Can you sous vide sausages in a condom?

happy valentine's day

Happy Valentine’s Day, clowns!

Can you smell the love in the air yet? No? Well, you’re about to. Because today’s newsletter drop is loosely on theme. Turns out it smells like a whole lot of sausages.

So there’s this meme that floats around the internet every once in a while, and because the internet’s collective memory is shaped like a dented circle, it resurfaces on a regular basis.

In it is a photo of three hot dogs tucked neatly into condoms, floating in a pot of boiling water.

The caption reads: Sous-vide is a traditional French cooking method where food is placed in plastic bags in a water bath for up to 6 hours. The technique is used in many high-end restaurants.

Every time this thing pops up, like 12 people send it to me. And each time, I think, “Heh.”

But this go-round, when yet another person sent the meme to me, I actually looked at the caption a little closer. Just like most internet crap, it’s mostly factually incorrect. As old and as French as it sounds, the original concept of sous vide was actually conceived in the United States by Colonel Ambrose McGuckian in 1969, which to me seems a bit too recent to consider “traditional.”

Two French chefs, Bruno Goussault and George Pralus, are credited with eventually dialing it in, though they may have stumbled upon the concept independently of McGuckian.

And despite what the meme says, you can sous vide food for way longer than six hours. You want to sous vide a human leg (okay, short rib) for 72 hours? People actually do this. And technically, cooking hot dogs in condoms isn’t exactly sous vide; all the air has to be removed from its wrapper (which is usually plastic), it has to be submerged fully in water, and Jesus fuck am I “well-actuallying” a meme right now?

Okay, so the meme’s really just out there to get you to send people a picture of hot dogs in condoms. But as the greatest food writer in all of history, I thought to myself, “Dannis Ree, would cooking a hot dog in a condom work? Is there something about this method that is superior than just boiling or steaming it?”

Then I looked off into outer space, and asked yet another question.

“And does it just have to be a hot dog?”

Boy, this was a fun shopping trip.

Imagine me pushing my cart around the supermarket, chucking four types of sausages in it, along with multiple packages of condoms of varying sizes. (It would have been even better if I hadn’t forgotten to get the beer I needed.)

Any self-respecting person would have gone through the self-checkout section, but since I am not that kind of person (see: entire newsletter), I decided to go through a manned register. The nice older lady checking me out was too efficient to even look down at what she was scanning, but the young dude bagging my stuff up definitely noticed what I had purchased.

I made sure to sneak a look at him every time he put one of those boxes of condoms into my tote bag, and each time, his smirk got bigger. I’m wondering what he thought, because I’d purchased three boxes of increasing sizes. Then there were the cocktail weenies, regular hot dogs, jumbo smoked sausages, and bratwurst that he’d also kindly bagged for me.

If I were him, I’d be awfully suspicious about where those sausages were headed. “Have a good one, man,” he said, putting the stuff in my cart, avoiding eye contact.

I decided to start off my condom sausage experiment with the Hillshire Farm Lit’l Smokies.

Am I the only one who’s thought it was “Lil’ Smokies” this whole time? I feel betrayed.

For this batch, I’d use a Magnum-sized condom, because I wanted ample room for my tiny sausage(s).

Every time I go to a party that has cocktail weenies, they’re always simmering in a thick and sweet barbecue sauce.

So I figured I’d keep with tradition by also filling the condom with Famous Dave’s Sweet and Zesty barbecue sauce. It’s good to know that the base of these Magnum-sized condoms fit snugly around the neck of a barbecue sauce bottle without leaking. These things really do work!

And here is something important I’ve learned.

You can fit exactly eight Lit’l Smokies in a Magnum-sized condom before you get to the top. I blew a bunch of air into the dong sheath to give the Smokies some breathing space and then moved onto my next sausage, the good ol’ fashioned hot dog.

For this go-round, I figured since I already had the box of Magnums open, why not just use one of those too?

In terms of the hot dog, I specifically picked Chicago’s favorite hometown brand, Vienna Beef. Mostly because they’re the best, and also because they were on sale.

Turns out a Magnum-sized condom provides ample space for your average-sized hot dog.

In case you need a point of reference to see whether or not you or a loved one, uh, potentially qualify for certain types of purchases. I set this guy aside with the cocktail weenies and moved ahead with a slightly more challenging part of the experiment.

It was time to go big. Extra big.

Eckrich brand smoked sausage was also on major sale, so I got some. This generically-named “smoked sausage” is the same size as mass-manufactured kielbasa. I wanted to protect my “kielbasa” from directly touching the water, but I figured a mere Magnum wasn’t going to cut it, so I busted out the Magnum XLs I purchased.

What’s interesting is that the Eckrich brand sausage wasn’t quite worthy enough of the Magnum XL sized condom, specifically in terms of girth.

There was still some leg room left in that tube sock, if you know what I’m saying. But now I’m imagining what it takes to wear one of these things and I’m getting kind of scared for some people. Also I hope someone from Eckrich stumbles upon the newsletter to check out today’s piece. If I type it enough times, I wonder if they’ll get a Google alert. Eckrich. Eckrich Eckrich.

