How to Add Acid to a Hot Dog

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Is anybody else’s instagram feed basically 80% hot dog related content, or are algorithms just getting really good?

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Here’s one for my favorite hot dogs from Porter Road (they are crazy good): https://shareasale.com/r.cfm?b=2122549&u=3799392&m=80197&urllink=&afftrack=

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0:00-0:52 – Why Acid?
0:52-1:09 – Kimchi & Escabeche
1:09-1:44 – Đồ Chua
1:44-2:20 – Chow
2:20-3:07 – Sumac Onions
3:07-3:35 – Caponata
3:35 – 4:00 – Som Tum
4:00-4:32 – Achaar
4:32 – 5:11 – Steam yr Buns
5:11-6:20 – Ad for Seed

Hot dog season is upon us, but the lesson you learn from watching this video is evergreen. Acid is one thing that intermediate cooks tend to struggle with. If you’re past the beginner stage, you’re good at hitting the right temps, textures, and salt levels, so this is probably the next thing to master. Acid is good at counteracting lots of fat in a dish. You’ll hear it described as “cutting through the fat”. Paying attention to this stuff is how you get better at making balanced food. The hot dog is the perfect medium for practicing this skill. Hot dogs are salty and fatty. We add acidic condiments to them all the time. Mustard, pickle relish, giardiniera, sauerkraut… these are tangy toppings for dogs and brats that balance the bite. Of course, sometimes I put bacon or mackin chee on my dog to lean deliberately out of balance into the realm of gratuitousness, but a bun-bound sausage is, I think, the best subject for this exercise. What a perfect opportunity to bring international flavors to a Fourth of July party. Take Kimchi for example. It is spicy, tangy, and all you gotta do to coax it into a proper weiner-clinging texture is chop it into small pieces. I’ll do the same thing to this escabeche, a Mexican pickled mix of carrots and jalapeños plus maybe some onions and cauliflower. Get your notepads out because there’s more headed your way. This is Đồ Chua. It’s a vietnamese mix of carrot and daikon matchsticks that are seasoned with salt and sugar, then pickled in rice vinegar. If you’ve eaten banh mi, this is that orange and white stuff. It’s a fantastic hot dog topping, and you could lean even more into that banh mi influence by adding cilantro, a squiggle of sriracha, heck, even some pate on the bun. But, on its own, Đồ Chua deserves a spot in your hot dog bar lineup. I use the recipe from Serious Eats. I’d rather not get into the weeds of how exactly to make each item I cover today step by step. You’re better off searching recipes online than relying on me as your arbiter of recipes. To illustrate why, consider this Trinidadian Chow. It is sweet from mangoes. It’s spicy from minced habanero. And the chadon beni brings a little hit of herbaceousness. What’s that? You don’t have chadon beni or culantro at your local grocery store? If you value authenticity above all, you probably won’t make this. But someone who’s fine with a small amount of approximation will use cilantro stems instead. You don’t even have to use the main ingredient in this recipe. Swap the mango for pineapple or cucumbers and it’s still chow. That’s why I’m not interested in getting into specific recipes today— if any of these dog toppers speak to you, find a recipe you like depending on what you care about and try it. Then again, some of these are so simple you don’t really need a recipe. If you slice a red onion super thin, toss that with a small handful of chopped parsley, and dress that with a reasonable amount of lemon juice, olive oil, salt, and pepper, followed by a big shower of ground sumac, you’ll get these Turkish sumac onions. That sumac is delightfully tart. I love this on a hot dog. I realize this video’s conceit is a bit silly, but you gotta trust the wax-on wax-off mysticism of my instruction here. Once you learn how to make something like this, you’ve unlocked a whole new way to add acidity to a dish in solid form, outside the typical squirt of liquid acid. If you were, like me, once mentally shackled to chimmichurri as the only fresh, herbaceous condiment to spoon over grilled ribeye or bone marrow toast points, all these hot dog toppings apply. Caponata is an italian relish made mostly from eggplant, plus briney capers and olives, dressed in a tangy agrodolce. I’d go easy on the salt when making this one. There were some good contenders for this list that are disqualified due to their salinity. Most hot dogs are plenty salty, so umeboshi paste or preserved lemon, although good ways of adding acid in solid form, aren’t necessarily good ways to add acid to a hot dog. The lesson at hand here is balance, and salt has to be considered as always. I do wanna give a couple lazier options. I didn’t even make this. I just ordered a Papaya salad from a Thai restaurant nearby, and after chopping it into a finer relish, I’ve got a hot dog topping that’s spicy from Thai chilies, crunchy from peanuts and papaya, and most importantly, acidic from tamarind and lime. If you prep a big container of this and bring it to the cookout to pester everyone like “no trust me put this on your dog”, it’s gonna be a hit. And nobody has to know you didn’t make it yourself. Finally, there’s no way I could publish this list without mentioning achaar. It’s a south asian pickle made out of mixed fruits and vegetables, but there are so many versions of just the Indian kind, and then a dozen spinoffs like Acar or Atjar… that this is one that I think you deliberately SHOULD buy a jar of before making your own. I don’t think it’s realistic to be like “hey guys, who wants to top one of the world’s easiest foods with a complex labor-intensive condiment that has an infinite number of variations before they even know what it’ll taste like”, so you’ve got my permission to buy some before you’re sold on the idea. I do hope you try one or two of these for your next cookout this summer. If you refuse, I’ll at least leave the plain dog-downers with one hot tip: Get a sheet of the cheapest flimsiest lightest-duty foil they sell, and after you construct the hot dog, wrap the whole thing up and leave it alone for a couple minutes before digging in. The meat heat’ll generate steam, and that trapped steam will soften the bun in a way that’s reminiscent of a good ball park hot dog. Thank you for watching my lesson on how to add acid to a hot dog. Perhaps this can be considered a sequel to my video about adding *** to popcorn, and I can wrap the trilogy up with a monologue on how to add ay*hu*sca to funnel cake. Seed has paid to be mentioned at the end of this video seed makes DS1 daily synbiotic a little capsule that I take at the beginning of each day to imbue my guts with a broad spectrum of prebiotic and probiotic microorganisms it contains 24 clinically and scientifically studied microorganism strains for whole body benefits like gut skin and heart health the characteristic that I care most about is the survivability of those microorganisms I wouldn’t want to make a habit out of eating probiotics that don’t make it to the colon ds01 is delivered inside of a patented capsule inside of a capsule via cap which is engineered to survive digestion but also is good at protecting its contents such that you don’t need to refrigerate the capsules I wake up thirsty every day so the first thing I do is take two DS01 capsules with my morning quart sized chug of room temp water I take it mostly for the promotion of gut health but it can promote healthy skin hydration too so win-win use my code Shaq25 for 25% off seed’s ds01 daily synbiotic that’s code Shaq25 and there’s a link in the description that applies the code for you automatically at checkout