Hot Dog: Newsletter Challenge (07/03/07)

never seen one .... but I guess one electrode is placed on one end of the food and the other electrode is placed on the other end ..... and the hot dog gets electrocuted.

Thereby becomes its own heating element.

Sounds cruel .... not sure I could endorse lunch cooked that way.....

oh well, .... Chow for now.....

That was my first thought - as long as the electrodes don't constitute heating elements....

Hi English Rose,

I read "no resistive heating elements" to mean that no part of the hot dog cooker would be heated by being resistive to the current used by the machine....

I don't think the electrodes that contact the food will be resisting anything (although the hot dog may transfer heat to them as a by product of the process)

Hi Red,

My comment was supposed to be a joke...ah well

electrical execution gives us electrocution, I suspect the dog is already dead?

Hi Hux,

........ I suspect the dog is already dead?

.....of course the hot dog is dead.....

I just think it seems somewhat diabolical to electrically execute your food before it's served.... that's all.

If the surface the hot dog sit in is magnetic, induction cooking would be a candidate.

If the hot dog is magnetic (lord knows they put everything else in them, why not iron?), then you do not need the magnetic plate under the dog. ;-)

But in this case I like the electrocution method. All you need are two pads for the dog to sit on.

The dog could be on a knife like non magnetic surface and passed back and forward through a magnetic coil. This would heat up the knife and cook the dog.

Unfortunately, that would be eddy currents and resistive heating...
Fyz

I agree, I think the dogs become the heating element.

I remember these from my childhood, suprisingly, I even remembered the items name "Presto Hotdogger". A quick google search turned up lots of hits. As others have guessed, it's a hot dog "electric chair", cooking by sending current through the dogs. Simple and effective.

Tom

Yes we had one of these when I was young. Worked fairly well although the meat tended to taste different then boiling, grilling or barbequing. I always thought it had a slight metallic taste.

I remember the device too, and there's only one way to describe the taste: TERRIBLE!!

Hi Guys,

The reason the dogs would taste terrible is because there is a certain amount of ionisation of the mositure [water] in the dogs, resulting in the bad taste.

There was once also a kettle which worked on the same principle but the boiled water tasted foul.

Cheers

Pay attention to limit the current that flows into the hot-dog or it may emit some light as this pickle does:

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/quantum/sodium.html#c3

benoit.

this reminds me, I must dig out my potato clock...to power the LCd display, you just shove the elcetrodes into the potato (or other vegetable of your choice). Potoes don't last as long as batteries though.

What the hell is a potoe?

What the hell is a potoe?

Colloquial, as in "Ow! Dang it! I hurt ma' potoes win ah stubbed dem on de leg o' de bed."

Thought I was the only one that remembered those cookers but to see one after 40 years still around. Must be an Antique collector.

Are they wired in series or parallel?

parallel

Yup. I remember that thing, they had a few problems...

1) it flared the ends of the dog,

2) they came out with a U-bend that wouldn't flatten out

3) the ends of the meat had a metallic taste

4) the cones deteriorated in the wash

5) major shock hazard

It's amazing we survived...

Ohhhhh mama, that baby has "class-action" written all over it!

If it's not td's Presto Hotdogger, I say it's something that uses ultrasound. In that case, I'd say it's a device we haven't heard of yet.

That's not likely, so my vote is for the Hot Dogger.

Two nails wired to the outlet for power,act as contacts to use the hot dog as the resistance element heating it.

My brother tried this (we didn't have the Presto). It worked, but the hot dogs tasted very strongly of iron. Echhh!!!

the dogs are carrying current and act as resistors, heated by electrocution, i'd say

Jstacat

The hot side of a multi-stage Peltier solid state cooler should be able to slowly cook hotdogs.

Sorry for not having signed in.

The hot side of a multi-stage Peltier solid state cooler should be able to slowly cook hotdogs.

My guess as well- a TEC ( thermo electric cooler) plate should as a general rule of thumb have a temperature of the hot side 20 to 40C above ambient room temps. So a room at 20C (68F) would give a T(hot side) of 40-60C (140F). In an enclosed box that ought to roast that wiener up in about X minutes? A TEC Peltier cooler is what's used in the little portable frig/heaters that you can plug into your vehicle like this- 150F max. Hot and cold personal frig.

TEC selection

This will also work with pickles. Plus, they'll glow. When you can read by their light, they're done!

