Squid ink frankfurter, anyone? The Korean hotdog arrives in London

If we can gently place politics to one side for a moment, I’d like to take you on a quick tour of US military influence on some of the foodways of the world. America has always excelled at supporting its service people abroad, a phenomenal exercise in logistics that today sees fast-food brands in military installations and a well-supported network of stores.

Naturally, this exciting “foreign” food has historically leaked off-base and blended with the local culture. So we see Spam as a popular ingredient in Hawaii, and fried chicken and corned beef in the Philippines. It was more direct US supplies of wheat flour to the postwar population of Japan that caused the massive popularisation of ramen.

Korea, home to one of the most eclectic and exciting cuisines in the world, could have taken anything from the American canon. For reasons history cannot tell us, they adopted the corn dog, the hand-held-fried-meat-product-on-a-stick you’d expect to experience at a state fair in Kansas. The “Korean hotdog” is now a popular fast-food export back to the US, and Myungrang Hotdog, with 700 branches across America, is well regarded. Obviously, I find the arrival in the UK of such a culinary curiosity exciting, so I headed at once to its single takeaway unit in a shopping centre in Islington.

The dog part, a frankfurter-style sausage, is skewered and then coated in a foamy corn batter with a texture somewhere between bread dough and kid’s play-slime. The cook dips the tip of the sausage, spins it in the batter, spiralling a sticky coat along its length, dips it in breadcrumbs and then lowers it, tip first, into the oil tank, slipping the skewer into a smart little clip.

Fearlessly, I ordered a full pack of five dogs — thereby, I guess, breaking my personal oath to avoid menus de dégustation. These, the website indicates, come in a neat fitted box with a bright array of recherché Korean sauce sachets. I’m not going to dissemble. They lie there, in phalanx, looking like the bedside tool drawer of a particularly jolly dominatrix. Google it and take a look. “Myungrang”, I mean. Please God, not “jolly dominatrix”.

Before they close the lid, they ask if you want sugar sprinkled over everything.

“The Original” is a plain frankfurter with the simplest corn casing and “pairs”, as they say, with ketchup or a little sriracha for the adventurous. It’s good. There should really be some kind of blanket ban on explaining this to civilians but, where a regular sausage is made with coarse mince and fillers, a frank is filled with meat (usually, but not always, beef) that has been comprehensively liquidised and emulsified with its own fats, often with the inclusion of dried milk. Oh yeah. This is the good stuff. The cheapest and most flavourful cuts, usually too tough to consume, are transformed by charcuterous alchemy into a creamy, smooth and delicious “product”. Inside the flak-jacket of corn batter, the sausage steams to perfection. It “pops” as you bite in, as indeed it should, releasing its splendid juices.

“The Cheddar Cheese” will be a misnomer for Brits. The “Cheddar” that’s wrapped around the sausage before this puppy gets dipped is, in fact, a strongly cheesier version of the cheese-like-dairy-product-sheet laid over a burger to stop it escaping and tastes, I cannot lie, pretty good. The texture, however, is repellent, coating the mouth like denture fixative. Okay. We draw the veil.

“The Whole Mozza” contains no sausage. Instead, chunks of “low-moisture” mozzarella, the stuff used on commodity pizzas and for choking goats. Here the crisp outer coat really comes into its own and, in the absence of any cheese flavour, you can concentrate on the subtle corn sweetness. The cheese drains out the second you bite in and . . . well, the word “cyst” comes to mind. You can, however, pack the void with barbecue sauce and your evening won’t be ruined.

By now, you’re probably thinking this is not for you, and you may be right. But you’d be missing the high points. “The Potato” is a work of fiendish brilliance. Once the dog has been rolled in the batter, it gets a tumble in a tub of potato cubes. These make the thing resemble an elongated fragmentation grenade, probably with a roughly similar effect on your life expectancy. It’s a sausage, with bread, coated in its own chips. It needs only a generous spurt of mayo and a text to your next of kin before you dive into something really extraordinarily good.

Okay, so now, as they say in the movies, shit is gonna get real. It’s time for “The Squid Ink”. The batter is dyed dark grey by the ink and stops a few centimetres short of the end of the sausage, which is sliced so it opens up to resemble tentacles. We are so not in Kansas any more. There are all the crunchy, corny, juicy-frank and infantile humour cues of the others, but there’s also a hint of fishiness in there, which elevates it into something rich and rare.

At Myungrang, they make the food in front of you from base ingredients. A real human being meets your eye under a paper hat and makes something for you by hand. This, in the increasingly inhuman world of global fast food, has got to be appreciated. I went hoping for the kind of step-change brain-shift I’m growing to expect from Korean cooking and was largely underwhelmed. The weird squid number, however, was great. I’m definitely going back for more. The sugar sprinkle was a bit of a mind-blower, but they don’t use the authentic range of Korean sauce sachets that held such promise and, in further cultural mash-up, have substituted indigenous Heinz ketchup, mayo and BBQ sauce.

Well, if that’s their game, I’m going back, with my own salad cream.

Follow Tim on Twitter @TimHayward and email him at [email protected]

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