In my book, there’s nothing better than a refreshing glass of iced tea to go with food coming out of my Weber gas grill.
My favorite iced tea comes from China Mist and the variety is called Fiesta Fria. It’s described as “a deliciously fruity blend of fine black tea infused with a jolt of strawberry and herbs”. I buy it as loose tea in 24 3/4-ounce packages for $28.50. Each package makes 3 quarts of tea in the Mr. Coffee Iced Tea Maker.
If you want to try a smaller quantity, Fiesta Fria is also available in 4 1/2-ounce tea bags for $5.99, each bag making 2 quarts of tea.
I’ve served this iced tea to a lot of people and everyone loves it. Give it a try, I think you’ll like it too!
I recently learned that much of Weber’s new product design is being done by a Chicago-based firm named CHOi Design. As is the case with most design agencies, they like to tout customer success stories on their website. If you visit CHOi Design’s site, you can see some examples of Weber product designs they’ve done for:
At some point in the past few years, Weber stopped offering parts to convert gas grills from propane to NG or NG to propane. We can only assume that this decision was made for liability reasons.
But here’s an interesting little diddy, found while doing a Google search. It’s a memo from Weber to dealers about the no-conversion policy.
If your Weber dealer has no idea what you’re talking about when you ask for gas conversion parts, now you know why.
In 2001, grilling was more popular than ever. According to the Barbecue Industry Association, over 15 million grills were sold in America the previous year, up 32% from 1997. About 75% of households owned a grill, and over 50% used them all year long. The most popular book at the time was How to Grill by Steven Raichlen.
The Dot Com Bubble had burst in 1999 and the Housing Bubble was just starting to build in 2001. Homeowners were upgrading their kitchens with high-end commercial appliances. Appliance manufacturers like Viking and Jenn-Air started bringing expensive luxury gas grills to market around this time.
How did Weber respond? By creating an entirely new brand called Vieluxe. Vieluxe luxury grills were available in 44″ and 56″ models with suggested retail prices of $6,000 and $8,000 respectively. And quite noticeably, they did not carry the Weber name or logo.
Vieluxe: The Luxury of Life
The brand name Vieluxe was a combination of the French words “Vie” meaning life and “Luxe” meaning luxury. The tagline “The Luxury of Life” and the theme of luxury were prominent in the advertising of these grills. Brochures featured images of beautiful people in beautiful places enjoying the good life with Vieluxe.
“Sometimes the best restaurant to meet at isn’t a restaurant at all.”
In a 2003 Weber press release, Vieluxe Brand Manager Shaun Chinsky said, “Vieluxe grills are painstakingly handmade using only the finest materials. From the welder’s arc to the polisher’s cloth, no detail is overlooked.” In a 2004 interview with GenieKnows.com, Chinsky was quoted as saying that Vieluxe “is like our Lexus”.
“All day long you sit at the computer, sit in meetings, sit on a plane. When was the last time you got to just sit and talk?”
Vieluxe Features & Specs
Vieluxe grills were built to the highest standards of quality, featuring a welded chassis of 16-gauge stainless steel 304 tubing. They included a commercial-grade thermometer in the hood, heavy-duty 3/8″ welded stainless steel rod cooking grates, stainless steel Flavorizer bars, a rotisserie with infrared burner, a fold-away warming rack, and a funnel-shaped drip pan that directed drippings into a Teflon-coated catch pan for easy cleaning.
At a time when other Weber gas grills had the propane tank hanging on the outside of the grill, Vieluxe hid the tank inside a cabinet with “swing-out easy-change tank support”. Vieluxe was the first grill made by Weber to use continuous-spark electronic igniters powered by AA batteries.
Two unique patented features included a stainless steel work surface that “glides open on a steel rail and ball bearing assembly” to reveal two 14,000 BTU side burners and the Integrated Smoker System “with ported flues that disperse wood smoke evenly across the cooking surface, powered by a dedicated 8,000 BTU/hour burner.”
Vieluxe 360201 44″ Specifications
Dimensions: 65″ W x 33″ D x 50″ H
Weight: 370 lbs.
Cooking surface: 432 sq. in.
