Happy day after Memorial Day! I hope everyone enjoyed the day with whatever manner of celebration you chose to partake in. Obviously, a good old fashioned barbeque (backyard or otherwise) is traditional Memorial Day fare. Because I’m a contrarian/individualist, I eschewed the BBQ for a breakfast sampler plate at a local diner. (I also refuse to eat turkey on Thanksgiving for the same guiding principle: don’t tell me what to do!) But for those of you who prepped, cooked, gorged on, and cleaned up your own hamburger and hot dog-centric festivities, I doff my chef’s hat to you. I also come bearing some food history/trivia: hot dogs are routinely sold in packs of 10 while their corresponding buns are sold in 8-packs — something of course everyone knows and didn’t take this writer at all by surprise due to the astonishingly little amount of time she spends in the kitchen. So what gives? My guess was that it was a manufacturing manifestation of Americans’ talents in the mathematical arts, but no! Allrecipes breaks it down for us in a timely new article:
Have you ever bought hot dogs and buns for a cookout, only to realize you’re either two buns short or two wieners over? You’d think that, by now, the makers of America’s favorite ballpark snack would have solved this weird puzzle. Think again. … Come with me on this curious and historic journey to find out why we can’t get our hot dog to bun ratio sorted.
Before about 1940, hot dogs were bought and sold from local butcher shops and were not packaged as they are today. Shoppers would simply ask the butcher for the amount of sausages they needed and would be charged by the pound. This brings us up to modern day meat packaging, wherein meat is still typically sold by the pound. One standard American hot dog is approximately 1.6 ounces. If you do the math, that means that it takes 10 hotdogs to get you to one pound. It simply makes sense, from a meat-packing and butchering perspective, to sell them by the pound, not by the piece.
Similarly, modern bakehouses are optimized for efficiency with standards and systems set firmly in place. Buns are typically baked in clusters of four in pans designed to produce eight rolls apiece. It simply doesn’t make sense for most bakeries to completely upend their production systems and pan designs to accommodate the average number of hot dogs in a pack.
The light at the end of the tunnel: In 2022, Heinz and Wonder Bread partnered to solve this very issue in Canada by brokering a partnership to create 10-packs of buns. Maybe a similar deal is on the horizon for the United States. In the meantime, though, we Americans will just have to find a use for those two extra sausages.
My suggestion? Cut those suckers up and make a small batch of pigs in blankets for brunch the next day. Everybody wins!
I know what you’re thinking: how can we possibly trust a source that flits between spelling the central item as “hot dogs” and “hotdogs” so indiscriminately. But let’s put that controversy aside while we digest the explanation for the misaligned hot dog to bun ratio, as the author of this piece coined it. (Sidenote: for a relatively simple food item, hot dogs seem to find themselves embroiled in many a controversy, no? Remember the great “Is a hot dog a sandwich?” debate? Answer: it’s not.) The explanation provided is essentially, this is the way hot dogs and buns have always been made, right? “Buns are typically baked in clusters of four in pans designed to produce eight rolls apiece.” So… I think we’re gonna need a bigger pan. Couldn’t it be that simple? Or would that really “upend” bakery production systems? I mean, didn’t the cronut already do that?! I actually don’t have any beef with there being two extra bunless dogs. Why? Because there’s always at least one person at the gathering who’s being good about their diet and says “no bun for me, please,” while I sulk in the corner working on a bag of potato chips and homemade onion dip, lamenting my utter lack of willpower. You know who you are.
Photos via Walmart and credit RDNE Stock Project, Daisy Anderson and Kampus productions on Pexels
Missed opportunity to link the classic Father of the Bride scene where Steve Martin goes ballistic over this problem. I think about it every time I have hotdogs. 🙂
Me too! Classic rant on this very subject 🙂
☝🏻 every time.
I AM REMOVING THE SUPERFLUOUS BUNS!!!!!!
Superfluous is my favorite word (along with iconoclast)
And i will always LOVE this unhinged Steve Martin rant about somebody at the weiner company getting together with someone from the bun company to screw us all.
Nope, it’s the passing comment Swoosie Kurtz makes in “True Stories” (a film about a bunch of people in Virgil, Texas). It’s right before the “Love for Sale” video.
the two extra are for the cook — I make sure I burn at least two into an unrecognizable blackened, shriveled mess and then happily munch while everyone makes a plate.
our extra two were always for our girls. gottta pay the tax!
At every cookout there is someone like me who was raised on wrapping the mustardly hot dog rolled in a piece of white Wonder bread. I didn’t know buns made just for wieners were a thing until I went to high school. The 10/8 ratio works when you factor in the dog wanting hers without the bun as well.
Same. Wonder bread for burgers, too. Plus, I recall when my brother was a baby, he always liked to have a hot dog straight out of the fridge to eat. No cooking, no bun, no nothing.
There are extra hot dogs in case my little dog succeeds in making me stumble and I drop one or two.
It almost thought that made sense, until I realized the bun bakeries could keep all the same baking equipment, keep baking in pans of 4 or 8, but just get bigger bags.
So bake in whatever quantity you want, but package 10 per pack. Every 5 pans of 8 buns you make will yield 4 bags of 10, so it’s not like you’ll wind up with lots of random rolls.
That being said, the 8 rolls vs 10 dogs issue never bugs me, because these days, there’s always someone at the party that wants a bunless dog so non-problem.
At the cookout I was at this weekend, there was a whole convo about condiments, specifically the onion, mustard, relish are okay on hotdogs, but not ketchup. I actually like ketchup on hotdogs, that’s how I eat them at home, with maybe onion/mustard if I’m in the mood. But friends who’d run a roadside diner were all No! No ketchup!
Because some Big Shot over at the wiener company got together with some Big Shot over at the bun company and decided to rip off the American public.
Ah, the eternal question!
I don’t if this is the same for anyone else but I’ve never been short on buns or had too many hot dogs. It seems to even out in the end.
Ballpark hotdogs are 8 to a pack. I figured all had switched to that
Am I the bunless person you refer to?