What happens if you eat bad hot dogs

Hot dogs are an iconic American food eaten everywhere from ballgames to backyard grills. Because they come pre-cooked and contain lots of preservatives, you might assume they have a long shelf life, but do hot dogs go bad?

Yes, hot dogs can go bad, and more rapidly than you’d expect. Unopened, they can last up to two weeks stored in the fridge, but once opened, should be consumed within a week.

Hot dogs also provide a perfect environment for the growth of a bacteria called Listeria monocytogenes which can cause serious illness. This is why it’s important to thoroughly heat hot dogs even though they have been pre-cooked.

Shelf Life Of Hot Dogs

If your hot dogs come packaged with a use-by date, the USDA recommends sticking to that date. A best-by date, on the other hand, is a more general guideline, and hot dogs can stay good for up to two weeks beyond that date if stored correctly.

• Fresh hot dogs, unopened – Stored in the fridge, these can stay good for up to two weeks beyond the best by date. If there is no date, store for two weeks maximum regardless. In the freezer, they will remain safe to eat indefinitely, but best quality if consumed within two months.
• Fresh hot dogs, opened – Once opened, hotdogs should stay good for up to one week stored correctly in the fridge, and remain at best quality for two months in the freezer.
• Cooked hot dogs – Consume within four days if stored in the fridge, and up to four months frozen.

Regardless is the hotdogs are comprised of pork, chicken, beef or blended meat products, they all have the same shelf life.

How Long Can Hot Dogs Sit Out?

Bacteria grow very quickly at room temperature, and although listeria can develop even in the refrigerator, it will develop much more rapidly if you leave hot dogs to sit out.

If you’ve left your hot dogs sitting out for more than two hours at normal room temperatures, you should throw them out. At temperatures of 90 degrees Fahrenheit and above, you should throw them out after one hour. 

How To Tell If Hot Dogs Are Bad

Because bad hot dogs have the potential to make you very sick, it’s important for you to recognize the signs of rancidity below.

1. Surface changes – if the outside of the hot dogs becomes slimy to the touch, they are no longer good.
2. Color changes – the hot dog may change from a clear reddish color to duller brown or grey.
3. Sour smell – if you detect any kind of unpleasant, sour smells, throw the package out.
4. Freezer burn – frozen hot dogs are prone to freezer burn because of their high moisture content. If there are icy patches within the flesh and skin, the sausage will be dry and not pleasant to eat – although not dangerous.
5. Milky liquid – if the liquid in a package of hot dogs develops a milky quality, they should be discarded. This milky substance may only be fat, or it could be a bacterial overgrowth.

What Happens If You Eat A Bad Hot Dog?

While hotdogs often contain preservatives in the meat blend to keep them fresh, they are moist products wrapped in plastic and thus susceptible to bacterial overgrowth.

As they are popular with children, it’s critically important to cook hot dogs thoroughly so they can be safely served.

Listeria can develop in hotdogs and deli meats, even if stored at cold temperatures (although freezing will prevent this.) Listeria is dangerous, especially for pregnant woman or those with a weakened immune system.

Although the chances of contracting listeriosis after eating hotdogs is low, it can be a very serious illness, causing fever, diarrhea, and vomiting. If it spreads throughout the bloodstream and nervous system, symptoms can be much more severe.

Bacteria like listeria can be killed by high temperatures, so it’s important to always thoroughly cook hotdogs before serving.

Can You Freeze Hot Dogs?

Yes. Hot dogs will stay safe to eat indefinitely when frozen, but their quality does decline rapidly; they are prone to freezer burn and will dry out and be much less enjoyable to eat.

To prolong their freezer life, you can wrap them with aluminum foil or plastic wrap and store them in a freezer bag, but we still recommend using them within two months for maximum flavor and quality.

If defrosting hot dogs in the fridge, they can stay there for one or two days after thawing. But if cooking hot dogs using a microwave or cold water bath to defrost, cook them straight away.

By Meghan O'Keefe

September 10, 2020 // 1:07pm

Netflix’s new teen drama Julie and the Phantoms is a sweet series about a shy girl who finds her voice when she joins a band. The twist? Her bandmates are three handsome teen ghosts. Yes, the boys in the band in this Netflix series died when they ate bad hot dogs back in 1995. Which led me to wonder: can you really die from eating bad hot dogs? Or is this just a quirky invention for the world of Julie and the Phantoms?

Based on the Brazilian series Julie e os Fantasmas, Julie and the Phantoms is High School Musical mastermind Kenny Ortega’s first big series for Netflix. The show follows Julie (Madison Reyes), a withdrawn songbird who has struggled to overcome stage fright in the wake of her musician mother’s death. Her world is rocked when three handsome teen ghosts — Luke (Charlie Gillespie), Alex (Owen Joyner), and Reggie (Jeremy Shada) — pop into her life. All three boys were poised for rock superstardom in the mid-’90s, until they decided to eat hot dogs cooked on a car radiator before their big show. Soon, all three were carted off to the hospital where they died.

So how realistic is this? Can hot dogs really kill you? Here’s our analysis…

CAN BAD HOT DOGS KILL YOU LIKE IN JULIE AND THE PHANTOMS?

So there are a number of things in hot dogs that could definitely threaten to derail your rock ‘n roll career. Chief amongst them? (Especially if you’re eating all-meat hot dogs in the ’90s?)  Listeria. 

Here’s the problem with attributing Luke, Alex, and Reggie’s death to Listeria…it doesn’t usually kill people, shows up differently in different folks, and can take up to 70 days to assert itself.

Eating undercooked hot dogs can also upset your stomach or help you get Listeria poisoning. So maybe what killed our boys was the method the hot dogs were cooked?

WILL COOKING HOT DOGS ON A CAR RADIATOR KILL YOU?

Not necessarily! While it’s maybe not encouraged, there are safe ways to cook meals using the heat of your car’s engine. (Note: not radiator.)

According to HowStuffWorks.com, you can wrap your food in tin foil — a must — and drive around to cook your meal. (I’m serious. Car cooking recipes ascribe to a cook time based on mileage.) The heat of the engine should do the trick and it’s thought that older cars do a better job of handling this gig.

It’s worth noting that our heroes got their dogs from the radiator of a parked car. That suggests that the hot dogs might be both undercooked…and possibly contaminated by bacteria… (If the radiator was dirty.)

HOW COULD BAD HOT DOGS KILL THREE TEENS?

This is hearsay, but Decider’s own Alex Zalben says he has heard of a case where a NYC street dog killed someone via his wife’s physician. According to that doctor, a patient ate a hot dog that had been sitting in liquid for too long in a street vendor’s cart. Apparently the bacteria in this liquid can be harmful enough to cause death.

In 1998, the New York Times published an article explaining that thanks to the city’s lax rules for street vendors, it was very easy — around the time of Julie of the Phantoms — for street vendors to sell questionable food. Hot dogs were not part of this study and Julie and the Phantoms is set in LA, but the point stands. If the radiator the dogs were cooked on wasn’t heated up enough or clean enough, it could result in food poisoning.

But killing three different teen boys from the same batch of dogs? IS IT POSSIBLE?

See, here’s where I’m skeptical. I’m not sure all three boys would be immediately felled by such dogs. Indeed, the food poisoning wouldn’t be so…immediate??

So my theory — and keep in mind I have not watched the whole first season of Julie and the Phantoms yet — is that their food was poisoned by some nefarious schemer. Justice for the car-cooked hot dog!

(But seriously, be careful with uncooked meat and how you prepare your food.)

Watch Julie and the Phantoms on Netflix

• Julie and the Phantoms
• Madison Reyes
• Netflix