. Yeah.

[Randall]

It's a lot of baloney.

[John Carter]

It's a lot of Bonnie. That's kind of a standard, you know, round deli meat casing. It's made out of plastic.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, yeah.

[John Carter]

It's got, you know, some baloney's that plastic stays on some of it. They. They leave, they leave it on for the consumer to peel off.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[John Carter]

So you got something to run in between your teeth, clean them up, and then. And then some of them peel them off in the manufacturing process.

[Steven Rinella]

But I'd say keep asking questions. I got, I got to see if I get my. This, this relates. Let's see if I get my wife to send me something. Yeah, I'm gonna show you something.

[John Carter]

It's it. So, you know a sandwich made, a deli meat.

[Steven Rinella]

Right.

[John Carter]

Is not quite an emulsion. It's more of individually separated meat that's pressed and formed. And so we either leave it round.

[Randall]

Right.

[John Carter]

And what they call a chub. So, you know, a deli chub would just be a perfectly round clipped with like hog rings basically on each end.

[Randall]

Is that a technical term?

[John Carter]

Yep.

[Randall]

I always just call them loafs. When I see it in the case, I would describe it as loaf, but chub's much better.

[John Carter]

Chub. You can, you can put them in a mold to make them square. You know, you've seen this. Square hams. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[Randall]

Like when you buy a little pack when you, when you buy a little pack for. To take home to make sandwiches.

[John Carter]

Yeah, it's a square.

[Randall]

It's a very square piece of ham.

[John Carter]

So that starts off in a round form and it's put in a mold when it's broken, when it's, when it's cooked. Yeah. And then some hams back in the 90s, there were more of this. There's the D shaped ham.

[Randall]

Oh, yeah.

[John Carter]

So it's flat on one side and kind of arced on the other side. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

You know what? You know what? I wonder if the industry is still into because I still use it. That stretchy net.

[John Carter]

Yep.

[Steven Rinella]

You guys still use that stuff?

[John Carter]

We, we actually sell those. So. Yeah, I didn't bring any, but. And, and most of that. So it's. It's elastic netting.

[Steven Rinella]

You buy a roll that lasts your whole lifetime and.

[John Carter]

And it's used to put just surface characteristics on the. Whatever you're wanting to do. Oh, yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

You think that's how you guys think of it?

[John Carter]

That's what I think of it as.

[Steven Rinella]

But, you know, I got one of those big stuffers.

[John Carter]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

That bought like a big giant cylinder.

[John Carter]

Okay.

[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.

[John Carter]

It's like buying a Christmas tree.

[Randall]

Yeah. Christmas tree.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. And then when you. When. But when you brine and smoke it or whatever, you don't normally, if you smoke a duck or something, he goes

[John Carter]

like this keeps them all together.

[Steven Rinella]

Ye, well, if you mesh him, he stays all like a little ball. And the marks look cool.

[John Carter]

That does make some cool marks.

[Randall]

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?

[John Carter]

Good. Hey. Yeah.

[Randall]

It kind of prints like. Explain that.

[John Carter]

So, yeah, the, the guy over here that's. That's smoke treated. So we have transfer cases.

[Steven Rinella]

That thing smells good. Yeah.

[John Carter]

So yeah, the guys, they said I was getting the printed stuff. They, we made that in our printer down to Mexico 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?

[Steven Rinella]

Smell up the whole lot?

[John Carter]

So I brought it and it sat and 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 the hot dog casing.

[Steven Rinella]

So what's the electric blue one you got there?

[John Carter]

So that size is probably for a, for like a cocktail weenie.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, hell yeah.

[John Carter]

So that's 18, 19 millimeter they've got.

[Steven Rinella]

Why is it electric blue?

[John Carter]

It's electric blue because this customer has a visualization system that looks for that blue color.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, to make sure they got it.

[John Carter]

Make sure they got it off.

[Randall]

Interesting.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, yeah.

[John Carter]

Or most hot dog manufacturers have that looks for the black stripe. So they're looking for that black stripe.

[Randall]

Is that, that's automated. Like they're, they're sorting. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[John Carter]

Just making sure that it's all, it's all gone.

[Steven Rinella]

Got it.

[John Carter]

Yep. So you were asking about transfer. So we've got smoke transfer is if, if I'm going to make a product but I'm not going to run it through a smokehouse.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[John Carter]

But I want it to have a smoke flavor. You'd buy a casing with smoke transfer. There are also color transfers. The biggest in the hot dog world is, is dark cherry for making. I've seen the red hot dog. So they're big up in Massachusetts.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, but what does that come from? Like call them like, didn't they used

[Corinne Morgan]

to call them red hots and stuff?

[John Carter]

Yeah, there's a brand.

[Steven Rinella]

But why the redness? That was just a branding thing.

[John Carter]

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. That's what does that. Sodium nitrate also kills botulism and all 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. Yeah, It's a cultural thing. I can say that in the US the majority of our dark cherry red casings and that that color does transfer from the casing to the hot dog. We also have caramel colors, mostly in plastic and fibrous, that transfers a caramel color on the outside of the lunch meat. You know, you see that rind?

[Randall]

It looks like it was some of that.

[John Carter]

A lot of that smoke, right? Yeah. Because it's a smoked ham and that color comes from smoke. But, you know, I've said it a couple times. The consumer votes, you know, votes. And their vote is with their wallet in their eyes until they're hooked. And until they're hooked.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[John Carter]

Until they have a flavor, a flavor hook. And I want to see that kind of as a human being, I want to see a nice ring on the outside of my deli meat because it looks well put together.

[Randall]

Right.

[Steven Rinella]

Do you know, do you happen to know in barbecue, so they go like Texas barbecue or whatever, people want to see that smoke ring. And then there's talk about how deeply penetrated that smoke ring is.

[Corinne Morgan]

What is happening?

[Steven Rinella]

Like, what is that ring? That's. Why does it make that color?

[John Carter]

So it's, it's very similar to how we make hot dog. Right. We said it goes in the smokehouse and those surfaces, it's myosin. So the protein, once you've extracted the protein out, it's in form of myosin.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[John Carter]

Heat will make myosin migrate to the surface, and the smoke makes it cross link. So that's what makes the skin on a hot dog. That's what makes a smoke ring. I mean, my, my argument is I want the biggest smoke ring I can. I can get.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[John Carter]

When I'm smoking a bottom, not a

[Steven Rinella]

cigarette butt, but like a.

[John Carter]

Correct. A Boston butt. I'm from Alabama. That's what we call them. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

What's it called?

[John Carter]

Just a butt.

[Steven Rinella]

No, you said a word. Look.

[John Carter]

Pork butt.

[Steven Rinella]

No, you just said that. Should we call it where?

[John Carter]

Oh, in Alabama.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, okay. Yeah. Smoking a butt.

[John Carter]

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.

[Steven Rinella]

She's listening. I'm trying to get a hold of my wife. She's ignoring me.

