The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 858: John Carter

Episode Date: April 6, 2026

Steven Rinella talks with John Carter. Topics discussed:  Connect with Steve and The MeatEater Podcast Network Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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12 and 26 in the coming months. This is the meat eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten and in my case, underwearless. We hunt. The meat eater podcast. You can't predict anything. Brought to you by First Light. When I'm hunting, I need gear. that won't quit. First Light builds, no compromise gear that keeps me in the field longer. No shortcuts, just gear that works. Check it out at firstlight.com. That's F-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E.com. All right, everybody, if you ever wanted to know, everything you'd ever wanted to know about hot dogs and sausages, now's your chance. We're joined today by your mechanical engineer. 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 well we're talking about making hot dogs with Jesse Griffith and I received an email Roman passed it along there was an email sent to the podcast the mediator at the Meteor whatever.com and it's it was rather bold and it's tone

he said, I don't know what sort of quack. Hack, I believe. Hack you've got lined up here. We hadn't mentioned Jesse by name, so it was not a personal slide against Jesse, but I said, we're working with someone. He said, I know all about hot dogs, the science of hot dogs. And he said, I can guarantee you that I can give you. It caught my, I'm glad that you worded it that way because it caught my attention, and I called you up.

And I talked to you for 30 or 40 minutes. 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 about caseless technology. And I learned about lunch meat on that call. And I sort of paced around my house for a few minutes afterwards, just thinking how little I knew about something you thought you knew all about. Something I thought I knew all about and so here we find ourselves 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 a 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 shockingly low price. Right. Okay.

There was a, if you're in Sioux state, like in Michigan, there's Sioux Ontario and Sue Michigan, 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 gas, they fill up, right? Because America just has some things are cheaper in America.

This place used to have four roller dogs. This is, I'm going back to early 90s. Four roller dogs for a dollar. Sometimes. Insane hot dog prices. It's impressive. 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 trying to find hot dog experts. And then you wrote in saying that the hot dog experts were using aren't up to the job. Well, we're sitting here again. And I don't want to hack on it. This is a great. This is a sausage. If you can see in the camera, they can see this. Yeah.

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. It's an elevated. It's delicious. It's delicious. If I made that, I'd be proud of myself.

Ain't a hot dog. Right. It's a hot dog. It's like if someone said, oh, I make an Oreo, but it's better than Oreos. Exactly. And 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 going to tickle all.

the the Oreo notes. 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. Yeah, when a consumer goes into a store, they make a purchase on, on two points, a wallet, and what's the thing look like?

Okay. Visually. Because you haven't tasted it yet, right? Uh-huh. So you can't make a decision on taste. So it's going to be, how much does it cost?

And what's it visually look like. Okay. And those are key points for the whole process meat industry. Yeah. 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. Yeah.

That's the goal. 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 like sausage casing hot dog biz? It's a bizarre path. So, yeah, my senior year in high school. So I'm going to go all the way back to 1990. That's the year you graduated? I did.

Me too. Really? Hell yeah. Seventy-three. I was back with hot dogs. Roller dogs, that was like the kind of, I view that as like the heyday roll. That's what we ate for breakfast in high school. Yeah.

We probably put on there the night before and you're getting the roller dog from last night. Yeah, you'd pull into the station, buy $5 with the gas, $1 or the hot dogs. So now I know that's a 27 to 28 to 29 millimeter hot dog. This is what got me. When we're talking about the bore diameter of a hot dog, this is what really got me going. But yeah, we had a marathon gas station that was like two miles from the high school. And it was like 99 cents for two dogs and a small fountain drink. Oh good.

And then you could spend the other dollar. A small fountain drink? Yeah. 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 you also didn't know. And you also didn't know.

And a fountain for a dollar. Yeah. You know, this has nothing to do with any, ma'am. I just want to throw this in for 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. Hardee's was running this thing. It was, I can't remember if it was Tuesdays or Thursdays.

Early in the morning. It was all you could eat B&G, biscuits and gravy. All you could eat for $1.99. and it would be a foam, you'd go up to the counter and it'd give you a foam square, and they'd just mound it with B&G. And you'd go back to your seat, and you couldn't barely finish it, but if you did, you'd go up and they'd held true to their word. They would hand you another one of them foam trays just mounted with that, like, fake.

There's some, it was like milk and flour. There's some Gen Ziers listening to this right now, wondering what sort of horrible world they're inherited. So my first job at 16 years old, I was a chef. Okay. A little restaurant called Shoney's. Oh, yeah. Not a cook.

Chef, okay. That's right. I was in charge of the breakfast bar. Okay. 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. You'd wear them out. That's right. You'd wear them out. Yeah, they'd become physically exhausted before they became full. having to refresh their plate. Yeah.

All right. So your career, 1992, you graduate. 92, I went to a physics class. My physics teacher in high school was Robin Williams' half-brother. Really? His name was McLaurin Smith Williams, Christian Brothers High School in Memphis, Tennessee. Robin Williams' half-brother? Looked just like him, had the same sense of humor.

Writing poetry on the chalkboard and stuff. Awesome. So I became this guy that said I want to be an engineer because of that one guy. Huh. So I went in because he was Robin Williams half brother because he was inspiring in and of himself. Inspiring in and of himself. Yeah. Yeah.

And he didn't have a lot of jingle like his brother wasn't passing a lot of jingle off to him. No. No. He was a high school teacher and that, you know, that's who he was. I got a picture of him. I'll show you. Look just like him. That's great.

He, so he wanted me to go to the University of Tennessee to be. a nuclear engineer. Oh. I wanted to be a mechanical engineer, and I visited the University of Alabama. And once you visit the University of Alabama, you go to the University of Alabama. Because what? Just a beautiful campus. Okay.

That's just an amazing opportunity. Not throwing anything out for school or anything. I'm not a paid endorser, but it's an awesome campus. Well, my boy, he's getting to the point where his mom's starting to harass him about his college plans. I'll have to throw that one out to him. Visit Alabama. My daughter went there as well. You know what company 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. That's a good idea. Dude, that would be like a... We might have... Nuclear hot dogs. We'd kill it on that.

It's a good brand. We might have missed the boat. I don't know. I feel like... There's already one call back? There's got to be some guy out there. Nuclear hot dogs? No, there's not.

I know Atomic Burger. Oh. Would they sue you? No. I don't know. They might try a cease and desist. You just ignore it. Atomic and nuclear are pretty.

Nuclear hot dogs. Those are two totally different. Yeah. Areas. Let's look into that. Go on. We'll hash out the details on this later. Went to Alabama, graduated in mechanical engineering.

A whole plan was to be a process engineer. That was the plan. And upon graduation... Can you tell us what that means? Yeah. So every plant, whether they make steel, they make hot dogs. They make paper. They make cars.

Okay. Process engineers in them. And they're responsible for optimizing the process, managing quality, improving the efficiency of the plant, things of that nature. Okay. 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. Yeah. 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 97 when I graduated. I didn't dip in on that.

It was good. I think I ended up getting like fishing was hot. I think I got nine job offers coming out of college. Wow. And two of them were sales jobs. Seriously? Yeah. So two were in sales.

One was in the paper industry. People coming looking for you. Yeah, me. Who doesn't like this guy? I know. It's just fun. I had a lot more hair back. I mean,

if I got out of college and just waited for someone to come looking for me, they weren't coming. Right. Right. The co-op helped. That's great. Because that's what people look for. They look for that experience. 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 Astrovan as a good car and that's what kicked it over the air like a take home car that was it got it so that took me into into paper so I worked in paper mostly in tissue and towel for a while some timing leather uh and the source obviously for paper is cellulose okay the source for hot dog casings is cellulose so I knew of the company I worked for now this case from that from that experience and wanted to try something new so that's what brought me into the hot dogs so i went from ron williams half brother kind of down this weird path

the astrovan along the way to being a hot dog magnate in the in the process engineer at atomic hot dogs that's right nuclear hot dogs yeah can we touch on the leather thing because we're right before we started just very quickly touch on yeah before we started we visited uh just as we were kind of gearing up. And you were sharing with me that you've seen a lot of changes in 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 neighbor.

A big driver of the leather industry is the automotive industry. That's right. Can you touch on that? Yeah. So that, yeah, the leather industry is run out of Italy because of the fashion roots. Okay. So that's where everything's run. What drives a lot of the volume and leather is automobile, car seats.

And it's just because of pure volume. You know, it takes a lot more leather to make a car seat than it does a boot. And when we discussed that, I was sharing that. A friend of mine from high school, a friend of mine from high school, her mom was oblivion. I don't know how it all happened, but she wound up. marrying a dude from South Africa who was a leather buyer. And he bought leather for luxury auto. And again, this is going back to this is going back to that.

Like this, the time that I met him and that he was doing this would have been early 2000s. And he was buying all this leather down in South America. I think maybe, maybe we talked about Patagonia. But anyways, he's buying leather in South America. barbed wire is not as prevalent down there. And he was talking about how it's hard to find large pieces of perfect leather. Right. That you would use to do a car seat, like unblemished leather for like premium auto.

Right. And you were telling about how that is that that industry is in decline. Yeah. I mean, social pressure is a big piece of it. You know, social media drives a lot of the younger generation. The terms of vegan leather is out there, what I think is it's kind of a weird term to me. But basically 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.

But that cow is 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. Yeah. So 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. It is, yeah.

And it's surprising that people wanted out of, um, that people want that materialized. out of an oil or a plastic product. Right. And then to put the really durable, renewable stuff into the ground. That's right. Yeah. All right, back to hot dogs. So the cellulose deal.

Sure. You're dealing paper. Tell people, what is that when you say that? Did you say cellulose or something different? Cellulose. Okay. Explain that. Yeah.

I mean, so. So I came from paper. I live in Mobile, Alabama. We're in the southern yellow pine forest. You know, lob lollipines, long leaf 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.

