My friend Roy is not going to be happy about this. In fact, I, myself, am not very happy about what I’m going to write in the next sentence. My favorite Major League ballpark hot dog is the (drumroll!) Fenway Frank, produced courtesy of the Boston Red Sox. And if that weren’t bad enough, here’s more: I have eaten the fabled Dodger Dog and the Fenway Frank is in another league.
The problem is that I am a lifelong Dodger fan and, even worse, Roy is such a fan that he has an L.A. Dodgers’ website. Boo to me. But I can’t help it. During one of our ACS national meetings in Boston last year a group of us went to a game at Fenway and one bite out that Fenway Frank and I was a goner. What a wonderful smokey flavor! I know virtually all Major League teams have good franks (there’s the Braves’ Georgia Dog, the Rangers’ Big Dog, the Yankee’s yummy Nathan’s Frank and so on). But I have never, ever eaten more than one dog at a game, until Fenway. So Roy, please forgive me.
Meanwhile, away from the game, I always look for low-fat hot dogs and some of them are good, albeit a tad chewy. Well, hope may be on the way for the fan of the low-fat frank.
In part of an effort to replace animal fat in hot dogs, sausages, hamburgers and other foods with healthier fat, scientists are reporting an advance in solving the mystery of why hot dogs develop an unpleasant tough texture when vegetable oils pinch hit for animal fat. A report on their study appears in ACS’ Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.
Anna M. Herrero and colleagues explain that some brands of sausage (frankfurters) have been reformulated with olive oil-in-water emulsion as a source of more healthful fat. With consumers gobbling up tens of billions of hot dogs annually, and the typical frankfurter packing 80 percent of its calories from fat, hot dogs have become a prime candidate for reformulation.
Some hot dogs reformulated with vegetable oil develop an unpleasant chewy texture. Herrero’s team set out to uncover the chemistry behind that change with an eye to guiding food companies to optimize low-fat sausage manufacture.
Using a laboratory instrument called an infrared spectrometer (IR spectrometer) they verified that sausages made with heart-healthy olive oil-in-water emulsion stabilized with casein were slightly tougher. However, when frankfurters were elaborated with an emulsion stabilized with a combination of casein and microbial transglutaminase (to help the oil blend in better) the sausage became much tougher.
The IR spectrometer revealed that the proteins and fats in low-fat cooked derivates formulated with this stabilizer system as animal fat replacer showed weak lipid-protein interactions, which implies more physical entrapment of the emulsion within the meat matrix. This fact could explain why those sausages are tougher than the others.
Image: iStock
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