[John Carter]

She's in your biz. So she's. 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.

[Steven Rinella]

Sounds like she loves you.

[Randall]

I've been listening for awesome.

[John Carter]

That's right.

[Randall]

You haven't said it once until now.

[John Carter]

That's awesome. Thanks.

[Steven Rinella]

So. So that. Okay, that, that ring. Tell me again. I want to memorize this.

[John Carter]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

The ring from smoking is it. Something is being drawn towards myosin.

[John Carter]

Being drawn to the surface.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[John Carter]

And then the smoke cross links it to make that. That ring.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay. Theoretically. You couldn't theoretically do it to the point where that was through and through. It'll always diminish toward the center.

[John Carter]

I don't think you could. Because smoke penetration on a piece of meat, if you put a Boston butt on a smoker.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[John Carter]

You only need to leave it on there for the first hour. After that, it's done.

[Steven Rinella]

The smoke is.

[John Carter]

It's not going to absorb any more smoke. It's not going to get any more of a smoke ring on.

[Steven Rinella]

That's when it's just heat from there on.

[John Carter]

After that, you might as well throw it in the oven.

[Steven Rinella]

Is that right?

[John Carter]

Yeah. Thanks. Hour too, depending on your temperature, Right?

[Steven Rinella]

No kidding.

[John Carter]

Yeah. And that's me as a Alabama barbecue guy, not as a casing expert.

[Steven Rinella]

You guys got that good white sauce though, huh?

[John Carter]

Alabama white sauce. Pretty good. I. I ate at a place here in town last night and they had Alabama white sauce.

[Steven Rinella]

I know right where you were, man. Did you get it on the chicken?

[John Carter]

I did. I got. I ended up getting the pulled pork because I wanted to see if you guys got it figured out.

[Steven Rinella]

Does it start with the A?

[John Carter]

Started with a B.

[Steven Rinella]

You weren't at Ale Works.

[John Carter]

No, it's a restaurant that is named

[Steven Rinella]

See Our Family, Man. Our go to is Ale Works, dude.

[John Carter]

Okay, Just. I didn't know the town, it was close to the hotel.

[Steven Rinella]

We're a big booth family.

[John Carter]

Okay.

[Steven Rinella]

They could be in the booth.

[John Carter]

I got it.

[Randall]

Big booths.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[John Carter]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Going there, you're kind of in your own little zone.

[John Carter]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

I mean you're like in your own little private area, man.

[John Carter]

Yeah, I've got a big booth. My wife's 4 9, so she's a little bitty. And so I've got to be. She's small. Yeah, she's small. And so we. I. We have to be careful about where

[Steven Rinella]

we eat because someone reach up to the counter.

[Randall]

Yeah.

[John Carter]

So when we go there, they say,

[Steven Rinella]

do you want to get the booster?

[John Carter]

You want to sit at a high.

[Steven Rinella]

High.

[John Carter]

One of the high tables or one of the regular tables? Regular table. Yeah. It's just because their feet dangle.

[Randall]

I have the opposite problem. I want to find a place where the table isn't too close to the back of the booth.

[John Carter]

Why is that?

[Randall]

So that I can fit in without my shirt hanging over.

[Steven Rinella]

You don't like getting all in there and you're getting a. Braiding yourself trying to climb in there.

[John Carter]

If you. If you wouldn't eat eight hot dogs during. We need to talk. Like, so do I need to get you in, like, the. The big contest up in New York? Could you do that?

[Steven Rinella]

You mean the competitive hot dog contest? Are we really gonna.

[John Carter]

Joey Chestnut one? It was 70.5 hot dogs last.

[Steven Rinella]

Listen, man, that is. You're not into that, are you? That is a. That is just. That is grotesque.

[John Carter]

Soaking them in water and just.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. Are you into that?

[Randall]

No, no, I. I would do it. I would do a contest where you're just eating normal hot dogs. Like, you, like, if you're eating them to enjoy them.

[Steven Rinella]

If it was a hot dog enjoyment contest.

[John Carter]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

And it could, like, hook dudes up to, like, a pleasure meter. Yeah, yeah. And then who can score the highest pleasure. Yeah, exactly. Something like that. Like a pleasure measurer.

[Randall]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

It's probably some way. Like, what. What do you get when you go for a hike? You get a bunch of endorphins. I mean, are you getting endorphins? Are you getting, like. It's like. Because there's gotta be, like, a guilt. There's like getting hit by guilt.

[John Carter]

Right.

[Steven Rinella]

And endorphins and so, like, those. The guilt and the endorphins are.

[Randall]

Yeah, it's probably. It's probably like the butt at some point, like, the two meet and they just can't go any further.

[John Carter]

You'd measure salivary flow and all that kind of stuff.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, exactly.

[John Carter]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

But I don't know, how do you measure guilt? You know, because I'd want to see that in there.

[John Carter]

Yeah. Yeah. Maybe like the darting of the eyes.

[Randall]

You could read it on my face, I think.

[Steven Rinella]

How about.

[Randall]

Do we. I mean, could you talk about baloney for just a second? Because I've always, like. If you'd asked me when I was five years old.

[John Carter]

Yeah.

[Randall]

I Could have told you, like, baloney and hot dogs are cousins.

[John Carter]

They're closer than cousins.

[Randall]

Then that's what I wanted. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

So that's.

[Randall]

That's sort of what I'm. Yeah.

[Corinne Morgan]

So.

[Randall]

So tell me, like, I mean, bologna

[John Carter]

is an emulsion that's. That's cooked in a. In a casing.

[Randall]

Right.

[Steven Rinella]

Is it smoked?

[John Carter]

No, but I don't know if there's smoke. I mean, I know I like frying bologna.

[Randall]

Yeah.

[John Carter]

And I like smoking. Have you seen the video of the guys getting a chubb of baloney and smoking it on a smoker?

[Steven Rinella]

Getting a what?

[John Carter]

A whole Chubb of Baloney. So it's.

[Steven Rinella]

What are you saying?

[John Carter]

Chub?

[Steven Rinella]

You aren't.

[Randall]

You missed this when you're. When you're texting. Oh, that's the technical term for those loaves of meat you see in the deli counter.

[Steven Rinella]

Is it chaba? Really?

[John Carter]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

So this is for loading chubs right here. Is that what this is? Yeah. No, I didn't miss that. Yeah, I remembered that, man.

[John Carter]

But yeah, I've seen some. Some cool videos of guys that buy the whole thing from the deli.

[Randall]

Yeah.

[John Carter]

Bologna and smoke it.

[Steven Rinella]

Is it good?

[John Carter]

That looks outstanding. I've never done it.

[Steven Rinella]

That's a great idea.

[John Carter]

I want to try it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I mean, it's the exact same process. You can extract proteins, 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.

[Steven Rinella]

Right.

[John Carter]

Profile. Right.