Okay. And he owns land. So we, we hunt together. I cut a pine tree off the roof of the single wide trailer last weekend. Got it. So you're like maintenance and habitat. That's right. That was right.

So yeah, we do all tractorless. Anyway, we got a whole thing going on. Okay. But it's all farmed pine trees. Okay. I mean, my truck is sitting in the airport parking lot right now, covered in yellow pollen right now from the pine pollen. So down in that area of the world used to be owned by a lot of paper companies.

Okay. A lot of the paper companies got out of owning land. they buy trees now. Okay. There are a few warehouser, Rain Air Force products. There's a few out there that still own the land. I wasn't aware.

Like, I know that those places used to own these huge tracks. What was the outfit in western Montana? This is a wirehouser. No, Plum Creek and all that. Oh. So Plum Creek.

You know what I'm talking about? Yep. Like all that stuff above the Clark Fork when you're going down in I-90, looking to the south. Yeah, but it's probably international. paper. I think Palm 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.

Either way, I didn't know that that was a trend. I guess I can think of all kinds of places and people that have bought land that used to be timber company land, but I didn't recognize it as part of a general thing where they were like holding fewer asset, land assets. Definitely holding fewer land assets. International paper, the largest packaging company in the world, I don't think owns any land assets. other than when the plants are. You know, up in Canada, not so much.

So the Irving family, I don't know if you know about the Irving family out of Canada. Robert and J.D. Irving, they're the most vertically integrated. They're like a poster story on vertical integration. They on 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. Okay. Like they just keep bolting on stuff on to that company. They're one of the biggest landowners in Canada. Okay. Yeah. When we were working on our hide hunters' audiobook about the history of the Buffalo

hide hunters, we, toward the end of that, we get into the, the tannery, the tanneries. Like where all these hides were going and what they were making out of them. And that was kind of a detail about those tanneries. 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. Yeah, and that's where all the paper mills end up popping up is where's the woodbasket. So there's a lot of paper industry. the Southeast U.S. is big because that's where the woodbasket is. Okay. And it's sustainable forestry. Yep. And that sustainable forestry in the Southeast U.S. goes to make toilet paper, packaging, and hot dog casings.

And they're like, they're moving, there's enough hot dog pack. There's enough hot dog casings getting made out of cellulose that you were aware of it when you were in the woodbiz. Yes. But if you pie charted out who's using this, the hot dog chasings, chunks got to be like not even a you can't even see you know when you look at a pie chart and the only that you can see about one of the wedges is there's lines yeah but you can't tell what's in the lines i bet there's a very specific term for that and i'd love to know what it is 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 correct you're you're not wrong so so there's a specific type of wood pulp that's used

for making cellulist casings. Okay. And 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. Really? So that's the, that's one of the main things that I want to do coming on here is just to talk about, we work in the woods, cutting trees and hunting and doing all that kind of stuff. What happens when the trees leave our property?

And that's what happens. Toilet paper, wet wipes, feminine care, diapers, all that kind of stuff comes out of those forests. Before we go deeper into that, I want to go deeper in that. Can you explain, remember how we started talking about roller dogs?

Sure. 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? Right.

Good question. Or put another way, just to include more people with awareness. If you're in New York, city, and you go to a corner, and there's a do with a, stainless steel. He's got a cart and in it is a stainless steel tub. And you can feel the mist of the steam. And you order a dog and he takes the lid off and it's a steamy, we call him water, not roller dogs. We call those water dogs. And he dips a hot dog out of a bucket of hot water. Right.

That hot dog. Yeah. What is it? Well, there are those hot dogs. Okay. 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 two bucks. you 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, okay, ice, lean protein, and fat. But what's the stuffed to do?

And it's stuffed into a 90% of the hot dogs in the U.S. are stuffed into a cellulose base casing. So it's an inedible casing that that is stuffed into. This case actually invented that space. Let me see one there. Back in 1930, we invented this guy. And that's on a sheared stick. If I started walking, if Randall grabbed one in and I grad one end,

how far apart would we be when this was... That one is 200 feet. Wow. Yeah. That's a lot of dogs. That's 200 feet of hot dogs? That's probably 100 hot dogs in there. Okay.

Go on. Yeah. Because there's waste. You know, they twist and so it takes up some space. Yeah. Yeah. So we sell in lengths from 84 feet up to 200 foot sticks.

And that's a wood product. That's a cellulose product. That's a cellulose product. Okay. Which one source of cellulose is wood. Okay. Another source of cellulose is cotton linter's. Who?

Cotton linters. Do you know what a cotton linter is? Yeah. So it's used in money. But that's a byproduct of cotton, right? It's fiber that's inside the seed. Yeah. Yes.

So you can make that same product out of cotton lenders, out of dissolving pulp from trees, some interesting research going into using bamboo. as a salo source. Okay. Things of that nature. The two predominant sources are cotton linters and woodpult. He's trying to get me going on Eli Winter and the cotton gin and all that.

Yeah, don't take the bait. Don't take the bait. I'm not going to get into that. I think it's Whitney. Whitney, Eli, Whitney. I think it's Winter. I'm Luke Wilson. Join me each week for Film Never Lies.

Since retiring from the NFL, I've had a lot of my mind, and now got my own show. If you're tired of lazy takes, if you want on it, conversations join us each week. Film Never Lies, available on all TSN platforms in the IHeartRadio app. All right, everybody, if you're getting fired up for spring turkey season, you're going to want to hear this. Man, I'm telling you, I'm fired up.

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2000, 26. So you got all day that day. But it ends right before midnight. Gobble, gobble, gobble. So when we talked one of the things that I was asking you about is when you buy a hot dog because the case the casing that the hot dog is being stuffed into is

an inedible just there in the manufacturing process and so you so so what happens like when you stuff the casing we can get into emulsions and all that a little bit but like you just mentioned that this is an edible so describe how we go from an inedible casing to me eating a hot dog. But, Bohma, I got to call, I got to correct you on something. That's the flavor profile of a hot dog is salt? No. But salt is the most important

ingredient in hot dog. Okay, but there's a little more in there. When we get to emulsion science, we'll talk about the importance of salt. Okay, so pick up his deal. Yeah. So hot dogs originally came from Germany called doxin dachshund sausages. That's why we

turn that into hot dogs in the U.S. Really? Yeah. What was the word? Doxon sausages. See, I would think someone was making sausages out of those little dogs. Yeah. A wiener.

Fair enough. I think it was the shape. Skinny, long. Got it. Yeah, yeah. 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 in the background.

I don't think so, man. I think that was a huge oversight. on Phil's part. I didn't harass the prop department to get some sausages. Phil, but I don't remember they're being sausages. I don't believe there were. There was just a big fake goose.

You get no more. Small fake goose. There's nothing more Deccans than hanging sausages. I would expect next year around Christmas time, I'd expect call from Phil. I'll make some calls. So they were made natural casing. So what our founder did is he said. I've seen this new process in Europe called the viscos 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 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.

Got it. And then you can package it. You don't have to hang it in the store and cut links off. You can package it on a one pound 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. What did you call that word again? Anular strength. So it's strength around a circle. And the old days, we would have called this episode, annual rigidity.

We switched to bad titles. All right. 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 U.S. 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-link proteins. And that's what gives you a snap. So there is no skin on that hot dog. That's managed through smoking and cooking. Okay, I got a back stuff from it.

Again, you go, well, let's do this. You're going to a gas station because you're going to do a Fourth of July party. And you're buying you buy the, cheapest sack. How many comes in a typical? We got one in our work freezer. Have you ever seen that block of hot dogs in the work freezer? There's an open one. So how many is it a normal pad? Like an Oscar, what I don't want to name. Yeah. Oscar Meyer, the worst, not the worst. The least expensive hot dog. No, not the worst meaning best. The least expensive hot dog you can find. It wouldn't be the one you just mentioned. Okay. But the least the store brand least expensive hot dog you can find.

there is no case on that hot dog. No. But that hot dog has been smoked. Yes. Some of them. You know when you look at the end? You see the little casing dimples. Yeah.

That's from that being twisted. This is what, this is what convinced me that this is a podcast. Yeah. Like when you bite into a hot dog and there's like a little skin hanging off. That's. Cross-link protein on the surface of the hot dog. But it's no different materially than the rest of the filling.

Correct. What'd you call it? Cross-link protein at the surface of the hot dog, just on the surface. How do you get them out of his casing? So these are treated with easy peel, so it's got plant-based glycerin and things like that to make them peel easy. Okay. So the first time I went into a plant, it was the coolest thing I've ever seen. it was unbelievably clean.

The ingredients that went into that emulsifier were not what I was expecting. You were expecting some Upton Sinclair stuff. I was. I was. And it's not that. At all. I watched these butcher guys and when they're squaring up a rabbi.

I'm just going to square this up. That goes in the trim pile and that goes, that's bought by the hot dog manufacturers and things of that nature. So, um, so yeah, the casing.

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 is... Hot smoke or cold smoke? Hot smoke. So yeah, they're cooking somewhere around 130 degrees, something like that. So they're cooking that son of a bitch in the smoker. You could take it out of the pack and eat a hot dog. It's fully cooked. I'm just walking in that big old room, man. I'm trying to line that up here. The best hot dog I've ever had is right out of the oven, right out of the manufacturing oven. I can tell, man, because, like, my buddy, they milk cows. And you drink them, you know, they put in that super chiller.

Yeah. And you drink that milk right out of that chiller. I could picture that getting a hot dog right out of that hot dog machine to be the same, man. Very good. And they kill the cook at the end with cold water. Then it goes into packing. I mean, and so in these plants, it comes in as lean and fat. Okay.

The two primary ingredients that are in there. Yeah. It goes through the process, and it's coming out as packages, ready to go to the store. How come there's no bent hot dogs in a, because if it's draped over something, like, you know, you make a bra, 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, right? They're all, like, because they all got a bow to them. Right. But a hot dog and a hot dog pack is straight as narrow.

