Home › Some Swell Sandwiches › "Hog in the Wheat'' Sandwich
"Hog in the Wheat'' Sandwich
Pat a thin casing of biscuit dough around franks, wienies, or any link sausages, brush with egg wash and bake. Serve on lettuce with a paper cup of chutney or chili sauce, for link sausages; the frankfurter barks for chow or mustard. Such sealed-in sandwiches are only Americanized:
A camp-and-picnic version of what most cooks now call pigs in blankets. The original gives no oven temperature, no time and no quantities, so the working numbers below are the ones the technique requires.
- The hinge: cook the sausage firstBiscuit dough bakes in 12 to 15 minutes, which is not long enough to bring a raw pork link to a safe 160F, and the dough insulates it further. Use franks and wienies, which are already fully cooked, or brown fresh link sausages through in a skillet and let them cool before wrapping.
- Oven temperatureBiscuit dough wants a hot oven: 425 to 450F, on the upper rack, until the casing is browned and no longer doughy at the seam. At lower heat the dough slumps and greys instead of rising.
- How thin is thinAbout 1/8 inch, rolled or patted, cut into strips or rectangles just long enough to overlap. Pinch the long seam and lay each one seam-side down, or the dough opens and the fat runs out.
- Biscuit doughAny standard baking-powder biscuit dough works, made a little stiffer than for drop biscuits so it can be handled. Refrigerated tube biscuits are the modern shortcut; crescent dough can be used too, though being laminated it puffs and flakes rather than behaving like biscuit dough.
- Egg washOne egg beaten with a tablespoon of water or milk gives gloss and colour. Egg yolk alone browns faster and can scorch at 450F.
- "Chow"Shorthand for chow-chow, a mixed pickled-vegetable relish common on American tables at the time. Any coarse mustard pickle or piccalilli fills the same role.
- Yield and servingA batch of biscuit dough using 2 cups of flour should wrap somewhere around 10 to 12 standard franks. They are best eaten soon after they leave the oven; reheat at 350F rather than in a microwave, which softens the casing.
Dough-wrapped sausage is old and widespread -- the British sausage roll in puff pastry, the Czech-Texan klobasnek, the German sausage baked in bread dough -- and American "pigs in blankets" has been used for both this and a bacon-wrapped version depending on the decade and the region. The name presumably plays on the wrapping, the hog being the sausage and the wheat the biscuit crust sealed around it, though this is a guess rather than a documented derivation. Food that travels well suits outdoor eating: the crust is a container, so nothing needs a plate, and the paper cup of chutney or chili sauce answers the fact that a picnic table has nowhere to set a saucer of condiment.