Hallowieners!

What is it, another meme? OK let’s have a look.

Hoboy.

So look, memes are silly, but they can also reveal who we are. Now I personally think black licorice is delicious, but I don’t have anything against people who disagree. Black licorice flavored hot dogs though? If memes reveal who we are, then we are clearly a people who don’t think that licorice and tubesteaks belong together. 

And before we get too far into this video, let me assure you, I will not be making licorice-flavored hot dogs.

Black hot dogs for Halloween though? It’s spooky, it’s fun, let’s do it. As a Chicago guy, I like my hot dogs all-beef, with natural casing, so I’m starting with a beef chuck roast and dicing it into cubes before seasoning it with salt, curing salt, dextrose, garlic powder, onion powder, white pepper, nutmeg, mustard powder, coriander. 

I promised you I would not add licorice, and I didn’t. But fennel seed is a classic ingredient in Italian sausages. So is anise seed. Tarragon is used frequently in French terrines and in poultry and fish dishes. Each of these, to some degree, tastes like black licorice to most people. 

After putting the seasoned beef through the small die of my grinder, I also pulsed it with ice chips in my food processor to get a finer texture and help emulsify it. Then I added some liquid smoke, because hot dogs should have a bit of smoky flavor and I didn’t want to smoke these, and cuttlefish ink to give it that jet black color a true Hallowiener should have.

I stuffed them into sheep casings, then poached the sausages in 180 degree Fahrenheit water for 25 minutes or so to cook them. 

The colors of Halloween are orange and black. Black, for better or worse, has traditionally been associated with night, darkness, death, decay, mystery. Whether you subscribe to those associations or not, it seems like a natural color for the spoopiest of holidays. But why orange, which doesn’t seem particularly scary? Orange is also the color of the pumpkins that people carve into jack-o-lanterns. Orange is the color of the bonfires of Samhain, the ancient Gaelic festival considered a precursor of Halloween Orange is an autumn color, the color of the autumn leaves falling from trees, signaling the harsher season to come. 

So if the sausage portion of a Halloween hot dog is black, it stands to reason that the bun should be orange. Riding the high of using a natural colorant, the cuttlefish ink, to dye my sausages black, I thought I’d do the same here by using carrot powder to color the buns orange.  Let me tell you something about using carrot powder in a hot dog buns recipe: it’s a nightmare.  

Carrot powder absorbs a lot of moisture, throwing off your hydration ratios and forcing you to ad lib to adjust. Those adjustments throw off your dough mass, which has been calculated to exactly fill a New England style bun pan. Instead, bloblike, the dough expands until it breaks free from the makeshift lid, pushing up on one side to create these uneven, chaotic, lumpen and misshaped buns. Next time I would simply add food coloring instead. 

These buns did taste pretty good though, and the weird shape just adds to the Halloween character. I just wish they were oranger.

But how do I make these black Frankenfurters extra spooky once they’re in their orange buns? What are the spookiest hot dog condiments?

You may be thinking ketchup, given its similarity in color and texture to blood. You know what though? Honestly I’m not a fan. Let people enjoy what they want, I say, and I have long since given up taunting people for putting ketchup on their hot dogs. Still, I just don’t see myself adopting the practice any time soon.

A dragged-through-the-garden Chicago dog comes with a dayglo green sweet pickle relish that honestly looks like radioactive waste, a perfect Halloween condiment. We can use that, sure. 

But a hot dog is not a hot dog without mustard and onion, at least to me, and so I invented the mustard and onion skull gummy. This is Dijon mustard, onion juice, fresh microplaned onion, and unflavored gelatin, allowed to gel in tiny skull molds. 

These little skulls taste just as intense as they look.

Put it all together and it’s a pretty good bite.

The sausage comes across as a weird but good hybrid, somewhere between a hot dog and an Italian sausage, as long as you don’t look at it too close.

There’s a bit of sweetness to the carrot-flavored bun and the dayglo green relish that offsets the sharpness of the mustard and onion skull.

Those skulls are the biggest surprise of all—I was worried that the texture would be strange but the heat of the cooked sausage and warm bun starts to melt them almost immediately, resulting in a mustard and onion sauce that just works on a hot dog.

So Happy Halloween! Making these was a bit of a trick, but they turned out to be a treat.