You ain’t nothin’ but a corndog.

Read Time: 6 minutes

This week I turned corndogs into sandwiches.

Yeah, that’s it. That’s the tweet. I turned corndogs into sandwiches.

If you’re from a foreign country or planet that doesn’t have a corndog, they are pretty simple. A corndog is typically a hot dog or sausage, battered in a sweetened cornmeal batter and fried until the outside is crispy and golden brown. Then you squirt mustard on the outside or you find condiments to dip in and go to town eating a corndog on a stick.

There’s no need to turn a corndog into a sandwich but I did it anyway because no one tells me what to do.

The corndog

This week is extra corny, so we’re changing things up and instead of starting with the bread, we’ll start with the corndog recipe I use. This recipe is for making actual corndogs on a stick, but as you’ll soon see, you could turn any sort of sausage or meat patty into something that is corndog battered and fried until crispy and still soft between the outside and the dog.

I have typed the word corndog so many times at this point it’s out of control. Just wait.

A crazy person.

For my corndog sandwiches I used both hot dogs and also some breakfast sausage that I cooked up into circular patties. Here are some of the pictures of the buildup and frying process.

I like to use chopsticks as the stick in my corndogs. I believe the food genius Alton Brown taught me this. The disposable chopsticks that haven’t been separated from each other are solid and just wide enough to be a great handle for a fried corndog. This is the batch of chopsticks that I have purchased (Amazon affiliate link) and you can also use them to work on your General Tso chomping technique in your non-corndog time as well.

Or if you need some chopsticks, you can just order delivery Chinese and make sure to click the “no utensils required” and they will send you some anyway! Sorry, this is my specific annoyance, please ignore. Next.

The bread

For some of these sandwiches I had a few leftover potato rolls from past sandwiches. I also always have homemade biscuits in the freezer waiting for their turn to be baked. In this case they were my savory cheddar cheese biscuit recipe.

Biscuits baked from frozen

When I make a batch of biscuits, I often will only cook two or three and immediately put the rest in the freezer to firm up. Basically, I take two sheet pans both lined with parchment. One is headed to the oven and the other goes into the freezer with the uncooked biscuits I want to save. After three hours or so the freezer biscuits are pretty firm and you can take the sheet pan out and package all the biscuits up in freezer safe packaging. Freezing them on a sheet pan like this makes it easy to reach in and grab one or two biscuits for cooking later.

If you want to cook a homemade frozen biscuit, you can bake at the same temperature (I use 475 F/245 C) and I cook for two or three minutes longer than the time I would cook a fully thawed biscuit. The one thing you need to pay attention to is the bottom of the biscuits; they tend to darken quicker than the tops in my oven. Often if I’m making biscuits straight out of the freezer, I will double stack two sheet pans to give the bottom a bit more insulation and protection from the heat.

Here’s my savory cheddar cheese biscuit recipe that makes a fantastic sandwich.

The sandwiches

These first two sandwiches are on the same batch of cheddar cheese biscuits. They are corndog battered breakfast pork sausage patties topped with maple mustard. This was better than I expected. The corndog exterior had just the right amount of crunch and the texture of the sausage patty beside the soft interior of the cooked cornbread led to a great experience.

As you saw in the photos above, I also butterflied some hot dogs that I had cut in half and fried those in corndog batter as well. These I sandwiched with some maple mustard and topped them with pickle relish. This sandwich was also a lot of fun to eat. Corndogs are just plain fun, sandwich or no sandwich.

If you’ve read this far, I bet you thought I was finished for the week.

Maangchi’s Gamja-hotdog sandwich

AKA: the Goblin Club sandwich

If you’re a reasonable sandwich person you can stop here and come back and read about sandwiches next week.

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If you’re like me and have mostly lost your mind, please continue and read about how I attempted to turn Maangchi’s recipe for a Gamja-hotdog into a sandwich. If you’ve never heard of Maangchi, you need to go watch some of her videos. She’s great.

I mentioned in passing that I was writing a blog post about turning corndogs into sandwiches with my friend JP and she immediately sent me Maangchi’s “Korean french fries corndog” video. In the video Maangchi mentions that sometimes this style of fried hot dog on a stick is referred to as a goblin club because of how it looks like a lumpy club a fictional goblin might carry when the gamja-hotdog is cooked. Here’s a video you can watch of Maangchi making hers.

So I watched the video and then attempted it.

First I sliced a hot dog 2/3rds of the way through all the way down. I broke apart my chopsticks and I skewered the butterflied hot dog in two places (there’s a photo of this below). I did it this way because I felt it might be tough to flip over in the hot frying oil. This turned out to be a pretty good idea.

Then I followed Maangchi’s instructions and par-boiled some very small squares of potato. I also prepared the batter which is really nothing like corndog batter. It’s much more like a sticky very hydrated bread dough.

I set my batter, the pre-cooked potatoes and some panko breadcrumbs on my counter and this became my breading station. You can see below or in Maangchi’s video how the “batter” isn’t really much like pancake or corndog batter.

Each dog (I just made two this time) would go through the batter first, then get rolled into the potatoes and finally dusted with the panko breadcrumbs prior to submerging into the hot frying oil.

Once fried, your Korean Gamja-hotdog will look very lumpy and a little bit crazy. Apparently, it’s supposed to look like that. Maangchi dusts hers with white sugar and then squirts ketchup and mustard on them, so I did that as well. You can see the finished product still on the sticks below.

The final Gamja-hotdog sandwich.

Oh no. That crazy sandwich guy put it on a bun. Why do they let him do this.

I’m not sure why anyone allows me to do this, but for once, it worked out and this was a fun sandwich to eat. It’s crispy fried french fries and a hot dog on a bun! What could go wrong?

Why did I make corndog sandwiches? No one will ever know. Will I do it again? Probably not. BUT I will be making corndogs again because they really are easy and allow you a lot of freedom to incorporate different sausages. Corndogs are just fun!

We’ll see you all next week when I have a little bit more sense and make a much more normal sandwich. Maybe.