SALT LAKE CITY -- One man is making it his mission to find the best ballpark hot dog in the country, and he was at the Salt Lake Bee's game taste-testing Monday night.
Tom Lohr considers himself a lifelong baseball fan in search of the perfect hot dog. He decided to take his passion on the road, visiting ballparks across America.
"Some people got great dogs, some people got some crappy dogs, and I thought it be interesting to know whose got the best dog," said Tom Lohr, a self-proclaimed hot dog explorer.
Lohr is on an 11,000 mile road trip in hopes of finding the most mouth-watering ballpark hot dog in the country.
The Oklahoma man says he developed a rating system with the help of the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council. "The hot dog I rate on six factors -- one on the bun, then there's the taste of the dog, the price of the dog."
From San Francisco, where he describes the AT&T Park hot dog toppings as fabulous to a baseball game in Seattle where he considers the buns dry, Tom's journey can be found on "Blog About a Dog."
His next stop brought him to a Bee's game in Salt Lake City.
"The Salt Lake dogs? The taste was actually pretty good, the one was fresh but not steamed so it was a little cold." Tom says our sausages stack up below average. "It's not that it doesn't taste good but you throw in all the overall factor of how you do the rating, it ranks probably lower than average."
Locals who tasted the Salt Lake franks disagree saying their dogs hit it out of the park.
"Boom. It's phenomenal. I love it. I can't wait to eat the rest of it," said Galen Gorski.
"It's good. I mean I would rate it like a 7.35. Less bread, more dog next time probably," said Daniel Britt.
Tom said hot dogs are big business, especially at ballparks. He said there are 30 Major League Baseball ballparks in the U.S. and they serve about 21 million hot dogs annually.
Tom said there's definitely an appetite for what he's doing and plans to write a book about it.