[Randall]

And you were mentioning some of those earlier.

[John Carter]

Yeah, I think there's nutmeg, coriander. There's some.

[Steven Rinella]

There's some things in a roller dog,

[John Carter]

in a classic, more New York style, Chicago style. Like, when you think frankfurter. That's what. That's what's in there.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[John Carter]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

So if you took.

[John Carter]

There's also garlic and onion powder, you know, all the kind of standard spices

[Steven Rinella]

in a normal dog.

[John Carter]

Whatever. Yeah. And. And I would say that every single manufacturer. That's the secret sauce. Right.

[Steven Rinella]

I got you. They have their own.

[John Carter]

That's their own mix.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. On this baloney question, could you mix, like, if you mix up a batch of, like you mix up a hot dog emulsion, could you just decide, I'm gonna throw it into a baloney casing and then be like, it's baloney now.

[John Carter]

Different formulas.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay. Yeah, yeah, got it.

[John Carter]

Not.

[Steven Rinella]

So it's not the same deal.

[John Carter]

Right. I would say the manufacturing process is the same, obviously. The stuffing equipment is much, much larger. Yeah, than on a. On a hot dog. And a slower process.

[Corinne Morgan]

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[Steven Rinella]

All rights reserve.

[Corinne Morgan]

This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Now. When I was coming out of college, man, I had. I was trying to be a writer. I had no idea what was going

[Steven Rinella]

to happen to me.

[Corinne Morgan]

I was at times despondent about trying to make a living as a writer. Had I known about therapy back then, that could have been pretty helpful. And therapy isn't about, like, financial advice. It wouldn't help in that way. But it's about managing stress or shame or anxiety that can come with it. And money worries often bring anxiety, sleep disruption and even depression. And they are one of the leading sources of conflict for couples. Well, with over 30,000 therapists, BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform, having served over 6 million people globally with an average rating of 4.9 out of 5 based on over 1.7 million client reviews. BetterHelp does the initial matching work for you. A short questionnaire helps identify your needs and preferences. And their 12 plus years of experience means they typically get it right the first time. If you aren't happy with your match switch at any time. BetterHelp therapists work according to a strict code of conduct and are fully licensed in the US when life feels overwhelming, therapy can help. Sign up and get 10% [e-mail] Me Eater that's. That's better. H E L P.com Meater I want

[Steven Rinella]

to touch on processed chicken for a minute. Is that an area you're familiar with?

[John Carter]

Mildly. Ask and I'll answer if I can.

[Steven Rinella]

So people will point out. They'll be like,

[Randall]

did.

[Steven Rinella]

Certain major fast food chains will have their chicken products. Okay. Chicken finger items, nuggets, whatever. Okay. And people will say, well, but that. That was made from a slurry, mechanically separated chicken.

[John Carter]

Is that.

[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.

[John Carter]

Yeah.

[Corinne Morgan]

Because it's not like a chunk of

[Steven Rinella]

a chicken cut out and fried.

[John Carter]

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 free up proteins on the edge of that chicken with enzymes and other things, and then you press it into a mold.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[John Carter]

And it basically glues it all together. You know, you can. You can look at a sandwich meat and see does it have fat veining in it or does it not?

[Randall]

Yeah.

[John Carter]

And if it's got fat and fat meaning it's a whole muscle cut. Right.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[John Carter]

Just cut right off. Or if it doesn't, it was. It went through some level of processing.

[Steven Rinella]

Got it.

[John Carter]

But again, I think the thing I'm trying to convey is that the processing, it's not scary. It's not, you know, it's not this conglomerate of stuff we're sweeping off the floor. You know, I mean, I saw, you see in front of every one of these places, FDA parking. And I asked one of the guys, I said, how. How often these guys in said, once or twice a day.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, okay.

[John Carter]

Like every day.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[John Carter]

Yeah, 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.

[Steven Rinella]

And so sausage falls under fda. It's not usda.

[John Carter]

Right.

[Steven Rinella]

Got it. Because like, butchering is usda, but. Or like, you know, like a USDA inspector.

[John Carter]

I don't know a whole lot about the certifications and all that, that was just a question I asked. How often are these guys in. They're basically checking temperatures and conditions and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, yeah. I mean so to call that those fast food chain chicken processing a slurry. I don't know that I would call it that.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. I think that's meant to dog on it. That's meant to make it look bad.

[John Carter]

Yeah, I mean I think it's potentially. There's a range, right. There's a whole muscle cut that I'm just slicing off the bird. Then there's. I'm making sure I'm using whole use of the animal. So I'm going to combine the trimmings to make deli meat. Or you start migrating into the emulsion space. I'm going to make an emulsion and cook.

[Randall]

Yeah, it's the same as like if you had a. When you grind your deer, when you grind all your you know, off cuts, whatever the grind pile, somebody be like, well that you know that burger eating came from the deer's all different parts of the deer that was never on the deer in that form. Right. It's just a different.

[John Carter]

Just ensuring you complete use of the animal. Yeah, yeah. My father in law constantly says, you know what the most valuable weight of a chicken is? What's the most valuable thing on a chicken? By weight? This. He says this, I've heard it 300000 times from him.

[Steven Rinella]

By weight.

[John Carter]

By weight.

[Steven Rinella]

Whose liver feathers is that? Right?

[John Carter]

Yeah. Because they're extremely light and they're, they're highly valuable. They make feedstock, proteins and all kinds

[Corinne Morgan]

of stuff out of the feather.

[John Carter]

Stuff out of the feathers? Yeah, man. You know they stuff them in pillows and whatnot.

[Steven Rinella]

You know what's crazy is on that subject, I can't remember if I sent this to you. Does these archaeologists have developed this technique now where they can go look at 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 genus and family generally what feathers were in that grave. Totally. You'd never discern it. The human eye would never be able to discern it. Like if you were digging dirt, you know, within the, within the soil and they can. It's this whole thing these, these 5,000 year old burial sites in Sweden and then amount just the thing we would never known about these people is that just it must have been like elaborate headdresses, capes and things out of feathers where there's these Burials that they got a half dozen different.

[Corinne Morgan]

They're finding that they're buried with a

[Steven Rinella]

half dozen different kinds of species. Hawk owl, grouse, waterfowl.

[John Carter]

Wow.

[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 look at archeology, you'll often see that they'll, like. Let's say this whole room was an archaeological site. Some dude might come in and do 1 square meter, but then he's like, you leave the rest. Like, that's why.

[John Carter]

So you've got something.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, because also sometimes down the road, some dude's like, no, man. I could take that dirt and tell you what he was like, what he was wearing when he was buried.

[John Carter]

Interesting.

[Steven Rinella]

You know, so, like, that. That level of restraint, like, Lee, you know, like, leave it. Because dudes in the future will be able to do amazing, you know, in ways you can't imagine. You know what I mean?

[John Carter]

Right.

[Steven Rinella]

But just thinking about that, what made me think of that as you're saying that. That those feathers are utilized.

