While a taco shell may be thinner due to the ingredients used, it has the same shape as a hot dog bun; a hot dog is most closely defined as a taco.
In our opinion the above arguments settle the matter: tacos are NOT sandwiches. If you need a category for tacos, that would be “wraps and rolls,” with delicious relatives like burritos, quesadillas, shawarma, and piadine.
“Based on the current definition set by the USDA, yes, a hot dog is technically a sandwich.
Nationally, a hot dog is a sandwich-like product
The U.S. Department of Agriculture defines closed sandwiches as “consisting of two slices of bread or the top and bottom sections of a sliced bun that enclose the meat or poultry.”
A hot dog (commonly spelled hotdog) is a food consisting of a grilled or steamed sausage served in the slit of a partially sliced bun. The term hot dog can refer to the sausage itself. The sausage used is a wiener (Vienna sausage) or a frankfurter (Frankfurter Würstchen, also just called frank).
Both are popular types of American fast food sandwiches made of particularly shaped ground meat into specific buns, garnished with condiments. A hamburger is a round patty put into round hamburger buns along with condiments; a hot dog is an oblong sausage inside oblong hot dog buns, also with condiments.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) describes a sandwich as “a meat or poultry filling between two slices of bread, a bun, or a biscuit.” By that definition, sure, a hot dog is a sandwich.
A taco usually contains a form of meat, cheese, salsa and beans, among other things. A hot dog also contains such ingredients: the meat being a hot dog, some people add a slice of cheese to a hot dog, relish, which by definition is essentially a salsa, and many people add baked beans to their hot dogs.
Lakshmi isn't the first to declare hot dogs a sandwich. In 2018, the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg concluded that a hot dog is indeed a sandwich while on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.
"It's a long and convoluted and counter-intuitive argument, but ultimately pizza is a type of hot open-faced sandwich, primarily because the base of the pizza is a bread dough. As we reconstructed a taxonomy of sandwiches, pizza qualifies as a hot open-faced sandwich."
Naturally answers to this question depend on how one defines a sandwich. As some have argued, sandwiches are culinary objects composed of two pieces of bread or bread-like substance with different contents inside. Under this scandalously loose definition, a Pop-Tart could be a sandwich, and probably so could ravioli.
Merriam-Webster defines it as "two or more slices of bread or a split roll having a filling in between." Simple enough. Essentially, anything can be a sandwich so long as it's between two slices of bread or inside a roll or bun. So by a technical definition, yes, hot dogs and hamburgers are very much sandwiches.
According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, a “sandwich” is “two or more slices of bread or a split roll having a filling in between.” So, by this definition, a hot dog is, in fact, a sandwich.
Since a sandwich only requires bread with a filling—there's no specification on whether the bread needs to be leavened—tacos technically, from a definition standpoint at least, can be considered a subcategory of sandwiches.
The word "taco" is quite new. It originated from Mexican silver miners in the 18 th century. Gunpowder was wrapped in a paper like a “taquito” and inserted into rocks before detonation. By this time, tacos were known as the food of the working class, which included miners.
The origins of the taco are really unknown. My theory is that it dates from the 18th century and the silver mines in Mexico, because in those mines the word “taco” referred to the little charges they would use to excavate the ore.
Bratwurst (Germany):
But we don't blame you for mistaking a pork sausage in a crusty bun with mustard and sauerkraut for its American cousin. The Germanscall this delicious, but can you call it a sandwich? Matt: Nope.
"A sandwich is a meat or poultry filling between two slices of bread, a bun or a biscuit." That excludes items like burritos, wraps or hot dogs.
The hot dog, he explains time and again, is in a classification of its own. "In essence it boils down to a hot dog is its own unique item that exceeds the sandwich category. It breaks itself free of the sandwich category. People love to argue with us, but no, a hot dog is not a sandwich," Mittenthal said.
McDonald's introduced the McHot Dog in 1995 at certain locations. Customers weren't so hot on them, and they were later removed from menus in the U.S. The late McDonald's founder, Ray Kroc, vowed that his restaurants would never sell hot dogs, so maybe they were doomed from the start.
Why did McDonald's stop selling McHotDogs? McDonald's Corporation founder Ray Kroc revealed in his 1977 autobiography that he prohibited the chain to sell hot dogs, regardless of demand, because there was no way of knowing what was within the hot dog.
A vegetarian hot dog is a hot dog produced completely from non-meat products. Unlike traditional home-made meat sausages, the casing is not made of intestine, but of cellulose or other plant-based ingredients.
Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany, is traditionally credited with originating the frankfurter. However, this claim is disputed by those who assert that the popular sausage - known as a "dachshund" or "little-dog" sausage - was created in the late 1600's by Johann Georghehner, a butcher, living in Coburg, Germany.
Whatever its ultimate origins, German immigrants brought the food to New York in the 1860s, where street vendors sold them as “dachshund sausages,” presumably because of their shape. It is from this that the term hot dog derives, with the implied suggestion that the sausage really was made of dog flesh.
There is a crucial word this definition lacks: BUNS.
Additionally, you also need a patty. Could you put thinly-sliced deli meat in a bun and call it a burger? No. You would call that a sandwich.