So when they're cooked, yes, they're hanging it over a chain, but it's 200 feet of those suckers twisted together. Got it. And so they're hanging vertically. And that weight is pulling them straight. That's right. That's right. Got it. And then so in packaging, the casing stripped off.

It's either a water jet or a blade or whatever. You'll see a lot of these casings have a black stripe on them. What do you mean a water jet? So it's 30,000 PSI water that you can't even see it. But how does it not obliterate the hot dog? Because it's controlled. Most of these are are slit and peeled. Okay.

So, you know, you'll see. That I can visualize. When you cook a hot dog, like in a skillet, sometimes you'll see a perfect straight line open up on it. He's telling me about that line, but I was lying and acting like I knew about it. When you were talking about the line, I don't know the line. Yeah. Yeah, you'll see. I always thought it was like an indentation from it being vacuum sealed with other hot dogs.

So this is what I'm talking about. This is great. So you're telling me, you're cooking up a hot dog at home or on a stick over to Fourth July party, and you're seeing a line. Sometimes. Sometimes. Yeah. And that's from cutting that thing off.

And it's cut and peeled. The photo eyes and the plant will look for that blue or this black shirt. 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. Okay. With hot dogs coming out instead of bullets. Oh, if you could like have a gun like that, just come into a room, be like,

everybody would be so happy in there. It's very cool. And then it goes in, they get sorted and packaged, yeah, vacuum sealed. And then off to your grocery store. You know the thing we were talking, we were joking earlier about Upton Sinclair and how clean it is in there. But like, you know, like people say of hot dogs, right? The old classic, like lips and A holes, right? Right.

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

Oh, you know, that was a double whammy. worst case? The worst case with the you. I know, no. That was on an accident. Sorry. Go ahead. Give me the, like, and you know, I know you're in the industry, man.

You got it. You're a company, man. But like, give me the worst, like, uh, like give me an example. Like, would people be pleasantly surprised if they saw what's in their hot dogs? Or would they be like, oh, it's worse than I imagined? No, that'd be pleasantly surprised. I mean, so the lien, the lien is all from butcher trim. Um, you know, if they're wanting to get the cost point down, um, for that $2 pack of hot dogs,

and there'll be different protein sources. Okay. So they may put a way protein or some, some other. Oh, is that right? Yeah, some other protein source to get, to get the cost profile down. And, you know, and people, I had no idea. People were always, so the same stuff you drink when you drink like a, or not the same, but like, if you drink, like a protein replacement or like a replacement meal or protein powder milk protein plant protein

soy protein you can jam that and do a hot dog you could um 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 yeah like they get the ultimate vote with their purchase and so the consumer knows how much money I have my wallet. And what's the thing look like on the show? Yeah, yeah. 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 still have to make a profit, right? So there are ways to do that. You get that protein with protein additions. Yeah, but I haven't seen lips and a-holes on any shelf. Here, let me now, let's do this. I believe you're kind of. but like answer this one totally honestly. Okay.

If you had, would you be able to tell me? Yeah. I believe him. It doesn't bother me. It doesn't bother me either. 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.

Well, I mean, so there's a market for that stuff, right? If I'm in Alabama and I'm going in Alic, we don't have the Canadian. versus 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 going to see the hot dog rollers. But right next to it, I'm going to see a jar pickle pig's feet. I'm going to see a jar of pickle pig snouts. I'm going to see. There's a market for that stuff in it on its own. And you think those snouts and those feet are not likely to be. in those dogs. I think he knows that.

Of the places I've been to. I haven't seen it. And if you did, you'd tell me. If I did, I'd tell you. So I've been to, you know, I've been to a lot of them. Yeah. Rayne, 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 juxtapose to what yeah that so hot dogs are made out of beef pork or chicken or combinations of the above i didn't know

there's a chicken hot dog yeah yeah yeah really sure but the guys making those aren't like chicken hot dogs they do oh they do they do they do chicken and turkey like it seems like they're proud of a beef. Oh yeah, all beef. I mean, that's like a branding thing, I think, is like an all beef hot dog that, that it elicits, I think, incorrectly, a quality or whatever. I mean, and there are also religious pieces to it. Yeah. Where you've got to understand kosher. That's good. Yeah, kosher root and, uh, or what, so it's a whole, is the halal. The hall is there. Yeah, okay. All right. So, so you'd be like, if you were going into an area where you had, Um, you had Muslims.

You had Jews. You might see that there's a higher prevalence of just like labeled beef with the kosher. And it would have the stamp on there. Yeah. So that's what they're all looking for is the triangle K or the halal or what. Got it. Got it. So that, that drives that.

But it does. It doesn't mean that if it doesn't say it like if they're not touting what it is, it's likely because it's what? 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 a hot dog emulsion out of. Okay.

Very forgiving, very easy to make. So in the industry, there's a saying that says pork makes sausage and chicken makes money. That'd be a good name for the podcast, probably. Deer makes for a big weekend. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah. So chicken has a really high water holeing capacity. So you can put more water on the protein and sell more water.

So we've thrown around the word emulsion. Sure. And I'd pretend like I know what we're talking about. But scientifically speaking, what are we like? Yeah. 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. So people hear the word emulmonary. and they think, oh, this is lab-grown food. Mm-hmm. You know, it has this scientific-y feel to it. You know, milk's an emulsion. There's all kinds of natural emulsions out there. How is milk an emulsion?

What an emulsion is, is a fat particle that's stabilized with an emulsifier around it. So there are stabilized fats inside of milk. That's what emulsion means? Mm-hmm. You know, so if I make salad dressing, you know, an emulsion is I'm taking two things that won't mix. You know, 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. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay. So an emulsion puts an emulsifier around those oil particles to stabilize it. Okay, let's, let's, we make our own dressing, and we buy a dressing like most Americans. American households. Right. So when we make it, I have a little shaker. Mm-hmm. You can, right.

You 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. Right. But then when you buy, whatever, who's the guy that, the actor? Paul Newman. 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? That would be similar to what we're going to talk about for hot dog emulsions. got to pull an emulsifier around that oil particle to keep those oil particles from getting together and agglomerating. Okay. That's what happens. So, emulsions are, again, they're natural. I've worked with emulsions my entire career because I used to be in the chemical space.

So we made lots of defomers and things of that nature that are stable emulsions. And that's the key. And in a hot dog, the oil particle is a fat. and the emulsifier that we're going to protect that fat from getting together is protein. Huh. So what is it in salad dressing? And salad dressing, you know, it may be, uh, there are all kinds of emulsion starches and things like that. Got it.

That can, that can stabilize in the motion. But you could make one from the things you could buy at a grocery store. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And the key is you got to put tons of energy into it. So you've got to shake the bejesus out of that thing. Oh.

And when they make it most likely, obviously they're not shaking individual jars at the Paul Newman factory. So what? Yeah, they've never thought about that. They got like an industrial edge. They've got a full-on emulsifier pump. I was imagining guys on lunch break all going out for smoke and their forearms are just massive. That's right. So there's back pressure on that pump.

They're going to cycle it through that pump. you know, probably six, seven, eight, nine times, get the particle size of the oil down, stabilize it. Okay. You know, same deal on a hot dog. Same process. So when you grind at, walk me through making a dog, like you got your lean meat. Yep.

And you're grinding it to like a liquid. Not really. Okay. Well, I mean, I'm going to grind it a hell of a lot more than I'm going to grind ground beef, right? I'm going to ground a paste, let's say, not a liquid. So I'm going to grind it to, like, to. probably a three to five millimeter plate something like that's a pretty fine grind um but step one is protein extraction so i have to extract the proteins out of that meat well it is protein

what's left once you get the proteins 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. I do that. And I do that with salt. Oh, really? That's why I argued that salt was the most. most important ingredient. So salt drives protein extraction. So, um, you know, again, key components, salt, lean protein, fat, and water in the form of ice, um, or traditionally it. Because what I want to do

is extract that protein, but I have to be very careful that I don't start to denature it. Because I want it to denature in the oven. That's when I want to do. it to form into a gel and cook and solidify and have that texture that you want. Okay. I can't have it denature in the processing spot. So I'm going to add ice to keep the temperature down. Got it. Got it.

I see. So there's a, what is it? I got to look at my notes. So there's a differential scanning colorimetry, colorimetry. That's a tough, say that word five times. It's DSE. That's what I know. It's.

Okay. 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 in the manufacturing process, it's going to denature quick. Really?

So that's why Where's beef sit on that little scale? Harder than pork. So pork is the easiest. Okay. Beef is harder both because of the DSE curve and then also just because

the extractability of the proteins. 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, there's a piece of a relationship there?

And I, you guys, we all know, right? It's, it's, there's very little intermuscular lipids are fat in medicine. It's a highly active muscle. The proteins are packed really tight. So that's what makes them hard to extract. Mm-hmm. So, you know, overcooking venison has more to do with, you just lose any little bit of fat that was in there and you're going to make a really

tough chew. Got you. I'm Luke Wilson. Join me each week for Film Never Lies. Since retiring from the NFL, I've had a lot of my mind, and now I've got my own show. If you're tired of lazy takes, if you want honest conversations, join us each week.

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But don't wait around. The giveaway ends one minute before midnight on Monday, April 13th, 2000 and 26. So you got all day that day. But it ends right before midnight. Gobble, gobble. So do you, I want to continue out with the emulsifying, but just on this subject, would you be able to make, would you be able to take deer meat?

Mm-hmm. Wild deer meat. Would you be able to take deer meat and make a dog? that if I came in the gas station and grabbed it off the roller, I would just think I was having a roller dog? Or would I be like, something's different? You know, it's going to have a venison flavor, obviously. It's going to have a wild flavor.

But outside of that. But the texture. I think we could get the texture and all of that stuff right. It'd be really hard. Really? Yeah, there's science to this. This, that the DSC is the biggest driver. There's also pH of the most.

of the muscle itself. Okay. So, Corinne mentioned that I should listen to the, the Red Cutter episode. Yeah. And I did. You ever hear that guy before? No.