Girth is one thing, but in terms of length, the condom barely fit over the smoked sausage.

Tying it off was a struggle, but so’s life. Right, guys?!

I did want to challenge myself a little further, however, and try cooking a beer brat using this “traditional cooking method,” because cooking raw meat in a condom sounded hilarious.

For this exercise, I’d use a different kind of condom, one I’d never even seen before, called Trojan Raw. The connection was obvious. Raw meat, Trojan Raw, it obviously had to be the superior vehicle to cook a raw bratwurst sausage.

Okay, so I looked a little more closely at the package of Trojan Raw condoms and learned that it actually had nothing to do with cooking raw meat, which is a bummer. These extremely thin schlong shields are made with polyurethane rather than traditional latex. Nothing like slappin’ some plastic on your timber (brat) in order to facilitate a good time (meal).

Getting the brat into the condom was a little tricky in that the polyurethane condom didn’t exactly want to unroll easily.

But once I got it in there, I surprisingly managed to pour enough beer in there to be able to poach the thing. It is not lost on me that the beer had the color of a dehydrated person’s pee, but that is a different subject for a future edition of the newsletter.

I’ve taken a lot of interesting photos for Food is Stupid, but this might land in the top three.

Keep this on hand for when you’re having a bad day. In fact, just change your phone’s lock screen to my hand holding this beer-filled condom with a raw bratwurst in it.

I already had a Dutch oven full of water on the stove going at a bare simmer, so all I needed to do was put the fully-protected tube steaks in it.

In terms of time, I’d never cooked sausages in condoms before, so I had to hazard a guess as to what would work. I set a timer for 30 minutes, which I figured would be enough time to cook the raw brat. And technically, the rest of the sausages were already cooked; I simply needed to heat them up. I really could have just shoved them up my ass straight from the fridge if I’d wanted.

My timer went off and it was time to give these prophylactic weiners a shot.

In retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have popped the condom holding the cocktail weenies using a knife, because the thing exploded, spraying a fine mist of barbecue sauce everywhere.

Including on me. The sauce got all over my clothes and on parts of the kitchen island, and through some goddamn miracle, none got on the gang. Harvey would have never forgiven me. But hey, they were still piping hot when I tried them, which was good. Though I didn’t realize until now that (don’t hurt me) Lit’l Smokies don’t actually taste all that great. They taste more like meat snack sticks than they do miniature sausages — they’ve got a weird tangy flavor that I suspect is due to preservatives.

Next was the hot dog.

Thankfully I didn’t blow this condom full of air like I did with the cocktail weenies, so I did not have to dodge hot dog juices this time.

I tucked it into a poppyseed bun and topped it with loads of Chicago’s favorite hot dog condiment, blood.

This could have been my imagination, but this particular Vienna Beef dog was absolutely delicious, and my theory is because it was cooked in the condom. That way none of its dogginess could sweat out of its hot dog pores into any cooking liquid, and it all had no choice but to remain in the sausage.

The condom did more than just protect the world from unintentional babies and STIs, it protected my hot dog from losing flavor. Perhaps this meme was secretly onto something and I was the fool all along. A deep sadness flowed through my veins, followed by the realization that I just ate a hot dog that I cooked inside a condom.

Now it was time for the Eckrich brand not-kielbasa smoked sausage cooked in the Magnum XL-sized condom. Eckrich.

I’ll tell you what, Eckrich, how about you guys pay me to not cook your sausages in condoms from now on? What’s it worth to you, financially?

Like the hot dog, this smoked sausage was also cooked perfectly.

It was juicy and smoky, maybe a little more emulsified than I’d normally like, but otherwise it was in excellent shape. The best part is, it had a natural snappy casing to it that wasn’t removed during its childhood.

And here’s the part that made me nervous, the bratwurst.

As you can see, the brat appeared cooked, and it had shrunk a bit inside the Trojan Raw condom. It did still look like it was marinating in pee, but some juices had come out from the brat which had watered the beer’s color down a little. I put the brat in a brat bun, dressed it simply with yellow mustard, and took a big bite.

Incredible.

The thing had cooked all the way through and it was extremely juicy. It didn’t have any color to it, since I’d essentially just poached it to a perfectly pallid gray. There was no pink within, and though the beer flavor was very muted, I had used cheap-ass Beck’s, so I hadn’t been expecting too much.

One thing I noticed is that if you don’t give bratwurst at least a little roasted sear on each side, the meat comes off as mildly offal-flavored. I tasted a distinct liver flavor to it. Or was that just the polyurethane, which I’m sure I wasn’t supposed to be boiling? All I know is that this Trojan Raw did some Trojan Cooking.

In the end, I had no reason to believe that this method of cooking wasn’t going to work, because after all, there’s still heat transfer involved. But I was somewhat surprised to find out that cooking various sausages in condoms turned out better than I thought it would, even though the process was extremely inefficient. Plus, there is the issue that the next time I go back to that grocery store, I may have to face that bagger again.

But hey, we all learned something today, right? The moral of the story is that if you send me a food meme enough times, you can get me to write an entire upsetting edition of the newsletter about it.

…Happy Valentine’s Day!

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