My dad did this with two metal probes in the mid-1950s. The dogs didn't taste too good then, either.

It has a nail attached to the neutral lead and one to the hot lead. The nails are inserted into the ends of the hot dog. When you plug it in the wall you get 120 volts across the wiener and 'volla it gets cook. We used this method years ago when I was in the US Navy Seabees.

When the answer can be copied by googling "hot dog cooker", this challenge column has reached a new low.

Oh, come on. Can't you pick a harder challenge? :-)

Each end of the hot dog has an electrode pressing against it. Plugging in the cooker sends the 120VAC directly through the dog and cooks it.

I made one of these as a kid by driving two nails through a piece of wood and attaching wires. ...a project that would sadly never be allowed in this day and age.

david

A friend of mine in college also built one from two nails and a board. He then spent a few months "researching" which hotdogs cooked faster. Apparently, hot dogs have varying amounts of salt which leads to wildly variable resistance and cooking times.

Your absolutely right ! We couldn't do this today !!! This was a project we did in , ( Hell...6th or 7th grade ) I guess...for Electricity class....probably 1962 or so...... Can you imagine the kids with two energized nails @ 120v potential ? .....

Were we smarter then ? Or has common sense just been abolished ?

Jamie

Were we smarter then ? Or has common sense just been abolished ?

Common Sense has been abolished!!! When someone can get millions for a cup of coffee spilled in their lap or try to sue for a lost pair of pants there can be no common sense. Thank God that someone saw the light in the last one!

The hot dog cooker project really shows how powerful electricity can be. Look at a resistance welder if you really want to see the power!

Did I read in a post on here that a hot dog actually contains meat???

I thought they were soya protein, fat and chemicals, Ohh and a little dash of preservatives, emulsifiers, colouring and flavouring agaents!!

John

Ah yes the famous byproduct on a bun. It does contain meat if snout, tongue, lips and cheeks are considored meat.

The label doesn't say meat.

It says Beef, Chicken, Pork !

As a kid I used to use 2 nails, an electric cord, and "plug in the dog".

Never did like the dogs though.

"soya protein, fat and chemicals"

That's known as a "Veggie Dog", and like its cousin, "Veggie Burger", generally tasteless or overflavored to the point that it is disgusting.

I'd bet it works like my wife's hot dog cooker. The hot dogs are placed so as to be fairly low resistance electrical conductors that close the circuit in the cooker, and are "electrocuted". I'd guess each dog dissipates 50 - 100 watts of electrical power as heat buildup, sufficient to heat them up and cook them quickly and evenly. They stay juicy with no scorching.

My wife's cooking and electrocuted.

I'll choose the latter.

I use something similar to demonstrate the hazard of DC electricity. My "cooker" with two nails stuck in the hotdog is at 400 VDC. The current peaks over 5 amps initially and settles in at 500 mamp (onset of ventricular fibrillation in the DC world). The hotdog makes a great sizzling sound, smokes, stinks, and burns off of one nail with lots of sparking and a red glow in about 12.45343 seconds. The hotdog is cold and smells horrible. Definitely not a good way to cook meat.

But it makes a heck of an impression on the worker bees.

At residence University of Waterloo we were not allowed to have a hotplate or toaster so all the engineer students cooked hotdogs this way. A piece of plywood , 2 nails and a piece of power cord. Crude but got a quick cheap snack. The Hotdog formed the resistive heating element.

Use the dog as a resistance passing current through causing to cook

I made one of these when I was in college. When the lid closes, pins stick into each end of each hot dog. The line current goes thru the length of the 'dog heating it quickly. I could fully heat a 'dog from frozen in less than 2 minutes. I guess one could say that there really is a heating element - the hot dog itself!

It probably uses a thermoelectric heater, which is like a thermocouple (actually many) in reverse. If it is, it can also be used for cooling.

It reads like they are being "cooked" by passing an electric current through the "dog" a fad item from the 60's or 70's whereby the "autmatic shutoff" depends on the resistance of the "dog". Often the ends get a bit charred. I think the grilling method is preferable.

Using google to find "Hot Dog Cooker"; is where these challenge problems are headed. After all as time passes and people get more intimately connected with the information database (internet), then all knowledge available to mankind will be accessable with a quick search. I can't possiblely predict the timeframe, but I bet it will be sooner than I expect.

