Phoenix Sonoran Hot Dog

Nogales Hot Dogs has no building. Every evening around seven its owner raises an awning over a folding table on the southwest corner of Twentieth Street and Indian School Road, sets a propane griddle going, and works the cash-only line until the late crowd thins. That is how the Sonoran dog reaches most of Phoenix: from a curbside rig that opens at dusk in a working neighbourhood, run by people who carried the recipe up from the Mexican side and set it down where the customers already were. Across the Valley the dog lives on parking-lot tables and truck windows long before it reaches a tablecloth.

The dog that comes off that griddle is the Hermosillo build, carried north and kept whole. A frankfurter is wound in a strip of bacon and crisped on the iron, dropped into a soft bolillo-style roll, and banked with simmered pinto beans, chopped tomato, raw and grilled onion, then crossed with mustard, mayonnaise, and salsa from the squeeze line. A fire-roasted chile güero rides on the paper alongside. The Valley bakes the roll: Mexican panaderías across central and west Phoenix turn out the split-top bun by the rack, sturdy enough to hold a wet load through a one-handed walk to the car.

Phoenix did add a few things of its own to the topping line. The standard northern build stops at beans, onion, tomato, and the three sauces, but Valley carts and trucks routinely lay on canned mushrooms and a stripe of mashed avocado or guacamole over the top, a soft green layer the Tucson stands usually skip. La Pasadita works it from several trucks and storefronts on the west side; La Frontera parks at Sixteenth Street and Van Buren in the centre of town. The dog stays the Sonoran dog, but the Phoenix version tends to be a little more loaded, a little greener at the close, than the cart fifty miles south.

The build punishes a careless cook in a few set ways. A bacon strip wound loose slides off in the first bite and leaves the frank bare; wound thick, it stays pale and soft in the middle while the surface browns. A roll pulled from a wholesale rack rather than a local panadería line soaks the bean liquid to paste by the second bite, where the enriched split-top holds. Beans run too watery and they blow out the open end of the bun; cooked down to a stiff refried they turn gluey under the mayonnaise. The salsa goes on last, and a heavy hand there floods the whole thing into a wet mess instead of a sharp top note.

Stand near the cart after dark and the first thing is smell: bacon fat thrown off the griddle into dry desert air, sharper and quicker to thin than it would be in a damper climate, with the burnt-sweet of grilled onion under it and the yeast of the roll warming on the iron's edge. The bacon cracks audibly under the first bite. The beans come next, soft and starchy and low against the salt, then the salsa pulses high and short at the back of the tongue and the cold raw tomato cools it down. Halfway through the eater bites the roasted chile güero, blistered and salt-skinned, and the second half lands cleaner for it. The paper boat goes under the chin, because the dog is built to drip.

The ordering is a few syllables across the counter. Con todo brings the full pile; the rare bean-skipper says sin frijoles; con queso gets a layer of melted cheese at the stands that keep it; and the call goes back and forth in mixed English and Spanish without anyone breaking stride. What is distinctly Phoenix is who is standing in the line. The east-side barrios of Mesa and the central neighbourhoods eat it the way Hermosillo does. The downtown bar district off Roosevelt orders it at one in the morning after last call, and the Anglo lunch trade treats a drive to a west-side truck as a destination. The same cart feeds a late-shift worker and a downtown drinker and a curious office crowd inside one week.

The nearest relative is the same dog as Tucson reads it: identical Hermosillo template, identical bacon, identical bolillo, set in a smaller city that wears the dish as a civic emblem. The Hermosillo original still sold across Sonora goes lighter on the squeeze bottles and pushes more pinto bean and chopped tomato into the roll. The Chihuahua bacon-wrapped dog drops the beans and serves a thinner bun as a quick sausage rather than a built-up meal. The American ballpark hot dog shares only the frankfurter and the bun and runs on a separate track entirely. Strip the bacon, the beans, and the green off this one, leaving mustard on a plain bun, and what is left has left Sonora behind.

How the dog reached Phoenix

The configuration began in Hermosillo, the Sonoran capital, where bacon-wrapped franks loaded on a bolillo became a fixture of the late-night cart trade through the 1980s, sold heavily to students around the University of Sonora. Older roots are murkier: accounts that push the wrap back to the 1940s, attached to circuses, bullfights, and ballpark concessions, circulate without a paper trail firm enough to settle them, and the bacon idea may owe something to Oscar Mayer's 1953 American ads for wrapping wieners in bacon. The recognizable Sonoran dog is a Hermosillo street consolidation, not one inventor's patent.

It travelled north with the people who made it. Sonoran and other Mexican migrants carried the carts and the recipe up the border corridor through the 1980s and 1990s, and the dog took root first in Tucson, then a step behind in Phoenix, settling into the metro's central and west-side Latino neighbourhoods. The standing Arizona argument over which city does it better has run since at least the national attention of those years, with Tucson holding the older claim and the famous Beard-honoured stand, and Phoenix holding the bigger market.

The clearest measure of that bigger market is a count. When NPR reported on the dish on August 6, 2009, it put Tucson at more than two hundred Sonoran-dog vendors and noted that Phoenix had even more, the sprawling Valley quietly outnumbering the city that gets the credit. Nogales Hot Dogs still raises its awning at dusk on the Indian School corner, one cart in a metro that, by the only head count anyone has published, runs the densest concentration of Sonoran dogs north of the border.