[John Carter]

That's the goal. Everything's utilized. But, yeah, that's a. That's absolutely amazing. That technology that you have to do to figure out the DNA, I guess.

[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, feather adornment on them.

[John Carter]

And I think it's like they died. And this was the burial.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. Ceremonial berries. Ceremonial burials. Yeah. How much did you. How much have you dealt with? Normal casings?

[John Carter]

Natural, natural casings, 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.

[Steven Rinella]

Yep. Let's talk 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 for me to that wall over there. I guess one from one of these walls to the other wall wasn't that long. Probably now I'm lying. It was half that distance.

[John Carter]

Okay.

[Steven Rinella]

Invert, Soaked it in vinegar. Soaked it in a mild vinegar solution. Water and vinegar. Just loosen it up.

[John Carter]

Okay.

[Steven Rinella]

Inverted the whole thing. Turn it inside out because it's all fatty. On the inside.

[John Carter]

Right.

[Steven Rinella]

And then we just very gently scraped it 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.

[John Carter]

Did you salt it? So that's part of the process.

[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?

[John Carter]

Sure. Yeah. The guy that founded our company, his uncle ran a natural casing company.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[John Carter]

And it was called Oppenheimer Casings, I think. And they. He went like a whole nuclear deal here. So that's what I originally thought because he originally sold some of his land to the. 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.

[Steven Rinella]

No one knew. He was a big hot dog man. Yeah. So Brat man. Yeah.

[John Carter]

So I'll take it. So he. He went to Europe, saw this. This viscose process. Hey, I think we can make inedible hot dog casings.

[Steven Rinella]

Good.

[John Carter]

And his uncle said, no, we're. We're in the natural casing business, not going to diversify. And he said, okay, I will. And so he left, start his own company. I mean, the. The guts that it would have to take to leave the family business.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, it's good. I don't think Phil caught it. Phil didn't catch it, but it was good.

[John Carter]

And so then he starts a company called Vis King.

[Steven Rinella]

Vis King.

[John Carter]

K I N G vis for the viscose process. This thing, it's regenerated cellulose. King. I'm not sure why the.

[Steven Rinella]

The.

[John Carter]

The first brand name these. These casings are. We still carry the same brand called no Jacks. So you got Kings and Jacks.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh.

[John Carter]

So that there's rumors going around he was a big card guy, you know, And. And so then he decided to different. You know, he was all about expanding the business, going into new, different areas. So he took us to plastics. And the original brand, so you got Kings Jacks was Visqueen.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh.

[Randall]

Huh.

[John Carter]

And so I still call plastic sheets Visqueen.

[Steven Rinella]

Sure.

[John Carter]

Like, I still call it that.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, I do.

[John Carter]

I had no idea why.

[Steven Rinella]

No.

[John Carter]

I worked for this company. So it was Vis King and Visqueen. We sold off the Visqueen.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. Like it's an entry level ground cloth when you're camping. You know. Bisqueen ground clothes up.

[John Carter]

I still call it that.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[John Carter]

So that's where it came from. Is that plastic films. You know. And so he kind of came in at the right time. So it was the. The twenties. He's coming with a new technology to make making sausages lower cost for the consumer.

[Steven Rinella]

Got it. Because the casing, the natural casing was expensive.

[John Carter]

Was more expensive. Then the Great Depression hits and every single family's got beans and franks on their dinner table. You know, during the Depression. 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 because there was no skinless hot dog until he invented these.

[Steven Rinella]

And that was around what year?

[John Carter]

1928, I think. And then we. He. The company invented the shearing process, which is actually a term that we stole from. From the seaming industry. There's a shearing stitch 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.

[Steven Rinella]

Yep.

[John Carter]

To. To make sausages. He's like why don't we do that for them? And so he invented preloaded. And there's a lot of science that goes into how you make that.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[John Carter]

Like how it's twisted. So when you shear it, you. It's not just wadding it up on itself. Right. It's twisted and shoved and twisted and shoved to get the folds and the. Right. So that you can get the maximum amount of stuff on that. Huh. So there's a lot of. A lot of science to it. So it's pretty cool.

[Steven Rinella]

Now where do you see it going, like with people kind of starting to trip out about. Were 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? I.

[John Carter]

You know, it's possible. So this is cellulose. It's not. But. But we do sell plastic casings. The ones I got. I think that's when you guys go

[Steven Rinella]

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 counters. Classic wrap meat.

[John Carter]

You know, 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. Oh, so, so what are the. You got to weigh the pros and cons. Do I want.

[Steven Rinella]

That's an interesting.

[John Carter]

I want a bunch of bacteria making its way into my food product or do I want plastic?

[Steven Rinella]

Is that kind of, that's kind of the selling point on that?

[John Carter]

Yeah, I mean that's a non permeable. It's a non permeable barrier. And I mean those things are used to package pet food. You know, you see the new, fresh, fresh versions of pet pet products that are in their fridge.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, that's interesting, man. I ever thought of it like the trade off on it that it is that it's like protecting stuff getting in.

[John Carter]

That's right.

[Steven Rinella]

I mean it's obvious, but I just hadn't really put anything.

[John Carter]

So I think that, I think the big, the big piece is you just got to 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, I used to microwave stuff in those plastic containers until my wife started yelling at me.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, right.

[John Carter]

Yeah, I get it. When you store spaghetti sauce in a plastic container, it stained red for the rest of its life.

[Steven Rinella]

See, this is the deal. Like, I don't really know. Like, I don't know. And we'll get, 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 were laughing about like when my dad was in the army, they'd give you your C rash and came with three cigarettes. Okay? So I'm always telling them, like, 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, right? Like, this doesn't end. We're doing all kinds of things right now that in 50 years, 75 years, anyway, people will say, can you believe

[John Carter]

they were using radiation to treat cancer?

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, yeah. And it'd be like, I don't know, right? 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 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 something. And so I'm like, so a 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 going to be one of those kind of things, you know?

[John Carter]

Yeah. I don't.

[Steven Rinella]

But I'm like, it won't be in

[Corinne Morgan]

the future that they're saying, can you

[Steven Rinella]

believe they were eating deer meat and garden vegetables? It's just like, not going to be. That won't be it.

[John Carter]

Right.

[Steven Rinella]

It'll be some different thing.

[John Carter]

Yeah. And I, I, the way I look at it is, you know, I know how I behave at home.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh.

[John Carter]

But, 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.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[John Carter]

And that eventually gets to the water plant, eventually makes it through a pump, eventually gets ground up. It gets. So if I get microplastics in my blood, is it because of the way I microwaved my leftovers or is it because some guy kept throwing plastic water bottles into the river?

[Steven Rinella]

100%. Yeah. The other night I was having a conversation with someone there, asked me if Great Lakes fish are really safe to eat because of the heavy metals issue. And I'm like, man, when you die, it won't because you're eating Great Lakes fish. Yeah. It'll be something different that gets you, but it ain't gonna be that.

