How hot dogs are made

"We are making today hot dogs," says Manuel Baumann.

Baumann, who is German, has just welcomed me into a massive, cave-cold room with immaculate white walls and a gray cement floor.

The room is part of the sprawling Weeping Radish Farm Brewery building in Jarvisburg, N.C. Perhaps you've noticed the place on the way to the Outer Banks, seen the goats out front taking in the traffic on U.S. 158 from the roof of their pen.

A while back, Baumann hosted a hot-dog-making demonstration. Ever since, I've been wanting to see what the adage says I shouldn't.

Now, here at ground zero, the door has been shut behind us. A few pieces of hulking machinery rim the room. Set starkly in the center is a gleaming stainless steel table heaped with meat - a schlump of ground beef, a pyramid of cubed pork fat and a pile of glistening, fat-streaked hog meat.

The pork came from an organic farm near Chapel Hill, the grass-fed beef from near Rocky Mount, and Baumann, a fifth-generation master butcher, from Bavaria, where he spent five years training in the traditional European guild system.

His plan: to make 400 hot dogs.

The first thing I notice is that there are no curly pig tails on the table, no eyeballs, no snouts, no hoofs. Instead, two ordinary peeled onions sit alongside the meat, plus, a bowl of spices - nutmeg and pepper and... Baumann isn't divulging any more about that. There's ice - I don't yet know why. There's phosphate, which encourages emulsion, allowing the meat and the fat and the water to become one.

The only thing even remotely troubling is a red bowl filled with what looks like thick, cotton mop strings submerged in water. Clean mop strings, but mop strings nonetheless.

Sheep intestines, Baumann explains. They look limp, but like ladies' stockings they will expand to accommodate whatever is stuffed into them.

So these will be upscale dogs - no nitrates, no hormones, no antibiotics - made at the hands of an imported butcher dressed all in white. Baumann calls them "wieners." At the Weeping Radish market, and at farmers markets including Five Points Community Farm Market in Norfolk, they'll go for $6.49 a pound.

Baumann ties on a floor-length rubber apron and begins by pushing the hog scraps into the big grinder on one wall of the room. A tangle of tendrils emerges from the other end, plop, plop, plopping into a flesh-colored pile.

"This is the part you don't want to see," he says, smiling.

Baumann dumps the meat into "the cutter," a $250,000 piece of equipment shaped like a halved and hollowed-out doughnut. A stainless steel arm fitted with propellerlike blades juts out over the doughnut.

Back at the grinder, Baumann feeds the fat cubes into one end and they emerge like long, lifeless, snowy white worms. He then fires up the cutter, and the room sounds like a small airport in the Caribbean, with a fleet of propeller planes preparing for takeoff.

He smiles and shouts over the din that the blades can rotate up to 5,000 rpm. Soon, the meat is a smooth, flesh-colored mass, about the color of Vienna sausage. Baumann pours in the salt and phosphate and scrapes down the sides with a handle-less spatula. The energy of the blades has caused the meat to heat up. He adds the ice. Now we have what looks like flesh-colored icing. The room smells like hot dog.

He dumps in the ground fat, spices, a thick stream of colorless garlic oil and honey, speeds up the blades once more and tosses in the onions whole. Using his hands, Baumann smooths the mixture over and over, assessing color, texture and temperature. He's past his wrists in hot dog "batter" when he deems it done.

In a not-so-pretty move, Baumann squeegees hot dog off his hands, washes up and turns his attention to "the stuffer," a giant machine attached to the table in the center of the room.

He dumps the "batter" into the stuffer's funnel, then threads a sheep intestine onto a thin silver needle that protrudes over the stainless steel table. Standing at the edge of the table, he positions his right thigh against a sort of pedal that controls the speed with which the batter will be forced into the intestine.

There's a quick whir, like a dentist's drill, and magically, a strand of wieners materializes at the end of the needle, filling and twisting, filling and twisting, filling and twisting, until there is a pile of links.

Occasionally, a wiener bursts; Baumann ties it off and starts again. But in a couple of hours, he has a pile of linked wieners.

These, he winds around notched "smoke sticks" which fit on long rolling racks. When all 400 are dangling from the sticks, he'll wheel them into the smoker for a three-hour session. Then they'll be vacuum-packed and sent to market.

I returned the following day for a just-made dog. They're lighter in color than their distant supermarket kin, less salty, more savory; and they pop when you bite 'em. The quality of the meat and the way they are made eases some guilt.

After it was all over, I was left wondering what all the fuss is about. On a troubling food scale of 1 to 10, the Weeping Radish dogs hardly score a three. I mean, have you ever seen your mom's pressure cooker spew green pea soup onto the kitchen ceiling? Or watched a piece of tongue sliced for a deli sandwich?

These hot dogs? Piece of cake.

Lorraine Eaton, (757) 446-2697, lorraine.eaton@pilotonline.com