Cook Date January 20, 2024
I hear you: “OMG. Do NOT tell me you are writing about Coney Dogs Again!” Well, yes I am. I’ve had some disastrous results and some okay-almost-good ones. The biggest thing I’ve learned over the years is the best cooking method is to mix all the ingredients in a pan with some water and mix thoroughly. That’s right: you mix the raw hamburger in with the eater and spices before cooking. It’s the only way I’ve found to get the fine consistency I want for my dog. But warning: this post has one picture of a very unappetizing raw hamburger cooking.
After my last posting from an America’s Test Kitchen / Cook’s Country printed recipe I found a similar recipe by TessCooks4U. These taste better than the CC version and you can easily get the recipe from YouTube instead of subscribing to a magazine.
As you may recall I don’t cook this for Carla; she’s way to smart to eat these so I pick a time when she is out of town with sisters or friends.
We start out with the (mostly) common ingredients.
Measure. dice, squish.
If you aren’t preparing the dish for publication in a blog post there is no reason to separate all the ingredients like I did here. Just put it all – along with the water – in a medium sauce pan.
I used a powered hand mixer to combine everything. The burger tends to bind up on the beaters so you’ll have to work a bit to get it off the beaters and back in to the pan. Warning: Gross picture ahead.
Tess’s recipe calls for 1 – 1½ cups of water. I used 2 cups. Whatever, I simmered it for a bit more than 1½ hours – the long end of Tess’s approach. The fat will separate so you’ll need to mix it all back in as it cooks. I took pictures every 30-35 minutes so show how it cooks down.
At this point, I parted brass rags with Tess. She boiled her dogs (!) I sautéd mine in just a bit of oil. My preferred dog is Olympia Provisions. You may not be able to get those where you live, so pick some nice hot dogs. I microwaved the buns for a few seconds, nestled the dogs in their home, added some sauce, and topped with chopped onions and classic yellow mustard.
How are these? ★★★ 3 Stars
Well, they are as good as they can get with this method of cooking – and this method beats the other methods I tried in my early attempts. But they don’t come close to my target of Roake’s Coney Dogs. But to be fair, in a blind taste test for a non Roake’s fanatic, Tess’ method could very well come out as the winner.
Roake’s, must make their sauce in a completely different manner.
As is usually the case, after cooking these I think “that’s it; I’m done.” But today, as I was doing my 10 minutes of research to refresh my memory I saw some other good looking meat sauced dogs. I may just be Don Quixote here tilting at Coney Dog windmills.