You did a lot to talk about. 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, um. No, no, no. Okay.

We're good? Don't worry about that. All right. Yeah, it was interesting. So everything he was focusing on was about the tooth and chew of the meat. Okay. Making hot dogs, it's different. It's all about protein extraction.

Okay. So he was talking about the DFD meat. You know, you call 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 easy to extract proteins. From a dark cutter. Yeah.

That being said, the flavor's different and all that kind of stuff. Okay. So, and I'm just talking pure protein extraction. But in that episode, you talk a little about pre and post rigor. Yep. it's easier to extract proteins to make a hot dog in pre-rigger meat than it would be a post-rigger protein. You would never do that? Really?

Yeah. And it has most of what it has to do with pH. So as a muscle rigors, 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 pH. 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. Deer meat has a different pH. 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. Okay. And I would contemplate, feel dressing and making hot dogs out of it that day. Right then and there. Just get right to it.

That sounds like an episode. But, but I mean, it's, I mean, that's a lot of hot dogs. you know you just mentioned rigor man this has nothing to do what we're talking about but I was talking to a buddy mine yesterday and he was telling me that he he's a fireman and he's time weird it's kind of weird how this whole thing came up

but he said me they went to a nursing home one time and there was a guy and they had called about a that he was on a pacemaker and on some kind of other respirator or something and they're like they're called about it they couldn't tell what was going on with him but he had a pulse hmm um but when he went to he grabbed his arm went to lift it up and the guy was already in rigor with a pulse because of because of i can't remember what he's explaining to me 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 crazy not wow that is wow

wish I'd remember the story better back to hot dogs yeah yeah I wish I'd remember what he told me better I was driving and my kid was trying to get a hold of me where does the where does the water content come into play of these different meats

as far as like their ability to emulsify? 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 in a 60% water or something, something in that muscle. Chicken can hold more water. Right. Oftentimes, the manufacturer likes that because they can sell more water, right?

And both in a chicken breast or in a chicken hot dog. The more water that you put into the emulsion, you're stuffing a watery substance into cellulist casing. And that gets difficult to handle. Okay. You know, the more viscous the emulsion is 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 would say that water holding. and water content as 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. Right. 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? Right. And that ratio needs to be right because you got too little protein. You're not going to completely cover that oil part. You got too much protein and there's extra protein kind of swimming around. Yeah, this is what I remember from describing one of the big challenges. Important process. I mean, yeah, the key steps 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 that'll be a problem okay what are you going to do it in 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 go and slowly extract the proteins and you'll know you're done when it stops being grainy and start it'll be extremely sticky hmm 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 braids man i could picture what you're

talking about from having made some dogs in my day yeah that's that's what you're looking for yeah you're good to go your proteins are extracted then you're mulcify so you know it's done by that you're not So it's a look thing, a look and feel. Yeah, look and feel thing. Okay. And I mean, in the industrial world, it's a, it's a recipe. Like, they know I'm going to put this much ice in at this time. They've got specialized equipment that's both their chopper, they call it.

That's where you do the protein extraction and chopper and emulsifier. It's all in the kind of the same piece of equipment. Got it. And then they're going to ship that to the stuffing plant to stuff. 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 a little runnier than that it's a little runnier than that yeah yeah um 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 yep um 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 bare fat. And the key thing is to understand what is that protein to fat content. And when I'm emulsifying it in the kitchen, Nate, I'm not running it through that food processor for more than two minutes.

Okay. Because the temperature. Because if I go too hot, the temperature's going to get away from me. I got a question on the heat thing. I'm trying if this is related or not. You ever smoke fish, smoke salmon, trial, whatever? You ever notice, it really doesn't matter what kind of fish you're smoking. If you get it too hot, too fast during the smoking process, it puts off that white,

I don't know, foamy goo. You're melting fat. And it's like, oh, you, you overdid it. Yeah. Like too much heat, too quick. Right. That's what that is, is melted fat? Yeah.

Okay. Is that the same as what you're talking about? So that's a different problem. Totally different problem. Okay. This has more to do with taking off the denaturing process to form that protein gel that is a hot dog before it's in the oven. Okay. I needed to happen in the oven.

oven. Run the smoker. God. So the problem that if you get that heat going, is it that 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.

I'm sorry. Extracting the protein and you don't want to avoid denaturing it. And then two is the actual emulsifying process. Yeah. So, I mean, think of it as that protein is going to gel and firm up before you've made it into an emulsion. So it's not individual pieces of protein to wrap around that fat. It's not available anymore because it's gelled up and solidified, if you will. Right.

Got it. Yeah. And that's the emulsifying process is more ice. Lots of time to pre-emulsified fat. So I want to beat up the fat. So I get the size of fat particle that I want. I want one to 10 microns or something like that. And then I'm going to wrap that protein emulsion around it.

Okay. Or that protein, sorry, extracted protein around it to make an emulsion. And that's from the food processor. That's where you're applying the energy to it to make that. Serious, serious energy. Yeah. When someone gets baloney, that's amulsified. Yep.

A brat is not amulsified. Correct. 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 right yeah so like where else do people see emulsifications say hot dogs baloney mortadela all those types of products go through an emulsification stuff I'd say deli meats are approaching it, but not necessarily, you're not necessarily all the way there. So to make a deli meat, you're going to take pieces of 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 kind of like an amulsifying step, but you're not emulsifying it. Once you get the edges of that surface, surface sticky, you're going to press it and make, and it's going to basically glue it all together.

So it makes, you know, you either do that in a round casing, which are those over there, that's baloney casing, the red ones. How long is this if we and Randall started walking apart? A lot longer. Yeah. It's a lot of bloney. that's a lot of baloney that's kind of a standard you know round

deli meat casing it's made out of plastic yeah yeah it's got you know some bolognaes that plastic stays on some of it they they leave it on for the consumer to peel off so you got something to run in between your teeth

clean them out and then some of them peel them off in the manufacturing process but I'd say keep asking questions I got I got to see if I get by this relates

I mean, see if I get my wife to send me something. Yeah. I'm going to show you something. So it's, uh, it, so, you know, a sandwich meat, a deli meat. Right. Is not quite an emulsion. It's more of individually separated meat that's pressed and formed. Mm-hmm.

And so we either leave it round. Right. And what they call it chub. Mm-hmm. So, you know, a deli chub would just be a perfectly round, clipped with like hog rings, basically on each one. Yeah. Is that a technical term?

Yep. I always just call them loafs. I like when I see it in the case, I would describe it as loaf, but chub's much better. It's chub. Um, you can, you can put them in a mold to make them square. Mm-hmm. You've seen the square hams. Yeah.

Yeah, like when you buy a little pack, when you, when you buy a little pack for, to take home to make sandwiches. Yeah. It's a square. It's a very square piece of ham. So that starts off in a round form and it's put in a mold when it's broken, when it's, uh, cooked. Yeah. And then some hams back in the 90s, they were more of the, else there's the D-shaped ham.

Oh, yeah. So it's flat on one side and kind of arched on the other side. You know what I wonder if the industry is still into because I still use it, that stretchy net? Yep. Do you guys still use that stuff? We actually sell those. So, yeah, I didn't bring any, but, and most of that, so it's elastic netting.

You buy a roll that lasts your whole lifetime. And it's used to put just surface characteristics on the, whatever you're wanting to do. Oh. Yeah. You think that's how you guys think of it? That's what I think of it as. But you know, I got one of those big stuffers. Yeah.

That bought like a big giant cylinder. Okay. And 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 trussing that little net. It was like buying a Christmas tree. Yeah, Christmas tree. Yeah.

And then when you brine and smoke it or whatever, you know, I don't know if you smoke a duck or something, he goes like this. Keeps them all together. Yeah. Well, if you, if you mesh them. He stays all like a little ball. Yeah. And the marks look cool. It does make some cool marks.

You were telling me when we talked on the phone about using cellulist products to impart flavor and color to, I think, specifically like lunchmeats and stuff. But in theory, you could do that with the duck, right? Good. Hey. You kind of prints, like, explain that. So, yeah, the guy over here that's. that's smoke treated. So we have transfer cases.

That thing smells good. You can the whiff of that thing? So, yeah, the guys, they said, I was getting the printed stuff. We made that in our printer down to Mexico 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? Smell up the whole lot of when you come in there.

So I brought it and sat in my kitchen for a while. My wife walks in the first time. She's like, what have you been cooking it? here. It's like, yeah, it's my hot dog casing. What's the electric blue one you got there? So that size is probably for a, for like a cocktail weenie or a, yeah. So it's 18, 19 millimeter. They've got, um, why is it electric blue?

It's electric blue because this customer has a, a visualization system that looks for that blue color. Oh, to make sure they got it off. Interesting. Oh, yeah. Yeah. or most hot dog manufacturers have that looks for the black stripe. So they're looking for that black stripe. Is that that that's automated?

Like they're, they're sorting. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Just making sure that it's all gone. Got it. Yep. So you were asking about transfer.

So we've got smoke transfer is if I'm going to make a product, but I'm not going to run it through a smoke house. Yeah. But I wanted to have a smoke flavor. You'd buy a kick. facing with smoke transfer. There are also color transfers. The biggest in the hot dog world is dark cherry for making the red hot dog.

So they're big up in Massachusetts. Yeah, but what does that come from? Like, didn't they used to call them red hots and stuff? Yeah, there's a brand. But why the redness? That was just a branding thing. Yeah. So, I mean, you're going to add these dogs have probably a little bit of sodium

nitrate in it 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 in the pH discussion. I'll talk about that in my venison recipe. Yeah. Yeah, it's a cultural thing. I can say that in the U.S., the majority of art,

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 lunchmate. God, you know, you see that rind. It looks like it was real. Some of that, you know, 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 and their eyes until they're hooked until they have a flavor a flavor hook sure yeah 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 right 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 what is happening like what is that ring well that's why does it make that color so it's it's quite very similar to how we make hot dog right we said it goes in the smokehouse

and the surfaces it's myosin so the protein once you've extracted the protein out it's in form of myosin okay heat will make myosin migrate to the surface and the smoke makes it crosslink. So that's what makes the skin on a hot dog. That's what makes a smoke ring. My argument is, I want the biggest smoke ring I can get when I'm smoking a butt.