Warming rack: 117 sq. in., expandable to 247 sq. in.
4 primary burners 50,000 total BTU/hr (12,500 BTU each)
Smoker burner: 8,000 BTU/hr
Infrared rotisserie burner: 10,000 BTU/hr
2 side burners: 14,000 BTU/hr each burner
Rotisserie: 2 spit forks
Vieluxe 370201 56″ Specifications
Dimensions: 77″ W x 33″ D x 50″ H
Weight: 440 lbs.
Cooking surface: 648 sq. in.
Warming rack: 171 sq. in., expandable to 361 sq. in.
6 primary burners 75,000 total BTU/hr (12,500 BTU each)
Smoker burner: 8,000 BTU/hr
Infrared rotisserie burner: 15,000 BTU/hr
2 side burners: 14,000 BTU/hr each burner
Rotisserie: 4 spit forks
Ownership Is More Like Membership
Grill owners were entitled to the Vieluxe Concierge personal service program consisting of:
Complimentary Spring grill tune-up for the first 3 years.
Dedicated 24-hour customer care line to answer grilling questions.
Limited lifetime warranty.
As the brochure said, “With Vieluxe, ownership is more like membership.”
Luxury Hits The Chopping Block
Vieluxe grills were sold from 2001-2005 and then discontinued, presumably due to poor sales.
In 2006, a Weber insider told The Virtual Weber Bulletin Board that the key factor to the demise of Vieluxe was the high cost of hand fabrication. In 2005, Weber Summit Platinum stainless steel grills could be manufactured using the same tooling as the Summit Gold but at a fraction of the cost of Vieluxe. Not that these were comparable grills in any way, but time shows us that people voted with their wallets. Weber Summit grills are still with us today and Vieluxe is but a distant memory.
Vieluxe Brochure
It’s too late to buy a new Vieluxe grill and it’s unlikely you’ll ever find one used. But you can still enjoy its luxurious brochure. Here’s to champagne wishes and caviar dreams!
Special thanks to Mike Lang of AnotherPintPlease.com for tweeting recently about cooking on an old Vieluxe. His tweet reminded me of the existence of this old grill and inspired this blog post.
We’ve tasted all the hot dogs we’re going to taste for 2014…five divisions covering 16 all-beef dogs. If you’ve missed any of our taste tests, you can go back to the first installment for details on how we selected and judged the hot dogs and read details from each division taste-off.
Last time, Kirkland Signature beat Bar-S and Armour to take the win in the fifth and final Stray Dog Division. To wrap-up the taste-off, let’s summarize the results across all of the hot dogs we tasted and provide some closing comments.
Overall Results
Brand
Price
Weighted Score
Oscar Mayer
$2.98
66.8572
Ball Park Deli Style
$3.99
65.7372
Farmer John
$3.64
64.5828
Open Nature Uncured
$4.99
63.4172
Nathan’s Famous
$2.98
62.88
Oscar Mayer Selects Angus Uncured
$3.98
62.8572
Applegate The Great Organic Uncured
$8.69
61.7028
Ball Park Angus
$3.98
61.68
Kirkland Signature
$10.99
61.12
Hebrew National
$2.98
60.5828
Ball Park
$2.98
58.2856
Bar-S
$4.99
57.1428
Applegate The Great Organic Stadium
$8.99
57.1428
Organic Prairie
$8.99
52.5372
Armour
$2.79
48.5372
Wellshire Organic
$5.99
47.3828
Oscar Mayer Beef Franks
It turns out that the basic Oscar Mayer beef frank is the big winner, scoring higher than all other hot dogs in the taste test. And at $2.98 a package, they were among the least expensive hot dogs in the pack.
Conclusions
Here’s what we learned from tasting these 16 varieties of tube steak.
There are a lot of decent all-beef hot dogs out there. While there were a few stand-outs and a few bad dogs, most were decent with above average or very good scores. Personally, having tasted all these hot dogs, I would stick to the ones with scores of 60 or higher.
Appearance before grilling is not a good predictor of a tasty hot dog. While this was not part of our judging criteria, it’s interesting to note that some of the hot dogs that looked great before grilling did not taste great after grilling, and some of the more pale hot dogs grilled up beautifully and tasted very good.
