my hot dog has a first name

I love a good hot dog.  So, it stands to reason, my quest this summer was to find the best hot dog.  Not an easy task, as I soon found out.  Unlike aspirin, not all hot dogs are alike.  Each hot dog maker has their own recipe and process and fans of a particular hot dog are convinced theirs is the best.  A good place to start is to ask around and take it from there.  I soon found out that most people have no sense of taste and wouldn't know a good dog from a bad one, so my quest relied on direct involvement.

I must've grilled hundreds of hot dogs since April and the best ones were mediocre, at best.  Some were just, plain revolting.  A very few became favorites and in between my hot dog experimentation I'd consider these as my go to dogs.
It was always a tossup between Berks and Ballpark as to which one had the best taste, look, and plumping effect and I was ready to settle on these just to end this silly quest.

I needed to stock up and found what I considered to be a good deal.  5 lbs. of Berks grill hot dogs for five bucks and change.  Are you shitting me?  I scrutinized the ticket and sure enough, these dogs were a buck a lb.  An 8-pack of Ballparks are two thirds that price.  I figured if they really suck I'll save them for company. 


I heated up the grill and threw a couple on.  I don't know what's in these dogs but they refused to char black like every other hot dog I grilled.  That right there is a big plus.  They just plumped up and turned an even dark tan.  Well, these turned out to be the best dogs I've had all year!  I mean the texture, the spice, the look was all there.

Maybe it was serendipitous that I got a can of Castleberry's hot dog chilly sauce when I got the 5 lbs of dogs.  I never gave Castleberry's a thought before and usually opted for Hormel or some other crap, but I was compelled to get one.  Before I got to the second hot dog, I heated up the chilly sauce and gave number 2 a generous topping.

Ok... That's it.  The perfect combination.  After spending the whole season choking down crap dogs, searching for the quintessential, pie-in-the-sky tube steak, and assembling a rather enormous collection of various condiments to compliment the mediocrity of lessor dogs, I found my hot dog holy grail combination, locally, for a buck a pound.

These dogs seem hard to find in the 5lb packages.  The ticket is there but the shelve is always empty.   Tons of other brands but the Berks grill dogs always seem to be only the 8-packs.

Ya think there are other hot dog connoisseurs secretly searching supermarkets and hoarding all the Berks grills for themselves?  Not a bad idea, considering damn near every taste treat I find to be the best seems to get discontinued real fast.  Ken's wing sauce comes to mind.  Truly, the very best and that became discontinued as soon as I found it.  Masterpiece wing sauce came in second to Ken's and that's now discontinued as well.  Herr's fire roasted sweet corn popcorn is another one that came and went until it came back due to customer demand.

But I digress.

In case you forget, it's Berks Grill in the orange package.
 
Can you believe there are people out there who hate hot dogs?  I can if they judge all dogs from their Nathan's experience.

bone appetite