Not a cigarette butt, but like a pork butt. A Boston butt. I'm from Alabama. That's what we call it. Yeah, Boston. What's it called? Just a butt. No, you said a word.

Pork butt. No, you just said that's what we call it where? Oh, in Alabama. Oh, okay. Yeah, smoking a butt. My wife's going to get on to me. She's going to say I've been mumbling. So she's, she's in, she's in the biz.

She's listening. I'm trying to get a hold of my wife. She's in your biz. So she's, good God, 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. Sounds like she loves you. I've been listening for awesome. That's right. You haven't said it once until now. That's awesome. Thanks. So that, okay, that ring, tell me again, I want to memorize this.

Yeah. The ring from smoking is, something is being drawn toward the surface. Myosin being drawn to the surface. Okay. And then the smoke cross-links it to make that, that ring. Okay. So you couldn't theoretically, you couldn't theoretically do it to the point where that was through and through.

It'll always diminish toward the center. I don't think you could because smoke penetration on a piece of meat, if you put a Boston butt on a smoker, you only need to leave it on there for the first hour. After that, it's done. The smoke is, it's not going to absorb any more smoke. It's not going to get any more of smoke ring on it. That's when it's just heat from there on off.

After that, you might as well throw it in the oven. Is that right? Yeah. I think it's hour or two, depending on your temperature, right? No kidding. Yeah. And that's me as an Alabama barbecue guy, not as a casing expert. You guys got that good white sauce, though, huh?

Alabama white sauce is pretty good. I ate at a place here in town last night and they had Alabama white sauce. I know right where you were, man. Did you get it on the chicken? I did. I ended up getting the pulled pork because I wanted to see if you guys got to figure out. I don't know where you were. Does it start with an A?

Started with a B. You weren't an A word. no it's a restaurant that is named after our family man our go-to is ale works dude okay just I didn't know the town it was close to the hotel we're big booth family okay like to be in the booth they got big booths yeah yeah going there you're kind of in your own little zone I mean like in your own little private area yeah yeah yeah I've got to be my wife's 4-9 so she's little bitty and huh always 4-9 so I've got to be She's small.

Yeah. She's small. And so we, we have to be careful about where we eat. Because when we come in. She will reach up to the counter. Yeah. So when we go there, they said, do you want to sit at a high, high, one of the high tables or one of the regular table, regular table? Yeah.

It's just because her feet dangle. That's awesome. I have the opposite problem. I want to find a place where the table isn't too close to the back of the booth. Why is that? So that I can fit in without my. shirt hanging over. Oh, you don't like getting all in there and you're getting a braided.

Wedging yourself in there. If you wouldn't eat eight hot dogs during. We need to talk like. So do I need to get you in like the big contest up in New York? Could you? Do you have that in? You mean the competitive hot dog contest? Are we really going to.

Joey Chestnut won. It was 70.5 hot dogs last. Listen, man. Dad is you're not into that, are you? No. That is a, that is just, that is grotesque. Soking them in water and just. Yeah.

Are you into that? No. No, I, I would do it, I would do a contest where you're just eating normal hot dogs like you'd eat. Like if you're eating them to enjoy them. It feels a hot dog enjoyment contest. Yeah. And he could like hook dudes up to like a pleasure meter. Yeah.

Yeah. And then who can score the highest pleasure. Yeah. Yeah. Like the horology lab somewhere. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Exactly. Something like that. like a pleasure measurer. Yeah. There's probably some way. Like what do you get? When you go for a hike, you get a bunch of endorphins? Mm-hmm.

I mean, are you getting endorphins or are you getting like, it's like, because there's got to be like a guilt. There's like, you're hit by guilt. Right. And endorphins. And so like those, the guilt and the endorphins are. Yeah, it's probably, it's probably like the butt at some point like the two meat and you just can't go any further.

Yeah. You'd measure salivary flow and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. But I don't know how do you measure. guilt, you know, because I'd want to see that in there.

Yeah, yeah. It'd be like the darting of the eyes. You could read it on my face, I think. How, do we, I mean, could you talk about baloney for just a second? I can't. Because I've always, like, if you'd ask me when I was five years old, yeah, I could have told you, like, baloney and hot dogs are cousins. They're closer than cousins.

Then that's what I want to, yeah, so that's, that's sort of what I'm, yeah. So, so tell me, like. I mean, baloney's an emulsion that's. that's cooked in a in a casing. Right. Is it smoked? No. I don't know if there's smoke.

I mean, I like frying baloney. Yeah. And I like smoking. Have you seen the video of the guys getting a chob a bologna and smoking it on a smoker? Getting to what? A whole chob a bologna. So it's the whole chab.

Chub. You are saying that. You miss 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 is it chob. Really? Yeah.

So this is for loading chubs right here. Is that what this is? Yeah. I did miss that. Yeah. I remember that, man. But yeah, I've seen some, some cool videos of guys that buy the whole thing from the deli.

Yeah, it's smoking. A bologna and smoke it. Is it good? And that looks outstanding. I've never done it. That's a great idea. I want to try it. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, but I mean, it's the exact same process. You can extract proteins. Mm-hmm. 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 profile. Right.

And you were mentioning some of those earlier. Yeah. I think there's nutbag, coriander. There's some things. In a roller dog. In a classic more New York style, Chicago style. Like when you think Frankfurter, that's. That's what that's in there.

Okay. Yeah. So if you took. There's also garlic and onion powder, you know, all the kind of standard spices. In a normal dog. But every, yeah. And I would say that every single manufacturer, that's the secret sauce. I got you.

They have their own. That's their own mix. Yeah. On this baloney question. Mm-hmm. Could you, like, if you mix up a batch of, like, you mix up a hot dog emulsion. Could you just decide, I'm going to throw it into a baloney casing? And then be like, it's baloney now?

Different formulas. Okay. Yeah. Got it. So it's not the same. Right. Right. I would say the manufacturing process is the same.

Obviously, the stuffing equipment is much, much larger. Yeah. Than on a hot dog and a slower process. I'm Luke Wilson. Join me each week for Film Never Lies. Since retiring from the NFL, I've had a lot of my mind. and now got my own show. So if you're tired of lazy takes, if you want honest conversations,

join us each week. Film Never Lies, available on all TSN platforms and the IHeart Radio app. All right, everybody, if you're getting fired up for spring turkey season, you're going to want to hear this. Man, I'm telling you, I'm fired up. Well, anyway, right now, we're running the ultimate spring turkey giveaway, and it's packed with over $13,000 in prizes,

including an incredible turkey hunting experience, gear from Sig, a shotgun from Benelli, a $1,000 gift card from First Light and a whole big pile of gear from other partner brands. One lucky winner is going to receive a spring 2007 Rio Grande Turkey Hunt in the Texas Hill Country for you and two of your buddies or family members. Brought to you by Bird Dog. And during the giveaway, the more you spend at First Light, Phelps game calls, FHF gear, and the meat eater store, the more entries you'll earn for a chance to win the entire price.

prize package. Getting entered as easy. Just head over to the Firstlight contest page at firstlight.com. Fill out the entry form in your inn. Remember, for every 25 bucks you spend, you get 10 additional entries. One winner will be selected to win the whole damn prize pack. But don't wait around. The giveaway ends one minute before midnight on Monday, April 13th,

2000, 26. So you got all day that day. but it ends right before midnight gobble gobble i want to touch on processed chicken for minute is that an area you're familiar with mildly ask and i'll answer if i can so people will point out they'll they'll be like like uh uh did a certain major fast food chains will have their chicken products okay chicken finger items nuggets whatever okay and people will say say, well, but that that was made from a slurry. Mechanically separated chicken, is that?

Yeah. What is that? 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? Yeah, I mean, because it's not like a chunk of a chicken cut out and fried. Yeah. I mean, 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. Okay. And it basically glues it all together. You know, you can look at a sandwich bean and see, does it have fat vaining in it? Or does it not? Yeah. And if it's got fat and fat manning, it's a whole muscle cut, right? Okay.

Just cut right off. Or if it doesn't, it went through some level of processing. Got it. 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 often these guys in? Said once or twice a day.

Oh, okay. Like every day? Yeah, yeah. Every shift. so they're coming in to do their checks and all that kind of stuff. And it's a clean process. So Sausage Macon falls under FDA. It's not USDA.

Right. Got it. Because like butchering is USDA, but, or like a USDA inspector or whatever. I don't know a whole lot about the certifications and all that. That was just a question I asked. How often these guys in? They're basically checking temperatures and conditions and all that kind of stuff. Yeah.

to call that those fast food chain chicken processing a slurry, I don't know that I would call it that. Yeah. I think that's meant to dog on it. That's meant to make it look bad. 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 it. Yeah. It's the same as like if you had a, when you grind your deer, when you grind all your, you know, offcuts, whatever, the grind pile.

Somebody like like, 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. 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?

It's the most valuable thing on a chicken by weight. As he says this, I've heard it 300,000 times from him. By weight? By weight. His liver. Feathers. Is that right? Yeah.

Because they're extremely light and they're highly valuable. They make feedstock proteins and all kinds of stuff. Out of the feathers. Huh? stuff out with the feathers, yeah. And obviously they stuff them in pillows and whatnot. You know what's crazy is on that subject. I can't remember if I sent this to you.

