Serious Eats
How to Quit Eating Hot Dogs
The product of human curiosity and boredom has no limits, as evidenced by Jamie J. Weinman's experiment to determine what would happen if he cooked all the fat out of a hot dog. While the hot dog initially appeared to contain an infinite supply of fat in its tubular being, it stopped oozing fat after about ten minutes of being subjected to the nuking power of a microwave. What was left?
A stick. I mean, literally, a stick. It was hard, it was solid, and I could tell that while there was nothing edible remaining, if I repeated the process with another hot dog, I could rub the two of them together and make a fire.
And then Weinman gave up eating hot dogs.
For a hilarious and frighteningly thorough breakdown of Weinman's experiment in scientific jargon that would've made more sense to me during high school chemistry class than it does now, check out A Chemist Response to "A Scientific Experiment." In his response, Stephen McNeil brings up the important point that microwaving anything for a long time will take out all its fluid and render it unappetizing, but for the purposes of watching oozing fat, "it seriously doesn’t get much better than hot dogs."