You might say hot dogs are as American as apple pie.

Except we eat 10 times as many hot dogs a year as slices of pie, according to the market research group NPD. average american has 20 a year.apple pie: an average american eats two servings of apple pie per year.

We down most of our dogs - roughly 7 billioncq that b - between Memorial Day and Labor Day, according to the Washington-based National Hot Dog and Sausage Council. That's 818 hot dogs consumed every second during that time frame.

And on Independence Day alone, we'llAmericans eat 150 millioncq m hot dogs.

Philadelphia ranked fourth in the top hot-dog-consuming cities of 2007, with $46 million worth of franks eaten. New York$103.6m,, Los Angeles$86.4m and Baltimore/Washington$51.1m beat us out.

In the United States, the first Coney Island hot dog stand opened in 1871, and the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 was the first to feature hot dog vendors. It was also around this time that the hot dog first made its appearance at a ballpark, when they were served at a St. Louis Browns major league game.

Those dates explain, in part, why the number of dogs per package didn't match the number of rolls.

Initially, hot dogs were sold in butcher shops by weight, not number. Bun-makers, left to do as they pleased, packaged their rolls in eights. In 1940, when manufacturers began packaging hot dogs, they chose the 10-to-a-pack formula, presumably to give us arithmetic anxiety.

By the hot dog council's computations, you need to buy five bags of eight-to-the-pack buns and four 10-to-the-pack hot dogs to break even.

Meanwhile, the variety of dogs available has become dizzying. Do you want organic, all-natural or grass-fed meat? Cocktail length, bun size or foot-long? Chicken, turkey, tofu? The choice is yours.

Hot dogs contain 85 percent meat and 15 percent flavoring such as spices, salt, water and curing ingredients, the national hot dog council says. The meat can be all beef or a blend, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture requires that if the meat is other than from the muscle of the animal, the dogs must be labeled as byproduct or "variety meats."

Skinless means the manufacturer has already peealed off the casing in which the dogs were precooked. The casing may have been cellulose or "natural," which means it was made from animal intestine. When the casing is left on, the dog has more snap, more bite.

Curious about cured vs. uncured?

Curing salts made from sodium nitrite cq preserve the meat and add that special hot-doggy flavor you may recall from your childhood. But sodium nitrite (nitrate is a close relative) is linked to cancer. The uncured varieties are made with a combination of celery juice, which contains natural nitrates, plus lactic acid and salt.

(Kosher hot dogs, by the way, are all beef, made under rabbinical supervision.)

Oscar Mayer is the best-selling dog on the market, according to the nationalhotdog&sausage council.

But what's the best-tasting hot dog?

That's a matter of personal preference, of course.

We asked adults and children to participate in a taste test, using eight popular supermarket brands of hot dogs.

Three were all beef (Nathan's Famous, Hebrew National, Dietz & Watson); three were a mixture of beef, pork, chicken and/or turkey (Oscar Mayer, Ball Park, Hatfield Phillies); and two were organic, uncured brands from Whole Foods (Applegate Beef and Wellshire Turkey). The hot dogs were simply boiled and tasted plain without mustard or rolls.