Hot Dog Style Challenge – New York

Time for the first installment in our Hot Dog Style Challenge!

I posted the recipe for the onion sauce used in this first installment, the New York Style Hot Dog in the first post linked above.  If you’re interested in making some for yourself, it’s super easy and worth a try.  It’s definitely different.

New York Dogs are famous – people talk about them in movies constantly, you hear about them in tv shows, the Beastie Boys even rapped about them (Check out Posse in Effect!)  With all that hype, will they live up to the name they’ve garnered for themselves?

Well, I thought they were okay.

My rating: (3 / 5)

With sauerkraut on one side of the bun and the onion sauce on the other, these were actually a little… soggy!  Maybe that’s the buns (though I bought nice bakery buns, no cheapo generics here!) Or maybe it’s the all natural hot dogs?  Nah, I like those all kinds of ways.

But I’ll be honest here, sauerkraut is totally not my thing. In fact, any kind of cooked cabbage sort of makes me unhappy (and don’t even get me started on cabbage relations like brussels sprouts!).  I have a feeling that this dog was doomed from the start with me.  It’s like it wants to be a pickle, but it’s too limp to really be a pickle.  It wants to be cabbage, but it’s not crunchy enough to be cabbage.  I feel like it doesn’t know what it is, and in that case, how am I supposed to know?

The onion sauce is better on the hot dogs than I thought it would be.  When I taste-tested after making it I thought it tasted really strange.  The cinnamon note really stood out to me, and it seemed super spicy and the flavour was just so different from anything else I’ve eaten that it took me aback.  But paired with the hot dog it was really good.

Would I make these again?  For me? Absolutely not.  I have other preferred ways of making hot dogs – and I think, growing up in Chicago, that Chicago style just tastes right somehow – and the onion sauce was not enough to make up for the sauerkraut.  I really hope that this challenge doesn’t involve too much more of that stuff.  Seriously.  I’ll keep trying, but one of the only ways I like it is on a reuben sandwich, or reuben dip (I’ll have to remember to post the recipe for that one of these days, as it’s awesome!)  Without the corned beef and cheese, I can’t deal with it.