Rachael Davis
They say you shouldn’t ask how a sausage is made, but we’re nothing if not a curious species who can’t help but look.
Thanks to Discovery’s How It’s Made series, over 2.6 million viewers on YouTube alone have seen the grim reality of these clearly-processed meaty treats, and it makes for gross viewing.
After a quick introduction explaining their German origins dating as far back as 1860, the narrator then guides us through the mechanised process.
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First, off-cuts of pork, beef and chicken that mainly consist of muscle tissue are ground up in a similar fashion to hamburgers before being squeezed through a metal sieve.
Processed chicken is added to the mix, along with food starch, salt and other flavourings. The starch thickens up the mixture, and the flavourings will differ depending on where the sausages are being shipped to as regional tastes vary a fair bit.
From there, a truckload of corn syrup is pumped into the mix, and water is added to make them ‘juicier’.
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The mix is then blended into a ‘fine emulsion’ by a machine that also squeezes all the air out of it. From there, the blend is pumped into cellulose casing which is twisted off at 13cm intervals to make each hot dog.
At this factor, the machine can push out enough hot dogs to span the length of a football pitch twice in just 35 seconds!
The hot dog links are then carefully adding to racking that will carry them through a liquid smoke shower. Liquid smoke can get through the cellulose casing to give the hot dogs their key flavour, and the racking then runs them through an oven.
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Once cooked, they’re all doused in cold, salty water to cool them down and ready them for packaging.
From there, they’re dropped onto a conveyor belt where they’re peeled out of the black-striped cellulose casing. The black stripes are there to indicate the casing is still on, and a quality control phase sees someone check each hot dog to ensure all the casing has been removed and that defective hot dogs don’t go for packaging.
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The peeling machine can get through 700 hot dogs a minute, while the factory as a whole can produce 300,000 sausages in an hour, and around 2.5 million in a shift.
It’s impressive industrial work, but one ingredient in particular stuck out to viewers on YouTube.
“‘A dash of corn syrup’. Corn syrup: UNLIMITED POWER,” said one who noted the discrepancy between the narration and the truckload of corn syrup added to the mix.
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“Watching How It’s Made made me realize that Corn Syrup is in EVERYTHING. Literally,” said another.
“‘A dash of corn syrup is added’, fountain pours down lol,” mused another.
“A dash of clear corn syrup. Pipe: Proceeds to vomit corn syrup,” joked yet another.
In other views, someone added: “My dog would go mental in this factory.” Who wouldn’t want to see that level of joy?
And someone summed up the general consensus: “This is gross, I’m never eating hot dogs again. Four days later: I don’t care how its made, I love hot dogs.”