[John Carter]

You know, it's, it's mercury down in where I live.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. Yeah. So. No, it's true. It's. It's a super fair point.

[John Carter]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

You can't head it off.

[John Carter]

Yeah.

[Randall]

One, one question I had earlier. You mentioned the, the cost thing in the Great Depression. You'd sent me an email and I showed this to Steve with some early ads for hot dogs.

[John Carter]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Randall]

And one of them was some kid, these two kids eating lunch together. And 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. And we sat there and were puzzling over, like, why do you think that allows him to eat two? Remember this?

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. So the other mom was being a tight ass or something.

[John Carter]

Yeah.

[Randall]

So we were like, maybe they're suspicious of the casing or, you know, like. But he means it's cheap so he can get two hot dogs for lunch.

[John Carter]

I mean, that's, that's the key.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[John Carter]

Consumer votes with his wallet and with his eyeballs.

[Randall]

Yeah. I'd been, I'd been meaning to ask you about that and it clicked for me. When you're talking about the Great Depression,

[John Carter]

some of those ads or just so hilarious. Oh, yeah, like, you know, it's. It's similar thing. We look back at our advertising. Back then it was.

[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 grill.

[Randall]

Oh, yeah, here's. There it is.

[Steven Rinella]

Yep.

[Randall]

Your mom lets you two wieners.

[Steven Rinella]

How come your mom lets you eat two wieners?

[Corinne Morgan]

No skins.

[John Carter]

Bill's a lucky guy.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, yeah.

[Randall]

His mom's smart.

[Steven Rinella]

You know, like, Randall has like positive thoughts about dogs.

[John Carter]

That's right.

[Steven Rinella]

I have very positive thoughts about dogs. You know, about the hot dog? Yeah. Like. Yeah, yeah. Like. Like I look, I see a hot dog and 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 because, you know, like, you know, when you're a kid in, in.

[Corinne Morgan]

At a certain age, it was kind

[Steven Rinella]

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. Want. So it'd be that like there's kid like, Randall's got Nikes. So in my school, he'd have been a snob. Right, right. And he would bully kids whose mom wouldn't get him Nikes.

[John Carter]

Right, right.

[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.

[John Carter]

Sure.

[Steven Rinella]

In a lot. In 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 remember those like thermos containers?

[John Carter]

Sure.

[Steven Rinella]

Her mom would drop boiling water. Her mom would put boiling water in one of those thermos containers and jam a couple 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 and whatever or like, you remember those crackers came out, and you get the cheese and it comes with a little knife and all that.

[John Carter]

Yeah.

[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, and everybody watches the steam just go.

[John Carter]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

So in her. My dogs are a bummer. Yeah. It reminds her of, like, so being at the lunchroom, eating those lukewarm dogs when everybody else is eating cool stuff. She's right.

[John Carter]

She's not the only one that got sent. Went to the cafeteria with a thermos with hot dogs in it.

[Steven Rinella]

So that was the thing with that preparation. Oh, yeah.

[John Carter]

And then. Yeah, it's pre microwave, right?

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[John Carter]

You gotta have something to keep it warm. I got sent to school with a thermos fly too, as well.

[Steven Rinella]

So when she sees a dog. When she sees a roller dog, she's bummed.

[John Carter]

Okay.

[Steven Rinella]

She needs to go to therapy about it.

[Randall]

Yeah.

[Corinne Morgan]

Because the other day, we were at

[Steven Rinella]

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. Yeah.

[John Carter]

Yeah.

[Corinne Morgan]

She didn't even ask me for a

[Steven Rinella]

bite of my dogs.

[John Carter]

I don't think I've ever been unhappy eating a hot dog. Like, it's always a good thing. Like, you're. You're over a campfire, you're at a ball game, you're doing. Normally doing something fun.

[Randall]

No, that's how I feel about it.

[Steven Rinella]

Fueling up the truck.

[Randall]

Yeah. Like sunshine, a hot dog. 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.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. No one's ever kicking the out of you when you're having a hot dog.

[John Carter]

Never. Yeah.

[Randall]

It takes me back to the trenches.

[Corinne Morgan]

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[Steven Rinella]

All rights reserved.

[Corinne Morgan]

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[Steven Rinella]

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, to try to send in a deer meat roller dog, sure, please, please, we'll eat them. You know, I'm gonna do this. 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.

[John Carter]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

They're not gonna be like, oh, I'm gonna make a roller dog. Making a roller dog. And then I'm gonna put my, my poison into it and send it to the.

[Randall]

He's got all of his charts on the wall of how he's finally gonna get Steve R. And then he hears

[Steven Rinella]

this on the podcast. He goes, aha, Poison the dog. 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 poison. No pork or poison. Yeah.

[Randall]

Talk about when you, when you describe the, the hot dog.

[John Carter]

Yeah.

[Randall]

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.

[John Carter]

So the steps are.

[Steven Rinella]

I like how he put his glasses on. Yeah, you like that?

[Randall]

Yeah.

[John Carter]

I can't see anything. I can't see anything without them. Steps are protein extraction, then emulsification, temperature control than smoking.

[Steven Rinella]

Right.

[John Carter]

That's how every hot dog's made.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[John Carter]

You know, so there is, there's a hot dog recipe on, on your website for, for. For a red snapper venison.

[Steven Rinella]

Yep.

[John Carter]

Hot dog. Thanks for moving that mic, Randall. So I, I live.

[Steven Rinella]

What'd you think of that recipe?

[John Carter]

I thought it was good. I think it's got.

[Steven Rinella]

Don't choose your words carefully here.

[John Carter]

It's got problems.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay. That's what I'm trying to get to.

[John Carter]

He. He. I wear eight and a half in my taco, so I'll point out all the mistakes with this recipe. Eight and a half. So basically he's shoving together all the ingredients for emulsion. He rightfully points out, I got to control temperature. So he like pre flow pre fridge to 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 putting it in the refrigerator for a day, hoping that the proteins extract. Hoping and praying.

[Steven Rinella]

Does it say that right?

[John Carter]

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 and then make hot dog.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[John Carter]

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.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, yeah.

[John Carter]

He's thinking it's a fish shoved together

[Steven Rinella]

with fish put into a hop. It doesn't sound very good.

[John Carter]

So, yeah, I mean, if I was. So what I wanted to do was investigate. And the one thing he does in that recipe as he supplements pork trim and pork. Pork fat as his fat source. And I'm. I'm saying that's cheating. That's not what we're wanting to do.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. Yeah. Nice. Yeah.

[John Carter]

So I looked.

[Steven Rinella]

He's making a hot. He's just trying to make a hot dog.

