VIDEO EXCLUSIVE: ‘Fast Foodies’ Chef Kristen Kish Reveals What’s *Really* In A Hot Dog!

Fast Foodies’ Kristen Kish reveals what it was like working with Joel McHale and what makes a good hot dog in her new uInterview.

On the show, Kish, along with fellow Top Chef winner Jeremy Ford, and Iron Chef winner Justin Sutherland, compete to make gourmet versions of celebrity guests’ favorite fast food menu items.

“Fast Foodies is essentially where cooking meets comedy, meets friendship, meets slight competition, meets a celebrity,” Kish told uInterview founder Erik Meers.

“We invite a celebrity guest every week, they bring in their favorite fast food item,” she said jumping into a deeper description of the show. “The first round we get to copycat it as best as we can, trying to really nail exactly how Mcdonald’s or Taco Bell did it-ish, hopefully, better. And then our celebrity will pick their favorite, and then we’ll go into the next round, which is called the remix round, where we get to kind of do our chef spin, and you know, basically, no rules apply there. So we get to create something really beautiful and hopefully, our guests can find the similarity and then the guest will pick their favorite and that person is the winner.”

The first episode features celebrity McHale and his favorite fast food, the Portillo’s hot dog.

“The best part of every episode for me is when you get to see like that behind-the-scenes thing that normally wouldn’t have been put into like a show, right,” Kish said, “and so Joel … him pulling out his personal cell phone filming, what we were doing, asking the questions, showing us pictures of the beef that he cooked, and he was genuinely excited to show us all that. So, there was a little clip in there where you can see him walk around with his phone, trying to film stuff, and that was him genuinely excited about the whole process.”

So, what’s really in a hot dog?

“A great hot dog is either pork shoulder, different cuts of beef, depending on which way you want to go; lots of spices: nutmeg, coriander, allspice, mace, garlic, onion all the different beautiful things. And then yes, it ultimately is a meat that’s stuffed into a casing, which is, most of the time, an intestine, but for all the people that are squeamish they do other styles of casings as well.”

But, Kish revealed that McHale wanted the chefs to focus on a different aspect of the Portillo’s hot dog — the poppy seed bun.

“Immediately, when I heard that I was like, ‘Okay well, little Sardinian gnocchitini look like mini hot dog buns if you roll them the right way,’ and I was like ‘Okay I can do that.’ So, throw in some poppy seeds and I essentially made little pastas that look like mini hot dog buns. And then I did like a hot dog ragu that I like simmered for an hour and a half with you know homemade roasted chicken stock and mushrooms and parmesan rinds and all this umami flavor bombs.”

New episodes of Fast Foodies drop every Thursday at 10:30 on TruTV. Check out the trailer below.