Price is not a good predictor of a tasty hot dog. Some of the highest-rated dogs in our taste tests were among the least expensive. This may have to do with mass production and high sales volume for popular brands like Oscar Mayer and Kirkland Signature that drives the price down for a good quality hot dog.
Uncured non-organic hot dogs taste good. We got good results from the two hot dogs tasted in the Almost Organic Division that were cured using the sodium nitrate that occurs naturally in celery juice or celery powder.
Organic hot dogs were not superior. Highest-scoring Applegate The Great Organic Uncured was an expensive hot dog that finished 7th overall in the rankings. If buying organic hot dogs, do so for reasons other than taste.
There are taste differences between varieties within the same brand. We tasted three varieties of Ball Park hot dogs—regular, Angus, and Deli Style—and there were discernible differences in taste. In the case of Ball Park, the more expensive Angus and Deli Style dogs proved better than the regular variety. In the case of Applegate, the Stadium variety did not taste as good as the regular variety. In the case of Oscar Mayer, the regular variety tasted better than the Selects Angus variety.
Condiments level the playing field. Eating hot dogs on buns with condiments was not part of the judging, but we ate a lot of them that way after testing. Many of the subtleties you taste when eating a hot dog plain are lost when you wrap it in bread and smother it with condiments.
We’re tired of eating hot dogs. After tasting so many dogs in five rounds of testing, we’re ready for a break.
Thank you for joining us on this hot dog journey! Special thanks to everyone that provided comments and suggestions for hot dogs we should test in the future. Hopefully we’ll get to your favorite in 2015. We’ll broaden the tasting criteria to include dogs in natural casings, big 1/4 pound dogs, and some of the seasoned franks coming to market these days.
Now go eat some hot dogs and enjoy the rest of your summer!
According to the Hearth, Patio & Barbecue Association, in 2013 the grill industry shipped nearly 14 million grills and smokers in North America. That number breaks down as follows:
Total Gas Grill Shipments (58 percent of sales) – 8,053,000
Total Charcoal Grill Shipments (40 percent of sales) – 5,590,000
Total Electric Grill Shipments (2 percent of sales) – 302,000
Gas grills continue to dominate as the most popular type of grill sold!
This is the fifth and final round of our summer hot dog taste-off for 2014. If this is your first visit to the taste-off, make sure to read the first installment for details on how we’re selecting and judging the hot dogs.
Last time, Applegate The Great Organic Uncured beat three rivals quite easily in the Organic Division. This time, we taste three mutts that did not fit easily into our previous division contests.
The Stray Dog Division
The entries in this division include:
Bar-S (Sigma): $4.99
Armour (Armour-Eckrich): $2.79
Kirkland Signature (Costco): $10.99
Bar-S claims to be the #1 best-selling hot dog brand in America. The most popular varieties found in supermarkets in San Jose, California were chicken/pork/beef and chicken/pork, but we kept shopping and eventually found an all-beef variety for our taste test. At $4.99, it was a bit pricey compared to better-known brands like Oscar Mayer and Ball Park.
Armour is an iconic American brand, and those of a certain age will remember the famous jingle about Armour being “the dog kids love to bite”. We searched high and low for this dog and finally found it hiding in a Mexican supermarket. The hot dog itself was on the small side, weighing in at just 1.5 ounces. This is 1/2 ounce short of the 2 ounce criteria we established for hot dogs in the taste-off, but the judges granted a waiver to this classic dog so we could taste it in the competition. At $2.79, Armour was one of the less expensive dogs in the taste-off.
Finally, Kirkland Signature is a popular hot dog brand sold at Costco. Not to be confused with the 1/4 pound version sold in the food court, this is a standard length, 2 ounce hot dog that comes 12 to a package, 3 packages in a bundle. We had to buy 36 hot dogs just to taste 2 samples! However, at $10.99 for 72 ounces of meat, Kirkland Signature represents the best dollar value of all hot dogs in our taste-off.
(Note that in these photos, the hot dogs are always shown in the order listed above.)