These archaeologists have developed this technique now where they can go look at ancient grave sites. Okay. Where you just, now 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. Just from the dirt? Yep. Within the soil and they can, there is this whole thing, these 5,000-year-old burial sites in Sweden, and then a mount, just the thing we would never know about these people

is that just the most of the best, like elaborate headdresses, capes, and things out of feathers, where there's these burials that they got a half dozen different, they're finding that they're buried with a half dozen different kinds of species, hawk, owl, grouse, water fowl, all in these, like, feathers in these sites. That previous people thought of as just bones. So, like, when you look at the, when you look at archaeology,

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 one square meter, but then he's like, you leave the rest. Like, that's why. So you've got something. Yeah, because also sometimes down the road, some dude's like, no, man, I can take that dirt and tell you what he was buried, like, what he was wearing when he was buried. Interesting. You know, so you like that level of restraint, like, leave, you know, like, leave it. Because dudes in the future will be able to do amazing, you know, in ways you can't imagine.

imagine, you know what I mean? Right. But just thinking about that, what made me think of that, as you're saying, that, that those feathers are utilized. Mm-hmm. That's the goal. Everything's utilized. But, yeah, that's absolutely amazing, that technology that you have to do to figure out the DNA, I guess. 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. And I think it's like they died and this was the burial process. So, yeah, ceremonial berries. Ceremonial burials, yeah. How much have you dealt with normal casings, natural casings? You know, a decent amount.

I mean, so we don't supply them. So the natural casings are in the form of hog, sheep, or collagen. Yeah. 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

from me to that wall over there I guess one from one of these walls of the other wall wasn't that long probably now I'm lying it was half that distance okay inverted soaked it in vinegar soaked it in a mild vinegar solution

water and vinegar just loosen it up inverted the whole thing turn it inside out because it's all fatty on the inside right and then we just very gently scraped it and scraped it and scraped it until we had like what you would buy when you bought natural casings and then made brats out of it it was funny about it it it was the toughest like i don't know where we went wrong did you salt it so that's part of the process it was a you bit that brat dude you were fighting that brot 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? Sure. Yeah, the guy that founded our company, his uncle ran a natural casing company. Oh, okay. 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 U.S. government, some sort of nuclear.

You know, it was all around that same time. I said, is this the Oppenheimer? Like Oppenheimer? No, no, different Oppenheimer. No one knew he was a big hot dog, man. So I'll take it. So he went to Europe, saw this viscous process. Hey, I think we can make inedible hot dog casings out of this.

And his uncle said, no, we're in the natural casing business. We're not going to diversify. And he said, okay, I will. And so he left. Start his own company. I mean, the guts that it would have to take to leave the family business. Yeah, it was good. I don't think they'll caught it.

Phil didn't catch it, but it was good. And then so that is. And so then he starts a company called it Viss King. Mm-hmm. Vist King. K-I-N-G, the Visc for the Visc-Cose process. Yeah. It's regenerated cellulose.

King, I'm not sure why. the first brand name, these casings, we still carry the same brand called No Jacks. So you got Kings and Jacks. Oh. So there's rumors going around. He was a big card guy, you know. And so then he decided to differ.

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 Vis Queen. Oh. Huh. And so I still call plastic sheets Visc Queen. Sure. Like I still call it that.

Yeah, I do. I had no idea why. No, I didn't know why either. So it was Viscan and Visc Queen. We sold off the Visc Queen. Yeah, like it's an entry level groundcloth when you're camping. It's a Visc Queen groundcloth. I still call it that.

Yeah. So that's where I came from. It was that plastic films. You know, and so he kind of came in at the right time. So it was the 20s. He's coming with a new technology to make making sausages lower cost for the consumer. Got it. Because the casing, the natural casing was expensive.

It was more expensive. Then the Great Depression hits. And every single family's got beans and Franks on their dinner table. Okay. You know, during the Depression. And it was just starting a business. I've tried it. You've done 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. And that was around what year? 1928, I think. And then the company invented the shearing process, which is actually a term that we stole from the seeming 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 wadden the casing up on the horn. Yep. To make sausage. He's like, why don't we do that for them? And so he invented... Oh, come to preloaded. And there's a lot of science that goes into how you make that.

Yeah. Like how it's twisted. So when you shear it, it's not just wadden 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 science to it. So it's pretty cool.

Now, where do you see it going, like, with people kind of starting to trip out about, when people starting to trip out about plastic and ingesting plastic and plastic and food and stuff? Do you picture there be people moving away from that? I, you know, it's possible. So this is cellulose. It's not. But we do sell plastic casings, the ones I got, I think that.

You're talking about when you go to any deli and go to any deli in the world, not in the world. Go to any deli in this country, man. And you go to the deli counter, there's plastic wrap meat. It's a shrink wrap. I mean, so the one piece on why you would use a plastic casing is it's non-permeable. And so it adds perfect protection to whatever's inside it. Oh. So what are the, you got to weigh the pros and cons.

Do I want? That's an interesting point. I want a bunch of bacteria making its way into my food product. Or do I want plastic? Is that kind of the selling point on that? Yeah. I mean, that's a non-permable.

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

man. I never thought of it like the trade-off on it, that it is like protecting stuff getting in it. That's right. I mean, it's obvious, but it's hadn't really put any thought to it. I think the big piece is just got to make sure that,

how does it, feel, do you get it all off? What is that? I mean, I believe me, I get it. I microwave, I used to microwave stuff in those plastic containers until my wife started yelling at me, right? Yeah. I get it.

When you store spaghetti sauce in a plastic container, it's stained red for the rest of its life. See, this is the deal. Like, I don't really know. Like, I don't know. And we'll get all kinds of emails and people in the plastics industry when I say this, but I don't really know. But I'm always telling my kids were laughed about it.

When my dad was in the Army, they'd give you things. 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? 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, 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, people will say, can you believe they were? Using radiation to treat cancer. Yeah. And it'd be like,

I don't know. 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 Tupperware containers of

X, Y, and Z model and putting it in a microwave, and in eating the hot contents. I don't know that that's it, but there's some thing. 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? Yeah, I don't.

But I'm like, it won't be in the future that they're saying, can you believe they were eating deer meat and garden vegetables? It's just like not going to be. That won't be it. Right. it'll be some different thing. Yeah, and I, the way I look at it is, you know, I know how I behave at home. Oh.

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. Yeah. And that eventually gets to the water plant, eventually makes it through a pump, eventually gets ground up. You know, so if I get microplastics in my blood, is it because of the way I'm microwave from my leftovers or is it because some guy kept throwing plastic water bottles into 100% whatever 100% yeah yeah that's it I had uh there and I was having a conversation with someone there asked me if like great lakes fish are like really safe to eat because of the heavy

metals issue right and I'm like man when you die it won't because you're eating great lakes fish it's like yeah it'll be something different to get you but it ain't gonna be that you know it's it's mercury down and where I live yeah you're yeah so you know it's you know it's No, it's true. It's a super fair point. You can't head it off. One question I had earlier, you mentioned the cost thing and the Great Depression. You'd sent me an email, and I showed this to Steve with some early ads for hot dogs.

Yeah, yeah. And one of them was some kid, these two kids eating lunch together, and one kid's got two hot dogs and the other guys got one. And he says, you're mom. gives you two, and the kid goes, yeah, they're caseless. And we sat there and were puzzling over, like, what do you think that allows him to eat two? Remember this? Yeah, so the other kid was like, mom was being a tight ass or something? Yeah, 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. I mean, that's the key. Yeah. Consumer votes with his wallet and with his eyeballs. Yeah, I'd been meaning to ask you about that. And it clicked for me when you're talking about the Great Depression. Some of those ads were just so hilarious. Oh, yeah.

Like, you know, it's a similar thing. We look back at our advertising back then. It was. There's an ammo ad we used to pass around. There's an ammo ad where it's a dude doing a grip and grin with a mountain gorilla. You see that animal ad? Oh, yeah. There it is.

Your mom lets eat two weeners. How come your mom lets you eat two weeners? No skins. Bill's a lucky guy. Yeah. He's a mom smart. You know, like Randall has like positive thoughts about dogs?

That's right. I have very positive thoughts about dogs, you know. About the hot dog. Yeah, like, yeah, like I look at, I see a hot dog and I get happy. Like when I tell a hot dog story, it's a positive story, you know. Now my wife, she's got bad hot dog stories. because you know when you're a kid at a certain age

it's kind of like fifth grade, sixth grade, you become, it's also 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. So it'd be that like there's a kid, like Randall's got Nike's. So in my school he would have been a snob.

Right. Right. And he would bully kids whose mom wouldn't get them Nike's. Right. 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.

We were like middle class people. Sure. And a lot of our community was not middle class. But I thought we were poor because I couldn't get anything cool. Now, my wife would have to get sent to school. You remember those like thermos containers? Sure. Her mom would put 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. You remember when those crackers came out and you get the cheese and it comes with a little knife and all that? Yeah. They'd have all that garbage. And she'd have to crack open that thermos and pull out those lukewarm dogs and

eat them. And everybody watches the steam. You just go. Yeah. And her, my dogs are a bummer. Yeah. Reminds her of like being at the lunchroom eating those lukewarm dogs when everybody else is

eating cool stuff. She's not the only one that got sent to the cafeteria with a thermos with hot dogs in it. That was the thing. I told her I'm not familiar with that preparation. Yeah. It's pre-microwave, right? So you've got to have something to keep it warm. I got sent to school with a thermos full hot dogs he covered to as well.

So when she sees a dog, when she sees a roller dog, she's bummed. Okay. She needs to go to therapy about it. Yeah. Because the other day we were at my daughter's volleyball tournament, they had a concession stand up there. I went up there. She got like a diet pups or something dumb like that,

and I got two dogs. Yeah. She didn't even ask me for a bite of my dogs. I don't think I've ever been unhappy eating a hot dog. Like, it's always a good thing. Like, you're over a campfire, you're at a ball game, you're normally doing something fun. No, that's how I feel about it.

Feelein up the truck. Yeah. Like sunshine, a hot dog. A beer and a hot dog, like, can't fire a hot dog. It does something in my brain where it's this positive association. I'm like, life is good. Yeah, no one's ever kicking the shit out of you when you're having a hot dog. Yeah.

