Recipe Review: Hot Dog "Bacon"

I don't know if the word recipe is truly apt here, but I saw this unique method of preparing hot dogs while scrolling Instagram recently. It was posted by @buzzfeedtasty and as soon as I saw it, I knew I'd have to give it a try.

I'm not a huge fan of hot dogs, but my husband and sons are. So, I showed the video to my husband and, predictably, he got really (REALLY) excited. 

I bought a large pack of hot dogs at Costco and turned him loose. The post didn't really have any instructions, but the video was pretty clear and the method seemed simple enough.

The first problem he ran into was that he wasn't able to get the hot dog to peel into nice even strips like the video.  He tried both our traditional peeler and the y-peeler, to no avail. Eventually he got frustrated and started experimenting with every knife in the house to see how closely he could approximate those nice, thin pieces of hot dog. 

When he'd butchered a whole pile of hot dogs, he started tossing them in the air fryer. It's important to note that the video utilized a traditional basket style air fryer, while ours is a combo toaster over and air fryer.  There was a lot of smoke as the grease dribbled out of the hot dogs and hit the heating elements, and the pieces tended to cook unevenly because they weren't uniform in size. 

In the end, we had a mountain of things that didn't really resemble bacon or hot dogs, but tasted sort generally like a rendered piece of cured meat. I didn't love them. My kids thought they were okay. My husband thought they were pretty good.

Final Recommendation:

All in all, I don't think we'll be repeating this particular culinary adventure. The mess was extensive and the payoff pretty minimal.  Maybe someday I'll find an item like this on the menu at a really hip restaurant, and let the professionals prepare it for me. Until then, I think I can live without my hot dog "bacon".