A.r.e. Srl Bologna
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Hot dogs and bologna share one key similarity: they're both emulsified meat products. That means these culinary masterpieces have been created with meat and other ingredients that are ground into a fine paste before being cooked. This technique gives them their fine smooth consistency and that soft bite we've all come to know and love. The two are curiously alike in flavor as well, similarly spiced and seasoned. So that got me seriously wondering, as I plowed down a hot dog the other day, are hot dogs and bologna really the same thing, just different shapes and sizes?
I sought to answer this question by polling some meaty professionals in my life. Sean Hofherr is a long-time friend of mine, and he owns a fantastic butcher shop in Northfield, Illinois, called Hofherr Meat Co. (if you're in the northern suburbs of Illinois, go visit!). Part of what he does is make all sorts of sausage products, including bologna and hot dogs.
Hofherr's answer surprised me. "We make both products in house at Hofherr Meat Co. as part of our standard repertoire. Which goes to say that eight years and thousands of pounds of whipped, smoked meat later, the only difference between our hot dog and bologna recipes remains: the size of the casing."
"Not in our recipe!" he says. "We make about 40 different sausages in house and that includes making huge batches of particular spice blends which can be very labor intensive (roasting/toasting, grinding, sifting) so when we hit on our hot dog blend back in the day, I was like 'this is the exact same process as bologna, just a different diameter casing?!' So, we made a test batch using our hot dog mix and it was fucking delicious so we figured 'if it ain't broke...' and not one single person has ever made the connection."
Holy crap! I feel like I unearthed a great meat secret. A meatcret, if you will. But not all meatcrafters share the same techniques, so I reached out to another butcher, Ted Rosen, who's the executive chef at Dickson's Farmstand Meats in New York City. He is also familiar with the emulsified meat making process, having made plenty of hot dogs and bologna during his career as a meat guy. Dovetailing the conversation I had with Hofherr, we had a great and enlightening chat about hot dogs, bologna, and all emulsified meat products.
Ted Rosen: I'd say technically yes. Bologna and mortadella are all emulsified sausages. I think in the U.S. people have a looser definition of what a hot dog is, where you can do like a Ballpark [the style of hot dog], which is super super emulsified, whereas if you go to an artisanal butcher, they might serve you a hot dog that is a little more coarsely ground and maybe not a totally emulsified sausage.
The process of making a hot dog, bologna, and mortadella is extremely similar, where you're doing progressive grinds. You're going from big pieces of meat, to smaller pieces of meat, and even smaller pieces of meat, until you're turning it into a paste or an emulsion, where you're getting the fat and the meat to mix by adding things like milk powder, water, and ice. Gun to my head, yeah, I'd say a hot dog is small bologna.
TR: There's definitely a difference in flavor profiles. Hot dogs are going to be smoked, or have some kind of smoky component to them. At Dickson's, we cook our hot dogs in the smoker the entire time, so our hot dogs are particularly smoky. We find that smoke gives it a really nice snap, especially with the natural casing.
That's the other thing. Typically when you're eating bologna, you're removing whatever casing it's in, whether it's collagen or a hog bladder or whatever. You're going to remove that before you slice it, whereas with a hot dog, especially if you're using a natural casing, you'll want that snap. That's part of the experience.
Also, mustard powder is a pretty prevalent flavor in hot dogs that you're not going to have in traditional bologna or mortadella. Our recipe for both bologna and mortadella has some wine and fresh garlic in it, as opposed to our hot dogs where we use a powdered garlic to kind of mitigate that kind of spiciness that you'd get from raw garlic.
TR: The tricky thing here is we're dealing with regional things; bologna is a really large sausage that comes in a really large casing from Bologna. And mortadella is an emulsified large format salami from Northern Italy. And a hot dog is a small format emulsified sausage from Frankfurt [Germany], if we're really going back.
I'd say they're close enough to be called the same thing, especially at their core. A pretty high-fat emulsified salami that goes into a casing. If that's where we stop the description, then that's the same thing. But to someone from Bologna [Italy], saying my Oscar Meyer hot dog is the same thing as the artisanally crafted bologna that's been crafted in their family for 1,000 years, I think they'd probably take some umbrage to that.
When it comes to the taxonomy for birds, they all start on the same branch of a family tree, but depending on how far out you want to go, you can get to different genuses and species. Maybe hot dogs and bologna are the same genus, and it's the species that differentiates the two.