The only way to avoid the search for solution is when the challenge questions are presenting problems not previously solved by mankind. At some point this will happen too as we use our collective efforts to solve problems rather than hide behind closed doors hoping to make some $$ from solving a really difficult problem.

I'm still having fun trying to make the ice tubes from last week. I have the distilled water, a freezer with a fan, a temperature probe to help set the 1-9 cold, colder, coldest setting. Still no luck. Right now I'm trying to find an ice tray that won't bulge when the water freezes.

You don't have to use Google to find the answer to these questions. Look at the "Boxes and Coins" from a couple of weeks ago. KennyT came up with a solution that was much better than the official answer, and some are not satisfied yet that the official answer is correct.

For this question, tdesmit didn't need to use Google to find the answer, he only used it to confirm his memory and find a picture. And some are still proposing other methods to achieve the same effect.

"Some are not satisfied that the official answer is correct" . Can this really be you, 3Doug, ducking out of expressing your own view on the matter.

My 2-cents worth - the arrangement described in the official answer would have needed additional data equivalent to at least two further weighings; and, even if we accept that such information would be available, the weight differentials it used were not compatible with the weights given in the original question. Not just wrong, but crass.

BTW, if the Presto hotdogger is the official answer, that's wrong too, because (as pointed out in post #50) the hot dog is a resistive heater.

Fyz

No, I'm not ducking out, I'm sandbagging. I'm still thinking about that problem. In the meantime, I've had to deal with some issues here at home. I won't go into details, but now I know how to disassemble and reassemble a certain large piece of porcelain plumbing.

Back to the issue at hand: People need to be sure to read the problem carefully. Some of the devices mentioned use water, and the problem states that no water is added.

Also, I have noticed one possible method of generating heat that no one has brought up yet - electrochemical reaction. Normally, we think of how electrochemical reactions in batteries produce a current when connected to a circuit, but they produce heat too. Batteries can also produce heat while being recharged. I have a small, handheld LCD TV, and the batteries in it get very warm when they reach the end of their usefulness in the TV. Someone with a greater knowledge of chemistry than I have could design a gel cell type device to serve as a heating element. The device would not power the cooker, just produce the heat. However, having just proposed this, I will disqualify it as a possible solution because batteries heat up due to increases in internal resistance.

Of course, another way to produce heat is friction.

Anyway, I hope this discussion doesn't get too heated.

I'm relieved to hear that you've solved the critical porcelain problem (pun intended) and have not ducked out on the other.

I wondered about friction, but feared that mechanical resistance in the form of friction might be disqualified as too close to resistive heating. Adiabatic compression and latent heat are distinct in that they are both reversible effects (until you extract some of the heat, of course).

I have always recommended staying clear of water - it tends to dilute the alcohol stream unnecessarily.

BTW, I haven't (yet) had much of a problem with the porcelain part, but the plastic inserts in the upper section can be a pain in the ****

Fyz

Those nasty plastic fittings are really ****. They look as though the notion was to allow for variation between manufacturers , but I don't think I've seen any (not that I'm in the habit of getting on my hands and knees to inspect every fixture I see). Maybe there is an opening there (so to speak) for a better design. I have as yet not been faced with the problem of fitting a complete loo - I'm told that getting the large rubbery gasket thing to fit is a bit like wrestling an Alligator. Here is a mildly amusing anecdote - In my skool days , a science teacher set us a homework exercise to explain how the flush mechanism on a toilet worked. He was delighted with all submissions , explaining that he could now mend his own broken facility without getting too messy investigating.

Now , where were we..mmm... hot-dogs.

How about some of these? Although I don't think you plug them into the mains...eek!

When I got the homemade soup out this morning to heat up for lunch, it had a veritable forest of approx 1/16" diameter tubes over the surface. Tada!!

PS: it was asparagus soup

I was getting some ice out of the fridge this morning (ice pack for my sore knee....aaarrhhh poor thing meow) I had a whole tray with nice pimples in the middle.

It was reassuring to know why!

I'm going to take a different direction and say a small compressor could produce the heat and convection or conduction would heat the hotdogs.

The hot dog cooker utilizes magnetic induction heating - faster than a microwave - I have had a similar hot plate since 1988

The conductive component of the hot dog is high enough to transmit current through it, and cook the hot dog at the same time.

This sounds very much like how we made tea without a kettle.
(in the armed forces.)

