Hot dogs go grass fed and nitrate free

Maybe their dogs aren't up to Cupid's or Pink's, but the LAT Food section makes the hot dogs at the Let's Be Frank cart parked at the Helms Building in Culver City sound pretty delectable.

Sue Moore's hot dogs are made from free-range, grass-fed beef sourced from Hearst Ranch in San Simeon. Moore, co-owner of San Francisco-based Let's Be Frank, got the idea for the "dogs gone good" while working at Alice Waters' renowned Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley. "Alice is a big grass-fed fan and was buying two head of cattle every other week," Moore says. "I wanted to use all the trimmings because this stuff was so good."

Moore teamed with Larry Bain, formerly of Acme Steakhouse in the San Francisco Giants ballpark, to develop a nitrate-free grass-fed beef frank. "We went through dozens before we came up with the best flavor combo," she says. The winner was a dog lightly spiced with garlic and paprika in a lamb casing. Judging by the website photo of Waters noshing on the signature frank, she deemed it the winner too.

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This spring they'll park a cart on the Santa Monica Pier for the outdoor concert and movie series, doling out beef franks, a pork brat and a half-beef, half-pork "pup dog."

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