The Stray Dog Division – Front viewThe Stray Dog Division – Rear viewThe Stray Dog Division – Without packaging
The hot dogs were grilled together and served to the judges.
Grilling the hot dogs
Once the hot dogs were grilled but not overly cooked, they were brought indoors and immediately judged on appearance, then sampled and judged on taste and tenderness/texture.
Hot dogs ready for judging
The Results
Kirkland Signature swept the warehouse floor with both of its rivals, beating Bar-S by 4 points and biting Armour by 12.6 points. With it’s sub-50 point score, Armour is sent to the doghouse as our second-lowest-scoring hot dog in all five rounds of taste testing.
Here are the weighted scores:
Bar-S: 57.1428
Armour: 48.5372
Kirkland Signature: 61.12
Judges’ Comment Cards
Bar-S: Pale color, above average taste, decent texture
Armour: Very good appearance, odd baloney-like taste, bland, too soft, virtually no texture
Kirkland Signature: Excellent color and sheen, good smoke and spice flavor, snappy texture, hard bits in sample for one judge
So Kirkland Signature wins big in our final round of the TVWGG Hot Dog Taste-Off! Next week we’ll summarize our findings across all 16 entries and offer some closing comments about the hot dogs we tasted.
This is the fourth round in our summer hot dog taste-off. If this is your first visit to the taste-off, make sure to read the first installment for details on how we’re selecting and judging the hot dogs.
Last time, Oscar Mayer Selects whipped Open Nature in the Almost Organic Division taste-off. This week, we take on the most sincere hot dog category of all.
The Organic Division
These hot dogs are labeled “uncured”, meaning that they’ve been cured using the sodium nitrate that occurs naturally in sea salt and celery juice or celery powder. They contain certified organic, grass-fed beef from cattle that have never been administered antibiotics or hormones and have been humanely raised.
Applegate The Great Organic Uncured: $8.69
Organic Prairie Organic Uncured: $8.99
Applegate The Great Organic Uncured Stadium: $8.99
Wellshire Organic Uncured: $5.99
(Note that in these photos, the hot dogs are always shown in the order listed above.)
The Organic Division – Front viewThe Organic Division – Rear viewThe Organic Division – Without packaging
The hot dogs were grilled together and served to the judges.
Grilling the hot dogs
Once the hot dogs were grilled but not overly cooked, they were brought indoors and immediately judged on appearance, then sampled and judged on taste and tenderness/texture.
Hot dogs ready for judging
The Results
Applegate The Great Organic Uncured beat its sibling Applegate The Great Organic Stadium by 4.5 points, mowed-down Open Prairie by 9 points, and took Wellshire Organic to the woodshed with a spanking of 14 points. In fact, with a sub-50 point score, Wellshire Organic holds the distinction of being our lowest scoring hot dog in four rounds of taste testing to date.
Here are the weighted scores:
Applegate The Great Organic Uncured: 61.7028
Organic Prairie Organic Uncured: 52.5372
Applegate The Great Organic Uncured Stadium: 57.1428
Wellshire Organic Uncured: 47.3828
It’s interesting to note that in terms of appearance, taste and tenderness/texture, the Applegate The Great Organic Uncured hot dog did as well or better than many of the big brand and premium dogs we’ve tested in other divisions…but at a cost of $5-6 more per package.
Judges’ Comment Cards
Applegate The Great Organic Uncured: Plump, shiny, very good flavor, very good texture
Applegate The Great Organic Uncured Stadium: Pale, chewy texture, above average flavor
Wellshire Organic Uncured: Thin, bland, chewy, texture a bit hard
So Applegate The Great Organic Uncured is the winner of the Organic Division! Stay tuned for our last division contest of 2014: The Stray Dog Division.
This is the third installment of our summer hot dog taste-off. If this is your first visit to the taste-off, make sure to read the first installment for details on how we’re selecting and judging the hot dogs.
Last week, Ball Park Deli Style was the winner over Hebrew National, Nathan’s Famous Skinless, and Ball Park Angus in the Big Brand Premium Division taste-off. This week, we’re examining a small category in the world of hot dogdom.
