South Korea: French fry-coated Hot Dog

Deep Fried Hot Dog South Korean Style

If Coney Island witnessed the birth of the Hot Dog, Seoul in South Korea saw subsequent generations mutate into a an entirely new genus of animal. An animal coated in a skin of batter and french fries then presented deep-fried on a stick.

The taste is about as obvious as it looks: greasy but still crispy fries glued to a Hot Dog with a thick, neutral batter.

It turns out that Seoul is packed full of artisan Hot Dog vendors. Vendors wrap them in bacon , mashed potato, corn batter or what looked to be seaweed then invariably deep fry them. There are several french fry-coated Hot Dog Stands and a few more in the neighbouring Namdaemun Market. There are many Hot Dog vendors in the narrow alleys of Myeong-dong alone.

You can blame this mutation on the Korean War. When meat was scarce in the years during and after the war, Koreans made do with whatever they could scavenge from the surplus from the US armed forces bases - Spam and Hot Dogs. To make these items edible for Koreans, the locals mixed them together with the paste gochujang in a makeshift stew named “Budae jjigae” (부대찌개) - literally “base stew”. Over the subsequent fifty years, the locals have grown to love the processed meat-flavored soup, the only difference being that the stew now contains actual meat along with the mechanically-separated variety.

There seems to be no particular rules to making the stew, insofar that you need gochujang and Hot Dogs to start, and then whatever seems to be lying around the average Korean kitchen like kimchi, frozen dumplings, greens, ramen, rice cake, and actual meat. 50 years of Hot Dog flavoured broth may be a strange thing to some palates, but may drive you towards experimenting with Hot Dogs in an obscene and deep-fried manner.

One thing about the French Fry coasted Hot Dog on a stick is that they are doing it wrong, the sort of cultural misunderstanding that happens when one culture cooks the food of an unrelated and unattached culture and then impales said food on a wooden stick.

Firstly, the Hot Dog on a stick isn’t coated in real American fries but chunks of potato and secondly, the Hot Dog batter is wheat flour rather than a more American corn dog batter. If Americans had first cooked this one handed food, it would probably be a very different thing.

our special thanks to:Leslie Garcia and The Dallas Morning News

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The Hot Dog Kids