No Ketchup Please: I Want a Chicago-Style Hot Dog
Chicago. Best known for pizza, hot dogs, and now, a pope. It also happens to be the setting of FX’s The Bear. Which also just so happens to be airing its fourth season on June 25, 2025. We previously made the Italian beef sandwich from the show in honor of its third season, so join us as we make a Chicago-style hotdog to celebrate season four coming out soon!
But First, Hot Dog Lore 🌭
Every hot dog has a story. The Chicago-style hot dog’s story begins during the Great Depression. Well technically, it begins way back in Germany (the frankfurter) but we won’t go that far back. Anyways, it cost a nickel during the Great Depression. Yup, $0.05. In today’s US dollars that’s $1.17! When money is tight, 5 cents for an easy to grab meal in a bun is a steal of a deal. It was “dragged through the garden” (all of the vegetable toppings) to help make it more of a complete meal.
We highly recommend reading this passage from Iconic Chicago Dishes, Drinks and Desserts by Amy Bizzarri to learn about how the Chicago-style hot dog came to be thanks to immigrants.
What Makes a Chicago Hot Dog, a Chicago Hot Dog
We consulted the internet and Chicago restaurant menus. These are the ingredients you need to make Chicago-style hot dogs at home:
Poppy seed bun
Vienna beef hot dogs
Yellow mustard
Sweet pickle relish
Chopped white onion
Tomato slices
A pickle spear
Sport peppers
Celery salt
WTF Are Sport Peppers?
We’re from Canada, we’ve never heard of sport peppers before. Are they just peppers that really like The Cubs? 😏
We could have bought them from Amazon for an absurd price, but we’re just a small blog run by two people. This isn’t our full-time job. It’s our “side hustle.” We blew our budget on a Kitchenaid mixer and Ooni pizza oven this year. (Money well spent, we don’t regret it.)
We’ve read that they’re also hard to come by if you live anywhere else in the USA that isn’t Chicago. So if you can’t find them, you’re not alone! Apparently sport peppers are similar to serranos. Based on that, we recommend subbing pickled peperoncini for sport peppers, but you could also go for something hotter like pickled jalapeños peppers.
Living that #TariffLife
Vienna Beef Hot Dogs
Chicago loves this brand of hot dogs. Continuing the trend: we could not find this brand in Canada, so we went with a different all-beef hot dog—Schneiders. They’re alright. Maybe one day we’ll get to try the Vienna beef hot dogs to see what they’re all about!
🌭 Sidenote: Brittany really likes the hot dogs from Harvest Meats, but they are not all beef (they are pork and beef), so we decided not to use them. They are amazing though, so if you don’t care to be 100% authentic with an all-beef hot dog, try these. (Trevor is also in the mixed meat blend hotdog camp.)
A Note About Relish
We noted that sweet pickle relish was needed to make a Chicago hot dog. But really, if you want an authentic experience apparently you need to add blue dye to regular pickle relish to make it neon green. Yup, that’s right. Apparently the secret ingredient to the best Chicago hot dog is to make it look like the relish came from space.
Your chefs were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.
To Ketchup or Not to Ketchup?
People from Chicago have Opinions™ when it comes to putting ketchup on hot dogs. For two kids who grew up in the Canadian Prairies, ketchup on a hot dog is not just okay, it is expected. Turns out, Chicagoans really, really, really dislike ketchup on their hotdogs. One of our favorite quotes from The Bear touches on this:
“What kind of asshole is going to put ketchup on a hotdog?”
So no ketchup it is.
How to Make a Chicago-Style Hot Dog
The traditional way to prep the hot dogs is by steaming or boiling them (AKA using water based cooking if you’re a Gen Z/Gen Alpha lifestyle and fitness influencer).
You can grill them over charcoal, but then you need to cut a cross on the end and sell them as a char-dog.
The buns are traditionally steamed as well.
Steam baby, steam.
There are a lot of things that go into a Chicago dog. In order to make sure everything fits, we highly recommend going one size up for your hotdog bun — don’t just grab the regular size bun!
After looking at a bunch of pictures online, from what we can tell there isn’t one right way to assemble a Chicago dog. What we did was put the relish on the bun, then the hot dog, then a pickle spear, then we wedged some tomatoes on the side. Then we finished with mustard, onion, and celery salt.
The sport peppers seem to always be on top, but instead of adding them whole we sliced our peppers for an easier bite.
Mediocre Thoughts
🧑🍳 Trevor: I liked it more than I thought I would. I haven’t had sweet relish since our experiments with rancid vintage recipes. I think there’s perhaps one too many things on the hotdog, and, no joke, my hotdog exploded everywhere when I bit into it for the first time. But overall, I’d eat a Chicago dog again.
🧑🍳 Brittany: I like hot dogs. Hot dogs mean summer, BBQ season, and campfires. I knew I’d like Chicago hot dogs, even though I am a big fan of the ketchup and mustard combo. I like tomatoes, I like raw onion (not everyone does, fair), and I LOVE pickles. So yea, I liked it. I think I would have liked a slightly bigger hot dog, as the ratio of hot dog to toppings was a bit off for me, but maybe the Vienna hot dogs are larger.
Can The Chicago Dog Be Improved?
Overall, our Chicago dog experience wasn’t bad—we liked it! But we have a few notes. (Don’t come for us, Chicagoans.)
A lot of these ingredients are very wet. Normally, we’d recommend toasting your bun to attempt to provide something resembling resistance against all the moisture. However, according to Chicago canon, the buns need to be steamed first. Next time, we’re toasting our buns.
BBQ. Get some char on there. Steaming is great, but BBQ’d dogs are just better.
Get rid of the sweet relish. It serves no purpose and is nasty. We stand behind this assessment — fight us on this one in particular.
Cut up your sport peppers (or sport pepper substitute). It makes the whole thing easier to bite.
It wouldn’t hurt if you added a little bit of cheese, y’know?
Listen, we know ketchup is heresy. But…👀 Just don’t put too much on so it doesn’t mask the other flavors it’s got going on.
If you you do one or all of these things, yea, we know, it’s not a traditional Chicago-style hot dog anymore. It’s something…evolved. Feel free to call it an Edmonton-style hot dog (that’s where we’re from). Or a Chicago-Edmonton dog? A Prairie Dog. 😎
Umm akshually, that translates to he has eaten our dogs, as in the animal. You’re probably going to want to go with something like “Farciem nostros ipse comedit”.
If you live in Chicago, or you’ve been, what’s your favorite place to get a Chicago hot dog at? Let us know in the comments below!
Also don’t forget to watch FX’s The Bear on Hulu and Disney+ June 25, 2025! (We are not sponsored, but Matty, if you have a few extra bucks you should throw some our way kthxbai.)
