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When peanut butter and jelly first met, they thought they went together like hot dogs and baseball. In recent years, the modest ballpark frank has climbed off the roller, out of the tinfoil, and into the limelight. There has been a culinary boom across sporting stadiums, where food service teams are trading fryer oil for fancy fare. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the explosion of options regarding the once-humble hot dog.
Seattle uses cream cheese, Cincinnati uses chili, hell, you can even find some fruit on a frank depending on where you look. Regardless of what these wieners are wearing, one thing that can’t be denied is that they are growing. While there has always been a market for a foot-long dog, the spectacle of these snacks has become an attraction and a point of pride.
The Texas Rangers boast a 24-inch-long dog smothered in chili, cheese and jalapeños. Another of these gargantuan glizzies is the Warehouse Dog, a loaded foot-long dog sold in Baltimore. Perhaps the most famous is the Dodger Dog, a foot-long dog that boasts some of the best sales across any food item in the MLB.
The St. Paul Saints, our beloved and weird AAA team, saw all this and said: “Hold my hot dog.”
The Land of 10,000 Calories ($135, including four sodas) looks like something that a smokey room full of red-eyed college kids would come up with. This dish is so comically large, it belongs on a checkered tablecloth between Scooby-Doo and Shaggy.
When the Saints announced this hot dog a few weeks ago, it was immediately the talk of the town, and the Internet at large. Naturally, being the hot dog hound that I am, I woke up with a message from a friend with a link to the article and no text, just the link to Bonnie Tyler’s “Holding out for a Hero”.
Naturally, I immediately started planning to take it on.
10-12 EATERS RECOMMENDED
Now, if you’re familiar with me, or my stories, or just how I am, I don’t back down from a challenge. This colossus of calories wasn’t a challenge, though. It was a death wish for one, a self-flagellation for four, and a challenge for eight. The menu recommends 10-12 eaters when attacking this humongous hog, and in retrospect, unless you have some big eaters, I would err on the side of 12.
I got in touch with the Saints, and spent an hour before a game this week with Chef James Cross (Chef JC) and watched this monstrosity get made. I have made a lot of weird orders in my life, but never have I been looked at with more awe/fear than when I walked up to the Dog Park concession stand put in for the big dog. I walked down to the kitchen, where I met Chef JC, a bald man with a big laugh and a mischievous smile who looked me up and down, saying “so you’re the one, huh?”.
Chef JC let me sit in the kitchen and watch the process from start to finish. The orders are limited to 3 of these dogs per game, because each order takes 45 minutes to make and nearly the whole game to eat.
Chef JC has been working with the Saints since 2018. He has worked with large-scale food production for a long time, and it’s obvious he knows what he is doing and runs a tight ship. The kitchen was food-inspection clean, and the staff was working hard, but trading jokes and smiles the way a healthy kitchen might.
Chef JC said that while banquets and preparing concession food is all well and good, making these wild menu items like The Land of 10,000 Calories “is the kind of shit I like.”
HOW TO BUILD A MONSTER
While he joked with me and answered questions, slowly the materials began to collect, like watching the frame of a monster truck being built in front of me. First, two full bags of french fries were dropped into the fryer. Next, three custom-made 2-foot hot dog buns from Breadsmith were laid out on a six-foot-long plank, wood-burned with custom Saints logos.
“I use all local ingredients and supplies when I can. It just helps the community, and buying local makes the world go round,” Chef JC said when asked about the Breadsmith buns.
As the chef lined these buns up and began splitting them, a small crowd had gathered to gawk at the thing being made as a full hotel pan of mac and cheese and pulled pork, along with a half-pan full of foot-long Big City Red hot dogs arrived at the table.
“Everything that we can make in-house, we do,” Chef JC said, referencing the house-made mac and cheese, pulled pork, and chipotle mayo. As the hot dogs were laid end-to-end across the buns, an entire bag of jalapeno poppers was dropped into the fryer to garnish the side opposite the fries.
I watched in fascination and in horror as the chef and another cook laughed and cracked jokes as they began stacking the pork and mac and cheese comically high on top of the dog. They had a maniacal, Dr. Frankenstein-like light in their eyes as they watched me gape at the mound of food piling up before me. While “mound” isn’t my most appetizing descriptor, this hot dog was 6.5 inches tall. If you are reading on your phone, take a moment to look at how tall that is. A regular iPhone is about 5.5 – 6.5 inches tall. That is how massive this thing was.
Once the pork and mac were piled high, it was SMOTHERED in crispy fried onions, topped off with fresh-cut jalapeños, and then nearly an entire squeeze bottle of chipotle mayo was emptied over the top. If that wasn’t enough, one side of this 6-foot-long plank was filled close to overflowing with french fries, and the other was lined with 38 jalapeno poppers. In total, this dog came out of the kitchen weighing an estimated 28 pounds.
