gnat's triumphant return to hot doug's

it's been almost a year since my first hot doug's sausage superstore and encased meat emporium experience. in one sausage, dubbed "the mountain man," i ate four animals: elk, venison, buffalo, and antelope. now, that is an impressive number of unusual animals and yes, it was delicious, but the return visit makes that first trip look like child's play.

it started on saturday morning when, after my previously described incident with the turnstile, i met the andrews and christine on the red line to begin our journey. hot doug's is a train, a bus, and walk away, otherwise i might go more than once a year. upon arriving we made our way to the end of the line, which was already wrapped all the way around the building at 11:15am.

while we waited, pondering our meaty options, we were given this visual aid of typical sausage fare to contemplate. unfortunately it was mostly useless as a shockingly small percentage of hot doug's encased meat offerings feature pork.

once we made it inside we completely ignored the regular hot dog menu and went straight for the specials. we selected seven (yes seven) favorites and had a seat.

our selections were as follows. apologies in advance for the horrible picture quality (and to my models who likely were unaware they would be photographed when they embarked on this field trip).

andrew holding the apple, pear and port elk sausage, with cherry-fig mustard and caramelized onion marmalade cheddar cheese in one hand (don't ask me which) and the smoked antelope sausage with black garlic confit aioli and chipotle-cheddar cheese in the other.

christine with the smoked shrimp and pork sausage with cajun remoulade and goat cheese drizzled with honey, and the rosemary and garlic smoked chicken sausage with chipotle dijonnaise and carrigaline smoked farmhouse cheese.

andrew got  the wild rice and asiago smoked bison sausage with smokey bacon sauce and garlic-cheddar spread and a repeat of the shrimp/goat cheese/remoulade.

and yours truly with the smoked portugese linguica with saffron rouille and aged iberico cheese. with a side of cheese fries, because i needed more sodium in my life. (there were also duck fat fries. i don't have a picture, so you'll have to take my word for it.)

after typing a few of those out i'm not entirely convinced that some of those words aren't made up or the ingredients added for the sake of name embellishment. i've provided handy dandy links to the ones i was most certain weren't real.

in any case, we tried each sausage by the bite and pass to the right method, then each struggled to the end of our own. my favorite was the shrimp sausage, and not just because i enjoy the word "remoulade" so much. 

we performed admirably:

then made the somewhat painful walk back to the bus.

i don't know who secret robbie is, and while i question his claim that "encased meats" are the finest words in the english language (a pretty strong statement, when there are so many other excellent words which are frankly more fun to say, like denouement or neurofibromatosis) i do agree that encased meats are delicious and worth the trip to the undefined, faraway neighborhood where hot doug's (and literally nothing else) can be found.