New Gourmet Hot Dogs Make Their Way to the Market

From her childhood in Gascony to motherhood in New York, food maven Ariane Daguin long kept her distance from hot dogs and all the unknowable things within them.“I just told people that it’s better not to eat them,” she said in a telephone interview.No longer. Just in time for the grilling season, D’Artagnan, the Newark-based purveyor of traditional French-style luxury foods owned by Ms. Daguin, has introduced a new line of hot dogs with aspirations to artisanal status. Along with versions made of beef, pork, and buffalo, and in keeping with D’Artagnan’s motto of “everything but the quack,” there’s even a duck dog — the first to be commercially produced, Ms. Daguin said. All four varieties are free of added nitrites (common in commercial hot dogs), high consumption of which may have an influence on colon cancer formation. Nor do they contain fillers commonly found in supermarket hot dogs, such as hydrolyzed soy, corn, or wheat gluten protein.Ms. Daguin’s father — retired Gascon chef André Daguin, noted for his duck dishes at his Hôtel de France in Auch, France — conditioned his children not to eat processed foods. “They give the food a certain distinctive industrial taste,” Ms. Daguin said. Yet another problem she has with such products is that they violate a bedrock theory that the French need to know whence their edibles originate (chickens from Bresse, prunes from Agen, and lentils from Puy, for example).“You eat a hot dog, and you can never know where the meat comes from, what cuts are being used, or how it was procured,” Ms. Daguin said.Eschewing the industrial anonymity of the typical hot dog, Ms. Daguin has focused on the “provenance and cut” of the meats in hers. For the pork dog, for example, she sources Berkshire hogs from small farms in Osage County, Mo. “Instead of concrete floors, these pigs sleep in a barn with straw bedding and are allowed to root naturally outdoors,” she said. Their vegetarian diet consists of corn, soybeans, and rolled oats, as well as acorns and whatever else they can scarf up outdoors. The beef hot dogs derive from cattle raised on “grassy hills” in Oregon and Washington. They are “finished in grain,” while the buffalo dogs are sourced from herds in Ontario, which feed entirely by grazing and are not grain-finished, keeping the meat exceptionally lean. Peking-breed ducks, raised on Pennsylvania farms, are used for the duck dogs.Let it be said that the most valuable parts of the animals do not go into D’Artagnan hot dogs. By using the less desirable cuts, Ms. Daguin carries on as her father did: “He’d say that a good chef was the one who could not only make a great dish from filet mignon or foie gras, but could do it with the not-so-good parts,” she said.In the case of those Berkshire pigs, for example, the loin chops might end up on better restaurant menus, while the humble pork shoulder is now destined for the hot dogs, as are leg portions of the ducks, leaving the breasts, or maigret, for high-dollar fare.Good Gasconne that she is, Ms. Daguin could not resist adding pure duck fat to her duck dog. The result is that each link checks in at 320 calories, about double the count in the other varieties. “But duck fat, you know, is unsaturated fat — the good kind, like in olive oil,” she said. “The pork fat, on the other hand, is mostly saturated.”How do D’Artagnan’s hot dogs taste? Over the weekend in East Hampton, I grilled all four varieties alongside three New York standbys: Nathan’s, Boar’s Head, and Zabar’s kosher hot dogs. The outcome was not an outright victory for the newcomers. The D’Artagnan dogs seemed at first to be shadowed by the others, whose higher salt and fat content — augmented in the kosher example by the energy of extra garlic, and perhaps the nitrites as well — cranked up their flavor impact. By contrast, the D’Artagnan dogs, with their smooth and subtle flavor, did not deliver a total knockout to my taste buds or those of three other people at the table. In a word, they tasted natural — the very term that we associate with unprocessed foods.But, to switch metaphors from the ring to the track, the D’Artagnan dogs had a sneaky way of first hanging back, then making their move in the stretch. The “industrial” taste of the other entries, so flashy at first, began to seem merely aggressive and too searingly salty with repeated bites. Meanwhile, I found myself coming back to the natural taste of the D’Artagnan links. Their flavor seemed to deepen without palate fatigue. It was the duck dog, with its extra earthiness, that was my favorite.Even though he may never have chosen to eat such fare, perhaps even André Daguin would tip his toque to his daughter, now an all-American hot-dog maker.D’Artagnan hot dogs are available in 12-ounce packs ($5.95-$6.95) at Fairway, Dean & DeLuca, Balducci’s, and other food stores.

New Gourmet Hot Dogs Make Their Way to the Market

New Gourmet Hot Dogs Make Their Way to the Market

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