[John Carter]

I looked through all the fat options out there. Deer fat, a. There's not enough of it. It's waxy. It's got a super high melting point. It's out the door. Wild pig fat, maybe. I mean, it's pork, right. You want to get it off the back, not off some of the more active areas.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[John Carter]

The more I looked at it, I think bear fat is the preferred fat for making a pure wild hot dog.

[Steven Rinella]

Really?

[John Carter]

Because of its melting point. And it behaves more like pork. And I think it'd be a cool

[Steven Rinella]

flavor and not rendered cubed. Like cube fat.

[John Carter]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

We had a couple jars rendered right there, but yeah, not rendered.

[John Carter]

Yeah. I mean, so I mean, ultimately, when you're making a hot dog, you're trying to get that fat particle to 1 to 10 microns. So it could just. I. I don't think you'd want to spin up rendered fat. I think you're going to want to take cubes, cubed fat. I want to pre blend the fat, extract the proteins separately, then put them together.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[John Carter]

A couple other.

[Steven Rinella]

What would be the ratio there?

[John Carter]

So I would use 65 to 70% venison.

[Steven Rinella]

Good.

[John Carter]

Lean venison. 18 to 22% bear fat. Very specific number. I think that's where you. That's the range you're giving me like 20%.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. The.

[John Carter]

The biggest balance of the formula would be ice. So you're talking 10, 12, 15 ice. That's the other thing.

[Steven Rinella]

In what form? Shaved?

[John Carter]

I. It's going to get shaved in the emulsifying process. You know, a. You. It's. It's all got to be gone before you start stuffing it all needs to be water before you start stuff. 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.

[Steven Rinella]

Is that right?

[John Carter]

Yeah. So that, that's one thing. You've gotta make sure it's all melted out.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[John Carter]

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.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, right.

[John Carter]

I think there's some other cool stuff we could add. Mushroom powder, citrus fiber.

[Steven Rinella]

Now, why mushroom powder?

[John Carter]

So mushroom powder will, according to my sophisticated research, will give a better gel network. Because what happens with venison is it's a real crumbly gel network. It's going to want to crumble. If I overcooked my smoked sausage, it gets crumbly.

[Randall]

Yeah.

[John Carter]

And mushroom powder will help that. And it adds kind of a cool flavor.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[John Carter]

Citrus fibers gonna help with emulsion, stability, viscosity, water binding. There's some, some. All kinds of cool things that. That would do. I was trying to maintain, like, pure to the. The roots of what we're trying to accomplish here.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[John Carter]

You know, we could add. I think with venison, we may have to add some phosphates to help get the ph down. We talked about that when the deers, especially if it was. Had lots of lactic acid during death.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[John Carter]

So, you know, if you're my buddy Joe, and every deer you shoot runs for 300 yards. You know, I. They normally drop style. Yeah, Joe style.

[Steven Rinella]

He likes to be over on the neighbor's place.

[Randall]

Long, dramatic blood trail.

[John Carter]

That's right.

[Steven Rinella]

He likes those emotional eyes and lows.

[John Carter]

I'm gonna use 130 grain bullet, so it'll run even further. I stick with the 180.

[Randall]

Yeah.

[John Carter]

Anyway, he's gonna give me grief for that. Yeah. I want it to die quick, so. But. But I can use phosphates to get that ph up to help with the extraction process. 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.

[Steven Rinella]

What form does that phosphate come in when you buy it?

[John Carter]

I had it written down. I can't remember off the top of my head.

[Steven Rinella]

And what. What is it? What are they drawing it from?

[John Carter]

I think it's pyrophosphate. I think it's hexametophosphate. You mean, what's the feedstock for it?

[Steven Rinella]

What is it. What is it at? What is it as the form that, like the earth produces it or whatever.

[John Carter]

So the. The earth produces, you know, it's. It's mineral form. Right. There's all kinds of. I know a little bit about phosphate manufacture. It's. It's just. It's very energy heavy. Most of it's done outside the U.S. okay. And phosphate furnaces for taking yellow phosphate and. And making it into products that we use like TSP and all that.

[Steven Rinella]

So it's the same phosphate that would be like in fireworks or whatever.

[John Carter]

Sure.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay. Gotcha.

[John Carter]

It's a phosphates. Phosphate.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, Yeah.

[John Carter]

I think.

[Steven Rinella]

I think gunpowder's phosphate, right? Yeah.

[John Carter]

Yep. And. Or. Yeah, nitrocellulose and, you know, 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. They'd get out of tree stumps.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, yeah.

[John Carter]

And eventually that turned into paper chemicals.

[Steven Rinella]

Got it.

[John Carter]

They were a dupont child. There's a bunch of them out there. Companies that spun off from dupont. Yeah, yeah. Would you.

[Randall]

You mentioned, when we were talking on the phone, adding, like having, as you talked about earlier, having to supplement with like a whey protein potentially. Is that something that you thought more about?

[John Carter]

No. Yeah. I mean, I think we just got to do the math.

[Randall]

Yeah.

[John Carter]

I mean, it's all about.

[Randall]

That's simple.

[Steven Rinella]

It's.

[John Carter]

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. Because I got to know how much of that. But specific, there's not venison hot dogs flying off the shelves. Right. They're not everywhere. So we're gonna have to learn about how much of the protein can I extract and therefore, what's my protein to fat ratio? Because that's the secret sauce. Right?

[Steven Rinella]

Right.

[John Carter]

I want to have again, an emulsion as an oil particle that's surrounded with some sort of stabilizer. And the stabilizer in a hot dog emulsion is meat protein. 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. So hydrophilic loves water, so it points away from the fat. Hydrophobic loves oil, so it's going to point in towards the fat and it makes a more stable emulsion. Really? Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

You can go deep in hot dogs

[Randall]

and people say hot dogs are low brow.

[John Carter]

I know it's highbrow, man. It is. There's a lot of science. I mean that. Yeah, I mean, so like one of our. One of our sales people has a meat science degree. So it's. It's some serious stuff.

[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. Like the seasoning?

[John Carter]

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, those. Those types of flavors. You know, it all depends on what you want. There's. There's black pepper. Yeah, it's. What are you shooting for?

[Steven Rinella]

You know, so like those boys at Oscar Meyer, they have their own seasoning blend and that. No one knows.

[John Carter]

I don't know it. I wouldn't want to know it. Yeah. Because then they'd have to kill me.

[Steven Rinella]

Hunt you down.

[John Carter]

Yeah, that's right.

[Steven Rinella]

Man. I want it so bad. She's not writing me back.

[John Carter]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

My wife made these cookies that 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 mortadella.

[John Carter]

It's got the white. Well, it's probably the white.

[Steven Rinella]

Chocolate, white, everything in there. Dude, you would think, think like from across the room, you'd swear you're looking at a sliced up mortadella sausage. But it was cookies. Yeah, Kids didn't like them. I was trying to get her to send me a picture of it, but

[John Carter]

they didn't like the flavor. They didn't like the presentation?