To brew up we just stuck the bare ends of a live electrical wire
into a mug of water - usually boiled in seconds! Tea up!

If you blew the fuse the first time, just stick something of resistance
on to one end of the wires - but it rarely blew the fuse, and worked everytime.

Best not to get too careless with the wires though! (had a few shocks)

jt.

http://www.fastfreeads.com

Reminds me of the old high school experiment. The science teacher puts two wires connected to a battery and a light bulb into a beaker of distilled water. No light.

Taking ordinary table salt, NaCl, the teacher makes a few shakes into the beaker. The lamp begins to glow. Using a glass rod and being careful not to disturb the wires, he then stirs up the salt to help it dissolve. Very soon the light bulb is shining brightly.

This then leads to a discussion of ions, anions, and cations, and of electrical conductivity.

Your tea water was probably taken from a hard water source, with many dissolved minerals acting as ions, such as a spring, well or lake, and not a "soft water" source such as distilled water, some streams, or clean air rainwater. However, if soft water was disinfected through chlorination using calcium hypochlorite you might also have a high concentration of ions, allowing electric current to pass. One caveat though, be careful not to breath the vapors coming off one of the electrodes (wires) as it is likely to be poisonous chlorine gas (Cl₂).

Placing a resistive material between the two wires changes the heating mode from direct to indirect, as the material heats up first, then heat is conducted into the surrounding water. Without the resistive material the electricity heats the water directly as current passes between electrodes through the water via the motion of the ions, giving up some of their energy, which becomes heat.

The electrodes worked on board ship in the 60's. When we distilled water on board ship we made the drinking water taste a little better by carrying over a little of the salt brine in the high boil state. This would give the water a better taste than just distilled water and would allow us to heat the water for coffee or tea in the engine room do to the salt content. (very low) Although the water we made for feed had no salt carry over as it would act as a corosive in the HP 1200# boilers.

Had fun with this as the newby would get fresh distilled water (no salt) while the rest of us would get "sweet" water. ours would boil his wouldn't

It said no radiant energie(did sun is radiant energie???) but the easiest way to cook a dog that dont taste iron is a solar hotdog cooker the 120Volt is only for a motor to rotate the dog.

It cool to see the hotdog been burn by the sun. When i was youngt in vacation camp they show us how to do it and it working great without bad taste and it eco-friendly!!!

10 year ago it take about 5 to ten minute to be fully cooked, i try it 2 week ago on a sunny day 34 celcius outside and in 5 minute it was burn to death lol :)

Duh. I had one of these in the '70's. Electricity flows through salty water. There is resistance, and therefore heat. Get it?

How about a inductive coil setup, where the hot dog is placed inside a large inductive coil. I have seen this used as a forge setup to heat steel to white hot temperatures.

I did this as a kid. Two 16pd nails hammered thru an old wood skate board, the length of the hot dog apart. Bend the nail tips toward the center of board place hot dog to be cooked between the tips. Attach 120V .What else could EE do at 7 years old in the middle of summer?

I'm glad my wife didn't have one of these.

W. Bobbitt.

Still feeling stumped?

Just hard done by.

W.Bobbit

How about some type of heat pump?

Why do so many people feel the need to repeat almost verbatum the same story as so many entries before them

We use to do this as kids

We had one of these 40 years ago

Seems like everybody in Amercia circa 1960/1970 were cooking their food on skateboards or more crudely just jamming a couple of nails in the end of it.

So far we've had hotdogs, and pickles. Any advances to see if we manage a four course meal?

Al

I did boiled water earlier on, as did at least one other person.

The boiled water concept can lead on to poached eggs, rice, pasta,cabbage,bully beef,gravy, you name it.

I reckon its ultrasonic. As its pressure waves I'd say it doesn't count as radiant energy (clutching at straws ?!)

No resistive heater involved - that's difficult. The presto hotdogger sounds like a health hazzard - expect metal hydrides absorbed into the sausage from the electrodes; but the hod dog is a resistive heater in any case. (We don't have magnetic hysteresis in the sausage to provide losses, and other forms of induction heating use resistance.

OK, so we probably know the official answer, and, if so, it is not compatible with the question as asked. So what could work?
Low frequency near-field acoustics - unlikely, I think
HF acoustics would be radiative in the formal sense
With these temperature differences, most of the heating using thermoelectrics would be due to resistive heating (even if theoretically ideal thermoelectric heaters existed for this application).
Maybe inductive coupled heating of a magnetically hysteretic hot plate? But I can't think of any magnetic materials that would provide the required behaviour.

