Wikijunior:How Things Are Made/Food/Hot Dog

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Hot dogs are known by many different names including frankfurters, franks, red hots, and wieners.

What do we need to make this thing?
Hot dogs are primarily made of meat, salt, curing solutions, flavouring and extenders.

Meat type that is most often used is pork, other types may be used such as beef, chicken or turkey.

Salt is used to make the meat easier to work with, improve flavor, and inhibit bacterial growth.

Curing solution have some components such as water that functions including helping create the necessary meat emulsion and adding to the meat's juiciness. Sodium nitrite is included in the curing solution to retard the development of rancidity and stabilize the meat color. Sugar and corn syrup are used to give hot dogs a sweeter taste.

Flavouring are used to enhance taste of the hotdog and usually includes pepper, nutmeg, ginger, cumin, and dill.

Extenders are non-meat ingredients (usually are from non-fat milk, cereal, soy protein and whole milk) that increase the number of hot dogs that can be made from a set amount of meat and improve the nutritive value.

What is the step by step process?
Step by step (Preferable in bullet point list)
 * Step 1: The production of hot dogs begins with the preparation of meat. After it passes inspection, the incoming meat is chop into small pieces and placed in a stainless steel mixing container. The container is equipped with high-speed choppers, which can reduce the size of the meat pieces even further. The other raw materials including the curing ingredients, salt and flavorings are blended in this container until batter is produced.
 * Step 2: The meat batter is pumped into an automatic linker machine. In this machine, batter is put into tube-shaped, cellulose casings .These casing are then twisted at precise points to produce a long linked strand of equally sized hot dogs. Most casing are natural casings, which remain on and are eaten along with the hot dog.
 * Step 3: The linked hot dog strands are then conveyed to a large smokehouse. Here, they are thoroughly smoked under controlled conditions. The cooking times vary depending on the recipe however, typically it takes about an hour.