Never. It takes me back to the trenches. I'm Luke Wilson. Join me each week for Film Never Lies. Since retiring from the NFL, I've had a lot of my mind, and now I've got my own show. So if you're tired of lazy takes, if you want honest conversations, join us each week. Film Never Lies, available on all TSN platforms in the IHeartRadio app. All right, everybody, if you're getting fired up for spring turkey season, you're going to want to hear

this. Man, I'm telling you, I'm fired up. Well, anyway, right now, we're running the ultimate spring turkey giveaway, and it's packed with over $13,000 in prizes, including an incredible turkey hunting experience, gear from Sig, a shotgun from Bonelli, a $1,000 gift card from first light, and a whole big pile of gear from other parts. partner brands. One lucky winner is going to receive a spring 2007 Rio Grande Turkey Hunt in the Texas Hill Country for you and two of your

buddies or family members. Brought to you by Bird Dog. And during the giveaway, the more you spend at First Light, Phelps game calls, FHF Gear, and the Meat Eater Store, the more entries you'll earn for a chance to win the entire prize package. Getting entered as easy.

Just head over to the First Light contest page at First. Slight.com. Fill out the entry form and you're in. Remember, for every 25 bucks you spend, you get 10 additional entries. One winner will be selected to win the whole damn prize pack. But don't wait around. The giveaway ends one minute before midnight on Monday, April 13th, 2026. So you got all day that day. But it ends right before midnight. Gobble, gobble, gobble. All right. So tell us, here, we've been teasing. isn't it? Tell us

the ultimate, like, walk listeners through. You know what we should do? Maybe we should launch it right now if people are interested. If anyone out there wants to try to send in a deer meat roller dog, please. Please. We'll eat them.

You know, I'm going to do it. 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 going to send us the poison. Like dudes with poison. Deliberately. Yeah. And I could be like, like, oh, I'm going to make a roller dog.

I'm going to do all the trouble making a roller dog. And then I'm going to put my poison into it and send it to them. He's got all of his charts on the wall of how he's finally going to get Steve Ronella. And then he hears this on the podcast. He goes, aha. I've got it. He's all I got to 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. Oh, pork. Pork. Yeah. Yeah.

Talk about when you, when you describe the hot dog. Yeah. 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? Sure. So the steps are. I like I put his glasses on. Yeah.

You like that? Yeah. I can't see anything. I can't see anything without them. steps are protein extraction then emulsification temperature control then smoking right that's how every hot dog's made okay um you know so there is there's a hot dog recipe on on your website for for for for a red snapper venison hot dog thanks for moving that mike randall so i i live what you think of that recipe I thought it was good.

Don't choose your words carefully here. It's got problems. Okay. That's what I'm trying to get to. He, uh, I wear eight and a half in my ticova, so I'll point out all the mistakes. Eight and a half.

So basically, he's shoving together all the ingredients for emulsion. He rightfully points out, I got a control temperature. So you're like pre-frized, 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. Does it say that in their... It did not. It did not. So in my mind, 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 until it's super tacky. Okay. And then make hot dog. Okay. 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. Oh, yeah.

He's thinking it's a fish shoved together with Dennis and meat, put him to a hop. It doesn't sound very good. So, yeah, I mean, if I was, so what I wanted to do was investigate and, and the one thing he does in recipe is 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 yeah yeah yeah no yeah so I look through making a hot he's just trying to make a hot dog I looked through all the fat options out there dear fat hey 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? Mm-hmm. You want to get it off the back, not off some of the more active areas? Yeah. The more I looked at it, I think bare fat is the preferred fat for making a pure wild hot dog. Really?

Because of its melting point, and it behaves more like pork. and I think it'd be a cool flavor. And not rendered, cubed, like cube fat. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. We have a couple jars of rendered right there, but yeah, not rendered. 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 don't think you'd want to spin up rendered fat.

I think you're going to want to take cubed, cubed. Cube fat. I want to pre-blend the fat, extract. the protein separately. Okay. Then put them together. Okay. A couple other weird.

What would be the ratio there? So I would use 65 to 70% venison. Lean venison. 18 to 22% bare fat. Very specific number. I think that's the range. You're going to be like 20%.

Go. The biggest balance of the formula would be ice. So you're talking 10, 12, 15% ice. That's the other thing. In what form? Shaved? It's going to get shaved in the emulsifying process. You know, A, it's all got to be gone before you start stuffing.

It all needs to be water before you start stuffing. Ice crystals. There's, it's too dangerous. There's things like Listeria and things that can, they can happen. you've got crystallized ice in a processed meat. Is that right? Yeah. Huh.

So that's one thing you've got to make sure it's all melted out. Okay. 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. Yeah. Right? I think there's some other cool stuff we could add mushroom powder,

citrus fiber. Now why mushroom powder? 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 overcook my smoke sausage, it gets crumbly. Yeah. And mushroom powder will help that. And it adds kind of a cool flavor. Okay. Citrus fiber is going to help with emulsion stability, viscosity, water binding.

There's some all kinds of cool things that that would do. I was trying to maintain, like, cure to the roots of what we're trying to accomplish here. Yeah. You know, we could add, I think with Venice, and we may have to add some phosphates to help get the pH down. We talked about that when the deer's. especially if it had lots of lactic acid during death. Yeah. So, you know, if you're my buddy Joe and every deer you shoot runs for 300 yards.

You know, they normally drop when I show them. Joe style, yeah. Joe style. He likes him to be over on the neighbor's place. Yeah. Long dramatic blood trail. That's right. He likes those emotional highs and low.

Yeah. I'm going to use 130 grain bullets, so it'll run even further. Mm-hmm. I stick with the 180. Yeah. Anyway, he's going to give me grief for that. Yeah, I wanted to die quick. 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. What form does that phosphate come in when you buy it? I had it written down. I can't remember off the top of my head. And what are they drawing it from? I think it's pyrophosphate. I think it's hexameta phosphate.

You mean what's the feedstock for it? What is it at? What is it as the form that, like, the earth produces it or whatever? So the earth produces, you know, it's mineral form, right? There's all kinds of, I know a little bit about phosphate, manufacture, it's very energy heavy. Most of it's done outside the U.S. And phosphate furnaces for taking yellow phosphate and making it into products that we use like TSP and all that kind of thing.

So it's the same phosphate that would be like in fireworks or whatever. Sure. Okay. I mean it's the phosphate's phosphate. Yeah. I think, I think. Or gunpowder's phosphate. Right.

Yeah. Yep, or nitrocellulose and, you know, other stuff and gunpowder. The first company I worked for into the paper industry was a company called Hercules. It was known as Hercules Powder Company. You've probably seen the old ads for Hercules Powder Company. Had a guy with a club, but they made gunpowder out of nitrocellulose. They'd get out of tree stumps. Oh, yeah.

And eventually that turned into paper chemicals. Got it. They were a DuPont child. There's a bunch of them out there, companies that spun off from DuPont. Yeah. Yeah. Would you, you mentioned when we were talking on the phone at it, like having, as you talked about earlier, having to supplement with like a way protein potentially. Is that something that you thought more about?

Yeah. I mean, I think we just got to do the math. Yeah. I mean, it's all about. That's simple. I mean, and that's what all these folks do is 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 specific. There's not venison hot dogs flying off the shelves, right? They're not everywhere. So we're going to 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?

Right. I want to have, again, an emulsion is an oil particle that's surrounded with some sort of stabilizer. And the stabilizer in a hot dog emulsion is meat protein. Mm-hmm. Cool. And basically that keeps the oil particles repelling each other. There's some other cool stuff we can do, like partially denaturing it. Mm-hmm.

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. You can go deep and hot dogs.

People say hot dogs are lowbrow. I know. It's highbrow, man. There's a lot of science. I mean, that, yeah, I mean, so like one of all. One of our salespeople has a meat science degree. So it's, it's, some serious stuff. 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. Yeah, I mean, so the traditional Frankfurter flavors, we talked about them. It's nutmeg, coriander, some of those. The other ones are kind of your standard seasonings that, as wild game, cooks, we put in a lot of stuff, like onion salt, onion powder, garlic, um, those, those types of flavors. You know, it all depends on what you want. There's, there's black pepper.

Um, yeah, it, it's what are you shooting for? So like those boys at Oscar Meyer, they have their own seasoning blend. And no one knows. I don't know it. Mm-hmm. I wouldn't want to know it. Yeah. because then they'd have to kill me

I'll hang you down yeah that's right man I want so bad she's not right in me bad my wife made these cookies it's like it looks like a giant sausage but it's a cookie

and when you slice it's like you're slicing mortadella it's got the white well it's probably the white chuckle white white oh everything in there dude you would think like from across the room you'd swear you're looking at a sliced up

mortadella sausage but those cookies yeah kids didn't like them I was trying to get her to send me a picture of it. They didn't like the flavor or they didn't like the presentation. No, they didn't care for the cookie. They didn't get the joke. They didn't get the joke.

The joke was lost on them. They were just rating it as a cookie and as a cookie they thought it scored low. Did you used to have olive loaf when you were banging around? You've seen an olive loaf? That's another one of those probably fits in the emulsion category. You know what my old man was big into is, and this is definitely an emulsion. Yeah. Is my old man was big in Liverwurst.

Yeah. He'd buy, I believe he'd buy Oscar Meyer liverwurst that had the yellow wrap on it, right? Had the plastics on it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Came in plastic, yellow wrap. You get mad if you got into it. That was his sand-o, man. That onion on rye bread.

There's 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 spams coming, you know, Hormel is coming out with a spam hot dog. Interesting. And I got to try that.

Is that grab you by the boo-boo dog? That sounds pretty cool. Real curious. Yeah. Yeah. All right. That is it? What else?