[Steven Rinella]

No, they didn't care for the cookie. They didn't get the joke. They didn't get the joke. Joe was lost on them. They were just rating it as a cookie and as a cookie, they thought it scored low.

[John Carter]

Did you used to have olive loaf when you're banging around? Yeah, that's another one of those. Probably fits in the emulsion category.

[Steven Rinella]

You know what my Old man was big into is. And this. This is definitely an emulsion.

[John Carter]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Is. My old man was big in liverwurst.

[John Carter]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

He'd buy. I believe he'd buy Oscar Meyer liverwurst. That had the yellow wrap on it, Right.

[John Carter]

Had the plastics on it.

[Steven Rinella]

Came in plastic, yellow wrap. You get mad if you got into it. That was his Sando, man, that onion on rye bread.

[John Carter]

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 Spam's coming. You know, Hormel's coming out with a Spam hot dog.

[Randall]

Interesting.

[John Carter]

And I got to try that.

[Steven Rinella]

They grab you by the boo boo.

[John Carter]

That sounds pretty cool.

[Randall]

Real curious.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[John Carter]

Yeah, yeah. All right.

[Steven Rinella]

That it.

[John Carter]

What else?

[Steven Rinella]

Well, you're gonna. When someone tries this, walk someone through the smoking process.

[John Carter]

Yeah. So I. I think with venison, we're gonna have to take the smoking process very slow.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[John Carter]

Because that DSC curve that I talked about, we want to baby it through that gel network formation.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay. By slow you mean lower temp.

[John Carter]

Lower, longer. 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. I'd probably do that for this. And I'd hang them in. In, like a vertical, you know, whatever. Electric smoker, charcoal smoker.

[Steven Rinella]

Ballpark it. Like, what temp and how long? Because you're taking a raw. This. This hot dog has not been cooked. You're hanging a raw hot dog in a smoker. How long and how hot?

[John Carter]

I'd start at 120.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay.

[John Carter]

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. They're obviously the safety points that you got to cook into, 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. We learn from the natural world on how to. How to make this, make the materials.

[Randall]

Yeah.

[John Carter]

And, yeah, I mean, I'm convinced that the primary reason a 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.

[Steven Rinella]

Yep.

[John Carter]

And that's because that protein extraction is so hard. We just have to baby it, keep it cool. And then the smoking start at 120. Work your way up until 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.

[Steven Rinella]

Got it. That's interesting. You said that's why venison dogs. What? You were just telling me about venison dogs on the market. Have you ever seen the movie French Dispatch?

[John Carter]

No.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay. There's a dude in this movie. He's like. He's an art dealer.

[John Carter]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

This ties into hot dogs. He's an art dealer, and he's dealing in abstract art.

[Corinne Morgan]

He says the only way you can

[Steven Rinella]

tell if abstracts art art is good is you got to ask the artist to do you a regular painting. 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, they might be

[Corinne Morgan]

abstract artists who can't do a bird.

[John Carter]

Right. Good point.

[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. That's why you're doing.

[John Carter]

Right. You're trying to.

[Randall]

Curt, we need to do a bird.

[Steven Rinella]

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.

[John Carter]

Make me a roller dog out of Venice. Yeah, yeah.

[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. Yeah, you can't do a bird. That's why you're doing abstract.

[John Carter]

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 yeah, it's much easier to go to the store and buy a hot dog for five bucks a pack than to make hot dogs at home. Like, you're kind of.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, yeah. That's a weird deal, right?

[John Carter]

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. So the state.

[Steven Rinella]

We're in a one buck state right now.

[John Carter]

So 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 going to take a deer and just kind of commit to making some dang hot dogs out of this animal?

[Steven Rinella]

Our buddy made some and he pointed that out. 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? That's a very valid point because I want two. I don't need thousands.

[Randall]

If there was ever.

[John Carter]

You're gonna do this to make two hot dogs?

[Randall]

If there was ever a year to do it. It's the 250th anniversary of this fine nation.

[Steven Rinella]

That's a good point, man. How about to commemorate. Yeah, how better to commemorate, like.

[John Carter]

Yeah, I'm fully expecting this year to be a bang up year for the dog.

[Steven Rinella]

It could be a big dog in general.

[John Carter]

I think it's gonna be a big dog.

[Randall]

The conditions are right.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, well, I just have a couple. I had a couple on Saturday, man. They were delicious.

[John Carter]

That, that's my. Yeah, that's my go to deer camp. Like. Like lunches is hot dogs.

[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.

[John Carter]

I got a problem with that.

[Steven Rinella]

You put ketchup on them?

[John Carter]

No, no.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, they didn't want to hear about that.

[John Carter]

Yeah, my wife puts mayonnaise on hers. And I got a major problem with that.

[Steven Rinella]

I was observing the other day to my buddy when I was eating those dogs. You know, when you get those, like, you, let's say you're at event, you're at like a concession stand, right? And they give you a dog and it's on that little like the coffee

[Randall]

filter type tray thing.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. It's like. Like a little paper. 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.

[John Carter]

Could be.

[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 when you're sitting there on your. On the. What do you. The bleacher.

[John Carter]

Yeah, Right.

[Steven Rinella]

You're sitting there on the bleacher. There is no chance that you're not going to have ketchup mustard on your hands and on your clothes.

[John Carter]

Right.

[Steven Rinella]

It like it can't happen.

[Randall]

It's good.

[Steven Rinella]

I was just observing this on Saturday to somebody.

[John Carter]

Have you seen your car?

[Steven Rinella]

You get out of the gas station, you get in your car, there is gonna be.

[Randall]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Even if you skip the condiment table and just took the dog and raw. Dogged it, I swear you're gonna walk out your car and there's gonna be ketchup on you.

[John Carter]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

And you need to go near the catch.

[Randall]

That's how you know you had a good time.

[John Carter]

That's right.

[Randall]

Half of Sydney's phone camera roll is just images of me with mustard somewhere it shouldn't have been.

[John Carter]

Well, I've. I've been known to. To eat ribs in the car. And that's a similar. Yeah, a similar problem. Real messy driving food. If you need them, check them.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. I never eat ribs on the road. You know what boudin is? I do, yeah. Well, I had an idea with Boudin would be. I'll say 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. In a, you know, hose down through the car. Yeah. 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.

[John Carter]

You can just meter out a little. You can. You can.

[Steven Rinella]

Right out of that reservoir, you just dribble.

[Randall]

It's perfect because you only need two hands to do it.

[Steven Rinella]

Well, that's because you drive them with your knee. Well, maybe you'd get it such that you could. Like a foot pedal. Yeah, there's a foot pedal.

[Randall]

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.

[Steven Rinella]

Brilliant.

[Randall]

So you can hold a drink and a dog and dress your dog with your foot pedal.

[Steven Rinella]

That's how they do it in your.

[Randall]

At least we're the last. The last hot dogs. Well, I. I noticed it. It was not every.

[Steven Rinella]

That's incredible.