Once it was ready, I looked it over, doing some quick math in my head and asked Chef JC if it was actually 10,000 calories.
“Hell no,” he laughed. “It’s way more than that.”
THE BRUTAL MATHEMATICS OF OVER-CONSUMPTION
I don’t think I will ever get closer to the feeling of being a celebrity than walking in front of that hot dog being wheeled out on a cart through a crowd of people. Fans stopped in their tracks and stared, some ran to get others from their seats to come and see. It was like I was in front of a float in a parade or something. The dog landed at our section mid first inning, and the game was on.
We were not the first group to tackle this challenge. During the Saints’ home opener, four young men ordered two of The Land of 10,000 Calories. Two. That’s 3 feet of dog and sides per person. Needless to say, they left without even making a significant dent. We were only the 3rd or 4th order, but we came prepared: our team included nine adults plus one kid to help pick off the French fries.
Once we took pictures, the staff cut the beast into roughly 12 6-inch sections. We were given concession “boats,” with forks to eat the toppings with, and then the plank was set across our laps.
Now, before we get into the gross process of nine adults eating more food in two hours than most do in two days, let’s talk about the flavor.
The dog itself was delicious. The crunch of the fried onions and snap of the jalapeños on top gave a fantastic spice and savor to the creamy house-made macaroni and cheese on top. The big red hot dogs didn’t quite have the snap I would have liked in a dog, but the smoky flavor really added depth to the creamy, fatty toppings that made for a smoky, spicy and savory bite when the entire ensemble came together.
The Breadsmith bun had a pleasant yeastiness, and was light enough to complement the heavy toppings but substantial enough to add its flavor to the bite. As far as holding up structurally, you would need sheet metal to contain what was layered on top of his mind-boggling dish, so we can give them a pass there.
For the meal, I had gathered a crew who knew the score. They came hungry, with a dream in their eyes and a capacity for cholesterol in their heart. Our plan was to each take down one section, leaving four remaining sections (two feet), and then a few of us would double up. Easy in theory, right?
I was so confident before I saw this being made, I ate lunch, worrying I had invited too many eaters. What if someone didn’t get to eat enough hot dogs? That turned out not to be a problem.
Immediately when my section was delivered to me I began to despair. Rarely have I described a meal in terms of weight, but this hit my lap like a textbook. Audible “oofs” came from down the line as we slowly realized what we had done. I started picking off Jalapeno poppers and fries as I took care of the mac/pork topping before digging into the dog.
Even taking care of the top of this dog was enough to fill me up. Like a running start up a steep hill, our crew had finished off the first 65 percent of this monstrous meat missile within 15 minutes, and it would take us another 3 innings to even begin thinking about a second section. Doggedly we masticated, cheering for Saints hits between groans and rubs of our stomachs.
The temperature for spring baseball did play a factor. At 35 degrees in the shade once the sun went down, the dog and its extracurriculars also cooled off. While this didn’t make it any less delicious, there is something about a cold bite of mac and pork that isn’t quite as good as a warm one.
Halfway through the game, we had five sections left with a majority of our crew tapped out. A few beers, a couple laps around the stadium and some drill-sergeant performances from me brought us back to the plank. I had housed a complete section, and could feel my stomach stretching from working towards the second section.
Chef JC took some time out of his schedule to come chuckle at us and check on our progress. He was impressed, but with a significant amount of dog left and a significant lack of appetite, our progress was flagging.
We did get a celebrity lifeline as “Fanboy Fred,” a Saints personality, came over and took a small piece, as well as a good-natured watcher who had been religiously following our progress from a section over. With these final efforts, just after the 7th inning, we completely finished the hot dog itself, with a smattering of fries and small globs of mac and pork scattered along the board.
CULINARY HISTORY IS MADE
Now this is unconfirmed. Some may argue the completeness of the dog, and yes I would have loved to lick the board clean, but: according to the staff that picked up the board, we were the very first group to finish the entire dog, no significant leftovers to speak of.
Walking out, to an unfortunate Saints loss, we all felt worse for wear. We were proud of the work we had done, but with one, maybe two more adults, we could have cleaned the board properly. The Land of 10,000 Calories had laid us low, but what a fantastic concept by the Saints organization. The experience of gathering and eating together was incredible, and nothing beats having a hot dog while watching a game of baseball. So eat your heart out Texas, and go for broke Baltimore. The ultimate hot dog challenge, and a really delicious meal outright, lives right here in the heart of St. Paul.
The Land of 10,000 Calories is available at the Dog Park concession stands. It costs $135 and comes with 4 large sodas, and only 3 are available per game on a first-come, first-served basis. The suggested group is 10-12, and I would stick to that religiously.