
Lone Star Beer Cheese Dip – in a bread bowl!
A beer cheese dip that stays impossibly gooey for perfect dipping satisfaction every time. All thanks to one special ingredient.
In the scheme of “all-American” foods, the hot dog ranks pretty high. Sure, there are iconic cuisines like barbecue, deep-fried anything/everything, and a host of other regional specifics like Burgoo and Gumbo, but there’s something uniquely US about the dawg. Whether it’s a frank out of a questionably sanitary cart on the streets of Manhattan, to a pig-in-a-blanket served as an appetizer, Americans just love their wieners.
In fairness, it was the Germans who were the originals fans of the sausage. Brat, knock, weiss and bock are all, literally, the wurst. This tradition of sausage making in Deutschland also has mega-strong connections to the sausage we find in Texas-style BBQ, thanks to the many German immigrants who settled in Central Tx. But I digress… Have you ever actually wondered about the difference between sausage names in the US? Fun fact: wieners are usually pork based, and a little bland or milder, while franks are usually all beef with big punchy seasonings.
I consider the hot dog to be a distant cousin of the hamburger, in that they both share a high degree of portability. They’re a single hand food, with the bun forming a mess-free buffer between you and your meaty snack. They also happen to be a great option when you’re grilling for a bunch of people, because it’s so much easier to bust out 8 hot dogs than cook 8 perfect ribeyes.
In addition to being easy to cook, hot dogs are cheap, allowing you to feed a crowd without having to take out a small loan to cover meat costs. When a carcass is broken down in a processing plant, there are lots of perfectly edible bits of trim – scraps that are too small and ugly to be sold on their own. To maximise both the profitability of the animal, and more importantly to adhere to the concept of “nose to tail” eating, whereby as little of the beast as possible goes to waste, the trim needs to be reimagined, and sausages are one of these by-products.But good news – opting for franks doesn’t mean you have to skip on quality or luxury. What if you took the trim from a premium animal? Then you’d end up with a premium sausage. Case in point, Lone Mountain Wagyu 100% fullblood beef sausages, which is what I used as the base for this recipe.
A rich sausage calls for some equally rich flavors – and I thought it appropriate to create a mash-up of the classic American hot dog with a nod to it’s German roots. And so, the pretzel bun wagyu hot dog with beer cheese came to be. And don’t worry, unlike those teeny tiny NYC dogs, you’ll actually get your belly full with these.
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A beer cheese dip that stays impossibly gooey for perfect dipping satisfaction every time. All thanks to one special ingredient.
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