[John Carter]

Not the big hand pump.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. Holding your drink.

[Randall]

The foot.

[Steven Rinella]

The foot kids drink. Yeah. Your dog.

[Randall]

And I'm 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.

[Steven Rinella]

Speak American.

[Randall]

And then. And then I saw the pedal and I thought, my God, they are better than us.

[John Carter]

Well, they stole that from the porta potty industry. Right. You know that recycling is where they.

[Randall]

It's smart. It's smart.

[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, sure. We got to come find you guys. All the way in France. That's where the big bad lab is.

[John Carter]

That's where the lab is.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[John Carter]

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 reign of a lab to experiment and do all that stuff.

[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.

[John Carter]

That's right. Who knows? You're probably going to be. Get a bunch of requests.

[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

[John Carter]

guy was a hat.

[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.

[John Carter]

Pressure on. Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

And be like, he's no hot dog man. I'm a hot dog man.

[John Carter]

I'm a casing man. I'll say that I'm more of a casing man than a hot dog man. But. But you kind of have to. You got another process.

[Steven Rinella]

But I look at like, let's say you're an electrical. Electric vehicle guy.

[John Carter]

Sure.

[Steven Rinella]

Someone's like, I'm more of a battery man. Yeah.

[John Carter]

Yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

Than electrical. But I'm like, but That's. That's what we're after here.

[John Carter]

That's the heart of that.

[Steven Rinella]

That's what we're after. 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 an EV place.

[Randall]

Yeah, I think you're safe until I get an email from the. The. The podcast email forwarding thing, and it says [e-mail]. that's the only.

[John Carter]

That's right.

[Randall]

That's the only guy who's going to trump your credentials here. So for the record, you guys are

[John Carter]

the one that keep bringing up that brand, not me. But it's. That's fine.

[Steven Rinella]

Well, you know, 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. Ballpark.

[Randall]

Nathan.

[Steven Rinella]

What am I saying? Yeah. Oh, okay. Nathan's. Phil, can you scratch every time we said that we say.

[Randall]

Or if Nathan himself emails me?

[Steven Rinella]

Nathan at Nathan's.

[John Carter]

They're all customers.

[Randall]

We'll stop. We'll stop mentioning.

[John Carter]

Yep. You haven't mentioned one that's not a customer yet.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, what was the other one? Nathan's Ballpark. Yeah. So ball at Ballpark. Take that call.

[John Carter]

Nathan's Famous is who sponsors the.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah.

[John Carter]

Oh, yeah, the big event.

[Steven Rinella]

I don't get that, man.

[Corinne Morgan]

I don't think that they should do that.

[Randall]

It's probably their best marketing.

[Steven Rinella]

I don't think that that's a good idea.

[Randall]

You know what?

[Steven Rinella]

You know who's got another bad idea?

[John Carter]

Yeah. It's Wenzel's Oyster House.

[Steven Rinella]

You're not a paint man, are you?

[John Carter]

No.

[Steven Rinella]

Okay. Who's that paint outfit? Their.

[Corinne Morgan]

Sit.

[Steven Rinella]

Their. Their logo is the earth getting covered up with paint. Sherwin Williams. I think it says cover the Earth. I'm not kidding you, Phil. Pull that up. It says, like, cover the Earth. Their logo is the planet being consumed.

[Corinne Morgan]

Paint dumping on top of the planet,

[Steven Rinella]

and the paint is dripping off down around like, 45th parallel south.

[Randall]

I guess I can envision. I can envision it, but I never really put that together.

[Steven Rinella]

And then Nathan's doing that hot dog eating contest I think is bad business.

[Corinne Morgan]

People would sell a lot more paint

[Steven Rinella]

if they got rid of that paint load.

[John Carter]

I thought you were gonna go into other eating contests.

[Steven Rinella]

This. Yeah. Did these guys miss the whole Earth Day crate? Like the whole Earth Day era? Like, dude, I don't look at that and get all hot for some paint.

[John Carter]

You know what I'm saying?

[Steven Rinella]

Imagine if that was Like Exxon's logo.

[John Carter]

Not a sponsor.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. And that Nathan's hot dog eating contest. I think they should back out of that. That grosses me out, man.

[John Carter]

There's an oyster eating raw oyster eating contest in. In Mobile.

[Steven Rinella]

Pleasure or volume?

[John Carter]

It's volume. So you got to get your name on the board. And I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go dark for a minute. There is the guy that's at the top of the board, got sick halfway through it in one of those Lexan deals.

[Randall]

Oh, yeah.

[Steven Rinella]

That kind of sick.

[John Carter]

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? They said, sure. So he re. Ingested.

[Steven Rinella]

Oh, no.

[John Carter]

For the sole point of getting his name at the top of the top of the horse. I mean, some people have their.

[Randall]

It's good to have something you're passionate

[John Carter]

about, something they're passionate for. That's tough.

[Steven Rinella]

Do you want me to pull up

[John Carter]

a video of that?

[Steven Rinella]

This is on Phil's phone. Man.

[Corinne Morgan]

I appreciate you coming on the show.

[John Carter]

Enjoyed it.

[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.

[John Carter]

I get it. Nice.

[Steven Rinella]

Frankfurt. Because people were like, home. Now, why? Someone brought up, like, would you be doing other things there, too? We're like, no, just making the hot dogs.

[John Carter]

Yeah. Yeah. I'll look for a domestic option.

[Steven Rinella]

I'm sure other little worky things you'd be doing while you're there. And we were like, no, we're thinking about getting some coffee.

[Randall]

Seems pretty straightforward.

[John Carter]

Some bread. They do bread? Well, yeah. Yeah. I mean, getting so Beauvais is like a short cab ride from Paris. Getting from here to Paris, it's pretty easy.

[Steven Rinella]

I do have a little easy. For another. I just realized, for another. For. There's a writing project where I do have to do a little site visit. Yeah. I do have a France, like.

[Randall]

Yeah, that's a great point.

[Steven Rinella]

We're set. We're good.

[Randall]

All right.

[John Carter]

I just thought of it.

[Steven Rinella]

It just hit me. Okay. Thanks for coming on the show.

[John Carter]

Yeah, I've enjoyed it.

[Steven Rinella]

No, that's good, man. This I learned, you know? You know what's going to happen now, though? People I hang out with are gonna have to endure me when they're eating dogs for me to be like, mad,

[John Carter]

you know, Protein extraction.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. If you're curious about what you're eating or I'll be happy to.

[Randall]

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.

[John Carter]

And that was the key. Just to make it one pound packs.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah, yeah.

[John Carter]

Easy for the consumer.

[Steven Rinella]

Love it. Thank you, John. Thank you, man.

[John Carter]

Enjoying it? Thank you.

[Steven Rinella]

Yeah. Foreign.

[Corinne Morgan]

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[John Carter]

This is an iHeart podcast.

[Steven Rinella]

Guaranteed human.