The only thing I can come up with so far that fits: a compressor that uses hyper-compressed air inside a tube. This will get very hot, and can be used to heat an air-stream that is routed to heat the sausage.
Watch out, Heath Robinson, Emmett and Rube Goldberg - CR4 is on the case.

Better (or ?preferably worse) ideas that conform to the challenge eagerly awaited.

Fyz

Regarding magnetic induction heating; any ferrous type alloy, such as magnetic stainless steel will work. There are various cookware designs that have been marketed for years. A series of sinusoidal waves stamped magnetic ss bases, will heat the dog resting in the valley, just like those we find in the local convenience store. The magnetic induction coil is sealed below the ss base which heats the hotdog very rapidly.

Have a great 4 th of July

Mr. RELTEK

Induction heating certainly works. What I'm not certain about is the mechanism - is the heat mainly due to the hysteresis or are there significant losses in the associated eddy currents? (I'd always assumed the latter, in which case we still have a resistive heating element).

maybe they've somehow split the hotdog atom ???

This can only get worse - now we have radiation sickness from eating hot dogs. Not-so-cold fusion would be only slightly less problematic.

Fyz

The hot dog has a probe at both ends. (little metal spike) The metal spikes are hooked to the 120 and the hot dog itself becomes the heating element. I bet the salty ones take less time to cook! Ken Brockway

Well Ken Brockway,

That is sheer genius!!!

If only someone else had thought of that then you wouldn't have had to bother yourself posting "your" idea. You could have been off elsewhere solving the problem of global warming or world peace!!!

I look forward to reading more of your incredible ideas and explanations!

Al

I tried the 120 V electrode method on a snotty English bloke but it was impossible to warm him up. Must of had distilled water in his veins.

more likely to have been whisky, or whiskey...

"more likely to have been whisky, or whiskey...

...or "uisge beatha", Gaelic for "water of life", like the Latin "aqua vitae".

However, if he had that much distilled alcohol in his veins, wouldn't that lead to "human combustion" when hooked to 120 VAC? <grin>

Can we try it? Can we? Can we?

<ER starts writing a list of possible test subjects>

I would love to see that list, especially your Top Ten!

Do any CR4'ers make the list? <grin>

I am sure a good many of them might be politicians, but I know one of them has got to be Paris Hilton!

What if we suspended the dogs from different quadrants of a flat disk eg a CD, then suspended the CD using blu tak and a string in the middle, we could work out which one weighed different to the others. This knowledge combined with the "calculated weight" could be used somehow ..... maybe to heat the hotdogs .. ???

A subtle way of saying that the barbecue is using the hot air from CR4?

Taking up Fyz's challenge to find HR type solutions....

It's a fridge and you put the hot dog on the cooling fins (conductive not radiant energy) - this holds true for lots of electrical equipment, eg computers, but with the fridge you get the by-product of a cold beer/soda to drink with the 'dog!

Assuming that it is a vapour-compression (not thermo-electric) fridge, I like the principle. I know it's intended to be HR/RG solution - but...
Are there practical fridges where the fins become hot enough to cook an hot dog - that can still keep the beer cool enough?

Fyz

P.S. I also thought of using junction diodes and tunnelling devices as the heaters - indeed, any device where most of the energy is released overcoming quantum barriers rather than in resistive conversions. Then I realised that the initial internal conversion is to photons or phonons - both technically radiative effects, although that is not how the dog gets cooked.

Don't fridges have compressors....motors....coils.....resistances.....heatingses...

I'm trying to imagine an electrical circuit that doesn't have some element of resistive heating.

Yes - resistance = "thermodynamics in electrical circuits" - => unavoidable in any electrical activity.

Typically, however, a fridge is designed to avoid the heat from the resistance in the motors finding its way into the refrigerant, as that would reduce the efficiency of the cycle. So, although there is resistive heating in the motor, this is not involved in cooking the 'ot-dog.

That's probably about as close as you can get to cooking the 'ot dog without resistive heating. So the best solution (so far) was posted by English Regina (at least in part) as a light-hearted diversion.

Time to stir the pot some more...

The cooker is a hot dog cooker. That means it is designed specifically for cooking hot dogs, but it could be used for other foods as long as they are similar in size and shape to wieners.

