Gross Video Shows You How Hot Dogs Are Mass-Produced
New York dirty water dogs might be a classic, but mass-produced hot dogs are actually kind of gross. How It's Made released this video showing the makings of classic hot dogs, and it's not pretty.
Sausage manufacturers take pork, beef, and chicken trimmings (cuts left over from larger steaks or pork chops), grind them together, add processed chicken trimmings that look particularly pink slime-y, add some food starch, bags and bags of salt and spice, and churn them all into giant vats of meat goo. Lovely.
Then there's the corn syrup, obviously, and the funneling of all the meat goo into cellulose casings, where they get cooked and cooled and steamed and split and de-cased. Fun fact: It takes 30 seconds to twist enough hot dogs to span a soccer field twice.
Watch below to see the entire, fascinating process (apparently these are John Morrell Sausages?), especially as the announcer talks about firing up the grill to make delicious hot dogs, when the hot dogs no longer look delicious. It's very upsetting.