A (Bacon) Tale of Two Cities
If the medianoche (the Cuban sandwich featuring ham and pork) got into the turducken (the Russian doll-ish turkey stuffed with duck that’s stuffed with chicken) in the same way your chocolate got in my peanut butter, the result might be the bacon-wrapped hot dog. It’s big in S.F., says YumSugar:
Whenever I find myself drunk and hungry in San Francisco’s Mission District, I hurry over to the stand selling hot dogs wrapped in bacon. According to my sister, this delicious hot dog — topped with caramelized onions, mustard, and ketchup with a grilled jalapeño on the side — is a specialty of Mexico. Wherever it’s from, it’s pure porky heaven.
It’s popular down the coast in L.A., too, though it’s under attack by the food police there to the point where selling it can get you arrested:
Not quite Mexican and not quite American, the bacon-wrapped hot dog, like the city that so fervently embraces it, has a curious romance about it. You can smell one from blocks away. The grilled bacon, twisted around a wiener, is topped with grilled onions and a mountaintop of diced tomatoes, ketchup, mustard and mayonnaise. Then one whole grilled green poblano chile is plopped impossibly on top. You take a bite and think, This is so good, no wonder it’s illegal!
Among working-class downtown shoppers, belligerent clubgoers and adventurous foodies, devotion to the famed “heart-attack dogs” is strong and strident, a source of raw L.A. nostalgia.
“I probably saw my first one while I was trying to pick up 18-year-old girls at Florentine Gardens,” says Eddie Lin, a food blogger at deependdining.com, who has rhapsodized about the bacon-wrapped dogs on local public radio.
To get them, “I go to places like the 99 Cents Only store in Reseda or other Hispanic working-class neighborhoods in the Valley. Parks are good too. It’s the only street food L.A. can really claim as its own,” Lin adds. “It’s illegal and yet it’s a ubiquitous part of L.A. culture.”
So you can imagine the frustration of vendors like Palacios, caught between the demands of the market and the demands of the law.
She would love to sell bacon-wrapped hot dogs — trust her — but a trip last year to the women’s county jail, a trip she says officials orchestrated to “make an example” of her, finally pushed her to give up the bacon and illegal grilling device she used for so long. Instead, she prepares dogs the only way the county Environmental Health Department currently allows, by boiling or steaming. Not grilling. And grilling is the only way to make a classic L.A. bacon-wrapped hot dog.
More the LA Weekly.
2 comments posted
Posted by: Crispy on the Outside » Archive » This Week in Bacon - 04/25/2008
[...] first brought you the plight of L.A.’s bacon dog vendors a couple of months [...]
Posted by: Mike - 06/26/2008
Has anyone ever heard of a hot dog sliced half-way down the middle , filled with peanut butter and THEN wrapped with bacon? My family has been doing it since before I was born, but I have no idea where it came from.
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