"No chemical fuel" means nothing is burned, no gas, no butane, propane, or lighter fuid.

"No restistive heating elements,"... well, we could say that the dogs are not heating elements, in that they are not used to heat anything else, or one dog is not used to heat the others. Sure, they are resistive, and they heat up, but the heat in each dog is not intended to be used beyond the dog itself. I know this is picky, but isn't it an engineer's job to deal in details?

"No microwaves or any other type of radiant energy." This knocks out the solar cooker, because light is radiant energy. Actually, to meet this requirement, the heat must not reach the dogs by radiation.

So what else is available? The possibilties include chemical reaction, friction, conduction, and convection. The questions we are left with then are: What is practical, given the purpose of the device? And what is real, that is, what devices already exist for this purpose that also meet the requirements given in the problem?

"No restistive heating elements,"... well, we could say that the dogs are not heating elements, in that they are not used to heat anything else, or one dog is not used to heat the others. Sure, they are resistive, and they heat up, but the heat in each dog is not intended to be used beyond the dog itself. I know this is picky, but isn't it an engineer's job to deal in details?

Couldn't have said it better myself! Maybe that shows the difference between and Engineer and a Physicist! <grin>

Obviously, you are simply stating that engineers don't understand English - or at least will twist it to meet their preconceptions: the hot dogs heat, and they are individual items, or elements (or alternately, the elements that provide the heating). There is nothing in the term "heating element" that necessarily implies that they heat something else.
In any case, this method results in at least the ends where the electrodes are stuck tasting revolting; in my book, that would make it a pretty rotten answer, even if it was semantically correct; certainly, I would have had words with any engineer working for me who continued to advocate a solution to a technical problem after it was seen to have side-effects that were unacceptable to the customer.

Fyz

"..certainly, I would have had words with any engineer working for me who continued to advocate a solution to a technical problem after it was seen to have side-effects that were unacceptable to the customer."

Unacceptable to the customer? Well they certainly must have sold a LOT of these gadgets to have so many people remember them. I don't think there really was anyone advocating a "solution to a technical problem", since there are so many ways to heat up Hot Dogs anyway. I think it was the novelty of the thing that sold them.

And my description of the device still stands anyway, because it did not have any resistive heating elements in it as produced and sold, and perhaps I could have added that bit, but then it would really have been giving away the answer now wouldn't it?

Besides that darn 75 word limit that CR4 requires makes it extremely hard to be very descriptive. Wouldn't you say that MANY of these challenges suffer from the same problem?

Personally, the wieners I ate tasted just fine. The owner did say the trick is to NOT overcook them, and I can understand that.

Have you ever eaten a Hot Dog that was overcooked in a Microwave oven? They taste pretty bad also.

Hi STL

I too imagine that it was pure novelty sold them - my response was to this being the engineers approach to the problem as posed. Yes, the word limit is a pain - you could have squeezed a few words by removing redundant information, but it would still have been tough to tighten the question without showing why it needed to doing. Even as it was, Uncle Red gave the expected answer before the majority of us had even seen the post.

That said, it would be nice to have alternatives that do the job exactly as described (ER gave us a good start).

It's been a long time, but my recollection is that my preference was for boiled Bratwurst served with sauerkraut and German mustard (I think the boiling takes out some of the saltpetre).

Fyz

Whoa! Saltpetre?

You had me scared there for a while until I did a little research. The saltpeter I know of is Potassium Nitrate, and you would not want that in your bratwurst. It is a principal component of gunpowder, and they used to joke in the military about how the cooks added "saltpeter" to the food, as it was said to induce impotence, and it was added to keep us "out of trouble".

In olden days Saltpeter was produced from old stale urine (ugh!), but I think it is now chemically synthesised or obtained from ore. I think it might have been used in the past as a food preservative, but its use has diminished substantially.

Then I read that Sodium Nitrate, a more commonly used food preservative, is sometimes used as a substitute for Potassium Nitrate in gunpowder, and called Chile Saltpeter, as it is found in abundance there.

Anyway, most of the Bratwurst I consume is made from fresh (no preservatives) or frozen meat and we like to grill or pan-fry them. I like mine with a bit of mustard (honey mustard if available) or barbecue sauce on a bread roll of some type (usually the ubiquitous "hot dog bun"). I would never submit them to the inhumane electrocution treatment! <grin>

"Mmm, bratwurst......!" - Homer Simpson