The Best All-Beef Hot Dogs

From the “hot water” sausages of Coney Island to the pineapple-topped “puka dogs” of Kauai, you can find a hot dog in nearly every corner of America. While how you dress your dog varies with regional custom (like your hot dogs with ketchup? Don’t show your face in Chicago), the sausages themselves remain relatively constant across all 50 states—a mixture of meat trimmings, water, salt, and seasonings is stuffed into casings (sometimes natural but usually made from cellulose) and then smoked and cooked. Cellulose casings are stripped off after cooking, so most supermarket hot dogs are skinless.

Traditional frankfurters—the kind originally brought over by European immigrants in the mid-1800s—are primarily pork-based and can still be found in supermarkets nationwide. But nearly every hot dog manufacturer we talked to told us that all-beef hot dogs now vastly outsell traditional frankfurters because of their punchier meatiness and more straightforward ingredient list. (Pork frankfurters today are often bulked up with added poultry or soy.) With the goal of finding the best supermarket all-beef hot dogs, we cooked up the seven top-selling national varieties of skinless dogs for 21 America’s Test Kitchen staffers. To keep everything consistent, we locked away the condiments and served the hot dogs two ways: first boiled and bunless and then grilled and stuffed into buns.

Tasters immediately took issue with thin or skimpy dogs that practically disappeared when we nestled them into standard buns. Almost half the samples were deemed too petite by tasters, so we broke out a scale and calipers to measure the dogs. Top dogs were up to 12 percent plumper than lower-ranked ones, allowing for a higher meat-to-bun ratio in each bite. Our favorite hot dogs were also almost 20 percent heavier than low-scoring products—51 grams per dog versus 41 grams.

But bigger wasn’t always better, as some larger dogs had texture issues. Two products were downgraded for their off-putting textures: one was too dry, the other too wet and squishy. The ideal hot dog has a bouncy, snappy texture and a moderate moisture level; from our prior investigating in other sausage stories, we know that this ideal texture is achieved, in part, by a proper balance of fat and protein. So we scrutinized the ingredient labels and compared fat and protein levels. Though they all contained similar amounts of protein, the dog that tasters deemed dry was far too lean, with less than half the fat of our winner—about 7 grams of fat compared with 15 grams of fat in our top-ranked product. We preferred dogs with more fat, which were tender and juicy with just the right amount of boun... read more