Well, you're going to, when someone tries to walk someone through the smoking process. Yeah. So I think with venison, we're going to have to take the smoking process very slow. Okay. Because that DSC curve that I talked about, we want to baby it through that gel network formation. Okay. By slow, you mean lower temp. Low term. 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 like a vertical, you know, whatever, electric smoker or charcoal smoke. Ballpark it. Like what temp and how long? Because you're taking a raw hot, this hot dog has not been cooked. You're hanging a raw hot dog in a smoker.

How long and how hot? I'd start at 120. Okay. I'd probably increase it 10 degrees over a period of time. And, you know, I'm talking hours, potentially. I mean, when a hot dog's made in a hot dog plant, it's not ours. 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 it to. But I would baby it through those early stages until that gel starts to set up. And, you know, I think we've been talking about the science. I've been 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 make the materials.

Yeah. And, yeah, I mean, I'm convinced that the primary reason of venison hot dog, I think everything that's on the market as a venison dog would be pretty close to sausage and not close to a Frankfurter. Yeah. And that's because that protein extraction is so hard. we just have to to baby it, keep it cool

and then the smoking, start at 120, work your way up until you got a dog. I probably have one wiener that would be sacrificial. He'd be the one I'd be checking temperature on. That's interesting. You say 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? No. There's a dude in this movie. He's like, he's an art dealer. Yeah. This ties into hot dogs. He's an art dealer, and he's dealing in abstract art. He says the only way you can tell if abstract's 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 abstract artists who can't do a bird. Right? Good point.

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. Right. We need to do it. We need to do a bird. I know.

So I would go to a fancy dog guy, a fancy roller dog or a fancy hot dog guy, and do the same test. Be like, okay, okay. If your hot dog is so great, make me a roller dog. Make me a roller dog out of Venice. Yeah. Yeah. And if you can do that, then I'll believe you that your dog is great. But if you can't do it, you can't do a bird.

That's why you're doing an abstract. Yeah, and that was one of the questions that Corinne asked me during the prething. She said, well, when you make. When you make hot dogs at home, and 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... Yeah, that's a weird deal, right? It's a really weird deal. Like, am I going to 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... We're in a one-buck state. Yeah. 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 you 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? Our buddy made some and he pointed that out. Cal made him 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? Which is a very valid point because I want two. I don't need thousands of things. You're going to do this to make two hot dogs. If there was every year to do it, it's the 250th anniversary of this fine nation. That's a good point, man.

How better to commemorate? Yeah, how better to commemorate? Yeah, I'm fully expecting. expecting this year to be a bang-up year for the dog. It could be a big dog year. In general, I think it's going to be a big dog year. The conditions are right now. I just had a couple on Saturday, man, and they were delicious.

That's my, yeah, that's my go-to deer camp, like lunch is hot dogs. 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 put ketchup on them. I got a problem with that. You put ketchup on them? No. No. Yeah, they didn't want to hear about that.

Yeah, my wife puts mayonnaise on hers, and I got a major problem with that. I was observing the other day to my buddy when I was eating those dogs. You know when you get those, like, let's say you're at a vent, you're at like a concession stand. Right. And they give you a dog, and it's on that little. Like the coffee filter type tray thing? Yeah, it's like a little, like a waxed kind of tray. So you get your dog at the counter and you settle up.

And then somewhere nearby, they got like the condominance station. And maybe the dog's in a foil wrap or two. Could be. 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 bed on the, what do you, the bleacher?

Yeah. You're sitting there on the bleacher. There is no chance. that you're not going to have ketchup and mustard on your hands and on your clothes. It like, it can't happen. I was just observing this on Saturday to somebody. Have you seen it? In your car?

You get out of the gas station, you get in your car, there is going to be. Yeah. Even if you skip the condiment table and just took the dog and raw dogged it, I swear you're going to walk out in your car and there's going to be ketchup on you. You need to go near the ketchup. That's so you know you had a good time. That's right. Half of Sydney's phone camera roll is just images of me with mustard.

Somewhere it shouldn't have been. I've been known to eat ribs in the car, and that's a similar. Yeah. A similar problem. Real messy driving food. You need them, check the bones. Yeah, and I eat ribs on the road. You know what Boudan is?

I do. Yeah. What I had an idea with Boudan would be, I'll see 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 hose down through the car. So the picture that you're driving, right? Use your steering wheel and everything.

And right here is a little valve, a squeeze valve. So when you're eating Boudan, you can... Just meter out a little bit. You can right out of that reservoir, you just dribble. It's perfect because you only need two hands to do it. Well, that's because you drive. with your knee. Well, maybe you'd get it such that you could like a foot pedal.

Yeah. There's a foot pedal. You know, that's what in in Europe, in Europe at the outside of the hot dog stand, they have mustard dung with a foot pedal. Brilliant. So you can hold a drink and a dog and dress your dog with your foot pedal. That's how they do in Europe? At least we're the last, the last hot dogs.

Well, I noticed it. It was not everywhere. That's incredible. Not the big hand pump. Yeah. That is a good idea. you're holding your drink the foot the foot pump you get your kids drink yeah your dog 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 pointing it's american and then and then i saw the pedal and i thought my god they are better than us or they stole that from the porta potty industry right you know that recycling yeah exactly is where they they're smart it's smart yeah it's like you people might not be willing to help us out in our 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,

we got to come find you guys all the way in France. That's where the big bad lab is. That's where the lab is. Yeah. Obviously, there are tons of boutique customers here in the U.S. That had the same equipment, but you don't have to get, you don't have the free reign of a lab to experiment and do all like that. They've got to let you

in there with us because you got to be there with us when we do these dogs. That's right. Who knows? You're probably going to get a bunch of requests. Well, it'd be tough bar for them because they'd have to be able to now write in and be like, that guy

was a hat. 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, pressure is on. And be like, he's no hot dog man. I'm a hot dog man.

I'm a casing man. I'll say that. I'm more of a casing man than a hot dog man. But you kind of have to, you got to know the process. But I'd look at, like, let's say you're an electric vehicle guy. Sure. Someone's like, I'm more of a battery man.

Yeah. Yeah. But I'm like, but that's what we're after here. That's the heart of that. That's what we're after here. So being a casing, man, I don't think detracts me being a hot dog, man. It's like the battery guy at an EV place. Yeah, I think you're safe until I get an email from the podcast email forwarding thing.

And it says, Oscar at Oscarmyer.com. That's the only, that's the only guy who's going to trump your credentials here. For the record, you guys are the one that keep bringing up that brand, not me. That's fine. Well, you know the problem is you know why we keep bringing that band up is to be honest. I can't think of another hot dog outfit. Ballpark, Nathan's. Oh, what am I saying?

Yeah. Oh, okay, Nathan's. Phil, can you scratch every time we said that, it may be that we say Nathan. Or if Nathan himself emails me. Nathan at Nathan's. They're all customers. We'll stop mentioning hot dog brands now. You haven't mentioned one that's not a customer.

Yeah. What was the other one? Nathan's. Ballpark. Yeah. So ball at ballpark? Take that call. Nathan's famous.

as their sponsors the big event. I don't get that, man. I don't think that they should do that. It's probably their best marketing. I don't think that that's a good idea. You know what? You know who's got another bad idea? Yeah, it's Winssell's,

the Western House and Noble. You're not a paint man, are you? No. Okay. Who's that paint outfit? Their logo is the earth getting covered up with paint? Sherman Williams, I think. It says cover the earth.

I'm like, can you? Phil pull that up. It says like cover the earth. Their logo is the planet. Being consumed by the paint dumping on top of the planet. And the paint is dripping off down around like 45th parallel south. I guess I can envision it. I can envision it, but I never really put that together.

And then Nathan's doing that. hot dog eating contest, I think is bad business. These people would sell a lot more paint if they got rid of that paint logo. I thought you were going to go into other eating contest. 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.

Do you know what I'm saying? Imagine if that was like Exxon's logo. Not a sponsor. Yeah. And that Nathan's hot dog eating contest, I think they should back out of that. That grosses me out, man. There's an oyster eating, raw oyster eating contest in Mobile. Pleasure or volume? It's volume.

So you got to get your name on the board. I'm going to go dark for a minute. There is the guy that's at the top of the board got sick halfway through us. You'll say. in one of those Lexan deals. Oh, yeah. Oh, that kind of sick. 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 fire it back up? They said, sure. So he re-ingested. Oh, no. For the sole point of getting his name at the top of the top of the horse. Some people have there. It's good to have.

something you're passionate about. Something they're passionate for. That's tough. Do you want me to pull the video of that? This is on Phil's phone. Man, I appreciate you coming on the show. I've enjoyed it. I do.

See, we were 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. I get it. Nice. Because people were like, hold on me, no, why? Why friends?

And then someone brought up like, would you be doing other things there too? We're like, no, just making the hot dogs. Yeah. Yeah. I'll look for domestic options. I'm sure. Are there other little worky things you'd be doing while you're there? And we were like, no, no.

We're thinking about getting some coffee. Seems pretty straightforward. 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. It's pretty easy. For another, I just realized for another, there's a writing project where I do have to do a little site visit. Yeah. I do have a Sprant site visit. Yeah.

That's a great point. We're set. We're good. All right. I just thought of it. It just hit me. Okay. Thanks for coming on the show.

Yeah. I've enjoyed it. No, that's good, man. This, I learned, you know what, you know what's going to happen now, though? People I hang out with are going to have to endure me when they're eating dogs for me to be like, mad, you know. Protein extraction. Yeah, if you're curious about what you're eating there, I'll be happy to. I don't remember what day we spoke, but Sidney had like a bad first 45 minutes when she got home from work.

It's just like, you know this part of the hot talk where the line is? No, I don't know. And that was the key, just to make it. Mm-hmm. One pound packs. Yeah. Easy for the consumer. Mm-hmm.

Love it. Thank you, John. Thank you, ma'am. Enjoy it. Thank you. Yep. Hunting demands preparation, persistence, and gear that will not quit on you. That is why I wear first light.

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