The Almost Organic Division
These hot dogs share some attributes with organic hot dogs but are not certified organic. Although they are labeled “uncured”, they have essentially been cured using the sodium nitrate that occurs naturally in celery juice or celery powder.
Open Nature (Lucerne/Safeway): $4.99
Oscar Mayer Selects (Kraft): $3.98
(Note that in these photos, the hot dogs are always shown in the order listed above.)
The Almost Organic Division – Front viewThe Almost Organic Division – Rear viewThe Almost Organic Division – Without packaging
You’ll notice that the Open Nature hot dog looks more brown than the Oscar Mayer Selects. The Open Nature packaging makes claims about no antibiotics, no added hormones, and all vegetarian fed; the Oscar Mayer Selects packaging makes no such claims.
Grilling the hot dogs
The hot dogs were grilled together and served to the judges.
Once the hot dogs were grilled but not overly cooked, they were brought indoors and immediately judged on appearance, then sampled and judged on taste and tenderness/texture.
Hot dogs ready for judging
The Results
Open Nature squeaks by Oscar Meyer Selects with a 0.56 point margin of victory.
Here are the weighted scores:
Open Nature: 63.4172
Oscar Mayer Selects: 62.8572
Judges’ Comment Cards
Open Nature: Nice color; looks like meat; nice sheen; firm texture
Oscar Mayer Selects: Nice color and sheen; good flavor, a bit too salty
So Open Nature is the winner of the Almost Organic Division! Stay turned for our next division contest: The Organic Division.
We’re continuing our taste-off of the best hot dogs for summer grilling. If this is your first visit to the taste off, make sure to read the first installment for details on how we’re selecting and judging the hot dogs.
Last week, Oscar Mayer beat Ballpark and Farmer John in the Big Brand Basic Division taste-off. This week, we up the ante by tasting upscale tube steaks from the most recognizable names in hot dogs.
The Big Brand Premium Division
This division includes what some would consider higher quality hot dogs from the biggest names in the business.
Ball Park Angus (Hillshire): $3.98
Hebrew National (ConAgra): $2.98
Nathan’s Famous Skinless (licensed to John Morrell/Smithfield): $2.98
Ball Park Deli Style (Hillshire): $3.99
We had hoped for an entire division dedicated to kosher hot dogs, but Hebrew National was the only big brand available in supermarkets in San Jose, California where the taste-off was held. That’s why HN has been placed in the Premium Division alongside these worthy competitors.
(Note that in these photos, the hot dogs are always shown in the order listed above.)
The Big Brand Premium Division – Front viewThe Big Brand Premium Division – Rear viewThe Big Brand Premium Division – Without packaging
Judges Make Exception For Hebrew National
The Hebrew National hot dogs shown here are 50% larger than the competition, weighing-in at 3 ounces each. The taste-off rules require a standard length hot dog weighing about 2 ounces each. Hebrew National makes a 1.72 ounce hot dog, but it’s not readily available in San Jose, California where the taste-off was held. In order to include HN in the competition, the judges made an exception to the rule to allow this larger hot dog.
Grilling the hot dogs
The hot dogs were grilled together and served to the judges.
Once the hot dogs were grilled but not overly cooked, they were brought indoors and immediately judged on appearance, then sampled and judged on taste and tenderness/texture.
Hot dogs ready for judging
The Results
Ball Park Deli Style sliced up Nathan’s Famous by 2.9 points, gored Ball Park Angus by 4 points, and made Hebrew National say “Oy Vey!” by 5.2 points.
Here are the weighted scores:
Ball Park Angus: 61.68
Hebrew National: 60.5828
Nathan’s Famous Skinless: 62.88
Ball Park Deli Style: 65.7372
Judges’ Comment Cards
Ball Park Angus: Good color; salty; mushy
Hebrew National: Looked bland, tasted bland; good texture
Nathan’s Famous Skinless: Not the best color; good balance of salt and spices; good texture
Ball Park Deli Style: Nice color/sheen; excellent spicy flavor; good texture
So Ball Park Deli Style is the winner of the Big Brand Premium Division! Stay tuned for our next division contest: The Almost Organic Division.