So there you have it. According to the experts, it turns out hot dogs are a small version of bologna, if you look at it from multiple angles. For practical purposes, I'll still call a hot dog a hot dog, and bologna a bologna, but in my heart, I'll just consider them all a part of the same big happy family. Hell, maybe I'll ask someone to bake me a huge bun and I'll park an entire tube of bologna, dress it Chicago-style, and have it for lunch. As to whether or not a hot dog is a sandwich, however, we'll just let that particular debate rage on.
I am hoping this question isn't off-topic as it's mainly about what a specific type of food is made of rather than how to make it. Of course, I could always reframe the question as "How do I make hotdogs and bologna from scratch exactly as it's done by mainstream companies?"
So I want to know how to find out what, exactly, supermarket bologna and hotdogs are made of. When I was young, I was told that all the leftover parts -- organs included -- went into the slurry before being formed into the final product. Later, I was told that it was only the trimmings. I see trimmings as the more undesirable cuts of meat such as the parts I trim off myself before prepping. This includes fatty tissue, sinew, etc. I do not, however, consider organs to be trimmings.
I know that some brands -- perhaps the lower-shelf, bargain brands -- might use literally every leftover part, but what about mid- to top-shelf brands? In the middle, there are brands like Kahn's, Oscar Mayer, and Ballpark. Near the top of the shelf you have Hebrew National, Nathan's, and others. How can I tell which brands use organs and other unsavory leftovers and which use actual trimmings?
Also, is there a difference between the beef variety vs. the kind made with chicken and pork with beef added other than the type of animal they come from? Does the type of animal have an impact on what part of the animal goes into the mix? Is the beef variety more "premium" or do they all contain the same tier of meat trimmings?
As an example, here is the ingredients for Oscar Mayer bologna: Mechanically Separated Chicken, Pork, Water, Corn Syrup, Contains Less Than 2% of Salt, Sodium Lactate, Flavor, Sodium Phosphates, Autolyzed Yeast, Sodium Diacetate, Sodium Ascorbate, Sodium Nitrite, Dextrose, Extractives of Paprika, Potassium Phosphate, Sugar, Potassium Chloride.
Making an emulsified sausage (hot dogs, kielbasa, bologna, mortadella, etc.) from scratch is not that difficult. You would probably not want to make it exactly like these companies do. They are mass producing and need to ensure shelf life, as well as safety. There are a lot of things on that ingredient list above, for example, that you would not need if making this at home. Additionally, these companies weigh quality against cost efficiency. At home, you would likely use higher quality ingredients. Although, there is an argument to be made about the parts of the animal that are desirable vs. not. This could just be your preference. I'm not sure how you are defining "premium." I assume that in general, the parts of the pig, cow, and chicken, that can be sold at higher prices are not used to create emulsified sausages.
I've worked in a chicken processing factory and we did prepare a "slurry" for hot-dog/bologna or whatever else they put it in. It was mostly the leftover meat & fat from the carcass that we couldn't easily remove. Carcasses were chopped up finely then separated by a centrifuge machine into "meat" and "bones". We'd sometime also throw in trimmings if we didn't have enough orders for nuggets but no organs ever went in there.
Byproducts, Variety Meats "Frankfurter, Hot Dog, Wiener, or Bologna With Byproducts" or "With Variety Meats" are made according to the specifications for cooked and/or smoked sausages (see above), except they consist of not less than 15% of one or more kinds of raw skeletal muscle meat with raw meat byproducts. The byproducts (heart, kidney, or liver, for example) must be named with the derived species and be individually named in the ingredients statement.
So hot dogs and bologna can indeed contain organs, but they must be named on the packaging. Therefore, if you don't see heart, kidneys, brain, or other organs listed in the ingredients then it's safe to say the product is devoid of those parts. In this case, the product should consist entirely of skeletal meat, though this will be mostly trimmings.
MECHANICALLY SEPARATED MEAT is a paste-like and batter-like meat product produced by forcing bones with attached edible meat under high pressure through a sieve or similar device to separate the bone from the edible meat tissue. In 1982, a final rule published by FSIS on mechanically separated meat said it was safe and established a standard of identity for the food product. Some restrictions were made on how much can be used and the type of products in which it can be used. These restrictions were based on concerns for limited intake of certain components in MSM, like calcium. Due to FSIS regulations enacted in 2004 to protect consumers against Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, mechanically separated beef is considered inedible and is prohibited for use as human food. However, mechanically separated pork is permitted and must be labeled as "mechanically separated pork" in the ingredients statement.
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