Janet Riley: Hi! I am Janet Riley and I am President of the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council, and now I'm going to take you on a tour of the Midwest and their hotdog preferences.

When you go to Milwaukee, there is nothing that you'll love more than a great brat. In fact, Miller Park is the only stadium in America where they actually eat more brats than they eat hotdogs. We're also going to talk about Michigan Coney Dogs, another great tradition, as well as Cheese Coney Dogs, also a delicious hotdog.

The ingredients you'll need for today's recipe are one pound of ground beef, two chopped onion, two garlic cloves, one tablespoon chili powder, one tablespoon of cumin, one tablespoon of yellow mustard, one tablespoon of Worcestershire sauce, two teaspoon brown sugar and three quarter cup of tomato paste.

Let's take a look at the brats we've got cooking here today. There're really two kinds of brats; there is the smoke brat which is precooked. It's a little whiter in color and it really just needs to be reheated. There is also the fresh Sheboygan-styled brat and that needs to be cooked thoroughly. So what makes a brat a brat? Well, nutmeg is the special flavor that you taste in a brat that makes it unique from saying Italian sausage which has a knockwurst which is heavy on the garlic. All in all, brats are a great sausage, especially when you are sitting in a ballpark. So I'm going to serve up one of these delicious looking brats. I'm going to add just a little bit of yellow mustard on top and there you have it; a brat with mustard in Midwestern classic.

We're going to continue our tour to Midwest by taking a look at the Coney Island Dog and that's a hotdog toped in a coney sauce. This is very popular in Michigan which actually claims the Coney Island Dog. So despite the name Coney Island, this hotdog actually has very little connection to the Coney Island we think of in New York.

Coney Island sauce is typically a drier meat sauce. So we're going to start by browning our ground beef. We're going to let that cook for a while and then we're going to add our other ingredients.

So now that our ground beef is nice and brown and we've drained the fat, we're going to go ahead and start adding our ingredients. We're going to add some cumin and mix it in, stirring some brown sugar. We're going to add some chili powder and then we're going to add some nice chopped onions. Add some Worcestershire, mix that all in, a little bit of mustard and then we'll add our tomato paste. As you can see, it's kind of a nice dry sauce and as it cooks, the sauce is going to thin out just a little bit that made a paste that will liquefy a little bit more as it heats up.

So now this is being cooking for about 15 minutes, let's check on it, it looks great; some nice hot flavorful Coney sauce, nice and meaty. So to make the Michigan Coney Island Dog, we're going to go ahead and top a dog with our sauce and that's all it takes.

Now if we want to modify it a little bit and make this Cincinnati Cheese Coney, just put a little sauce on top with cheese. So there you have it; we have been at a great hot dog and sausage tour of the Midwest. We've sampled the Michigan Coney Dog, a Cincinnati Cheese Coney and a Wisconsin brat topped with mustard. These are three classics and we hope to try these recipes at home and enjoy them.