15 Things to Wrap in Crescent Dough Instead of Hot Dogs

You know the tray. Pigs in a blanket, first thing gone at every party, and the one thing on the table you can’t touch.

So you stand there with a carrot stick while everyone else goes back for seconds.

Here’s the thing nobody at that party has figured out. They’re not fighting over hot dogs. They’re fighting over the dough.

Flaky, golden, a little salty, it makes anything inside it disappear. The hot dog just got there first. It wasn’t even the original filling. Pigs in a blanket once meant oysters wrapped in bacon.

The wrapper is the star. The filling is up for grabs.

So what should you put in it?

Fifteen answers, from brie and jam to tater tots, each with a fact to drop while everyone’s reaching for seconds.

1. Brie and Jam

Brie was crowned the King of Cheeses at a peace conference, or so the story goes. During the Congress of Vienna in 1814-15, Talleyrand reportedly staged a cheese contest, and Brie de Meaux beat about 52 European cheeses, Stilton, Emmental, Edam and Gorgonzola among them.

It already had friends in high places. Accounts say it was delivered to Versailles every week by Louis XIV’s time.

Before you buy, flip the wedge over. Traditional brie usually uses animal rennet from calf stomachs, and no rule requires vegetarian-friendly cheese to say so on the label.

Look for “microbial” or “vegetarian rennet” in the ingredients. Brie is dairy, too, if vegans are coming.

2. Whole Carrots

A roasted whole carrot is exactly the right shape for the job, and that alone is a pretty good joke.

You’ve probably heard that the Dutch bred orange carrots to honor William of Orange. That’s a myth, or at best a big stretch.

Orange and purple carrots were already growing in Spain by the 14th century. Dutch growers in the 16th and 17th centuries did develop and spread the sweet, reliable orange types that became the standard. They just didn’t do it as a royal tribute.

3. Meatless Franks

Veggie hot dogs were in stores before crescent dough was. Worthington Foods sold “Meatless Wieners” as early as 1949, and VegNews counts them as the first veggie dogs to hit store shelves.

They got a new name, Veja-Links, in 1954. You can still buy them today under the Loma Linda brand.

The company behind them has a stranger backstory than the product. In 1939, an Adventist doctor named George T. Harding III founded Special Foods in Worthington, Ohio, to supply his father’s sanitarium. That business grew into Worthington Foods.

Loma Linda goes back even further. It started in 1905 as the Sanitarium Food Company and was canning meat substitutes by the 1930s.

Both brands have changed hands since. Kellogg bought Worthington in 1999, and Century Pacific, a company based in the Philippines, bought Loma Linda in 2025.

Rolled up in crescent dough, a meatless frank gives you the classic party tray with nothing to explain. Ingredients vary by brand and some contain egg whites, so check the pack if you’re feeding vegans.

4. Halloumi

Halloumi is the cheese that refuses to melt, and the reason is pure chemistry.

During cheesemaking, the curd blocks get cooked in hot whey. That kills the bacteria and deactivates the leftover rennet, so no lactic acid forms.

Without that acid, the pH stays high, the calcium phosphate stays bound and the protein network stays rigid. Inside a crescent roll, that means halloumi softens instead of leaking all over the tray.

In the EU, “Halloumi” has been a protected name tied to Cyprus since 2021. It’s usually made from sheep and goat milk, sometimes cow.

Rennet was traditionally animal. Most halloumi now uses vegetarian or microbial rennet, but check the label to be sure. And yes, it’s dairy.

5. String Cheese

String cheese as Americans know it came from Frank Baker of Baker Cheese in St. Cloud, Wisconsin, around 1976, after people asked for snack-size mozzarella. Production started in 1977 at a few hundred pounds a month.

Now it’s the only cheese Baker makes, and the company says that comes to nearly 3 million sticks a day.

It peels because mozzarella is a stretched-curd cheese. Stretching lines the casein proteins up in parallel fibers, so you’re pulling between strands. (Dairy, and rennet varies, so read the label if that matters at your table.)

6. Jalapeños and Cream Cheese

“Jalapeño” means “from Xalapa,” the capital of Veracruz. The funny part is that the peppers aren’t really grown around Xalapa. The name may come from the city’s role in trading them.

A jalapeño usually runs about 4,000 to 8,500 Scoville units, though sources give wider ranges. Cream cheese (dairy) is there to calm things down.

A chipotle is just a ripe jalapeño that’s been smoke-dried. Sahagún’s Florentine Codex records them being sold in Aztec markets, and the name comes from Nahuatl, roughly “smoked chili.”

7. Spinach and Feta

Feta has been to court and won. The EU made it a protected designation of origin in 2002, and when Denmark, Germany and others argued that “feta” was a generic word, the European Court of Justice upheld the protection in 2005.

Under those rules, Greek feta has to be at least 70% sheep’s milk, with no more than 30% goat’s milk. Denmark lost another round in 2022 over “feta” labels on cheese it exported.

That’s EU labeling only. In the US, “feta” can be made from cow’s milk.

Spinach and feta inside crescent dough is basically spanakopita that skipped the phyllo. Feta is dairy, and rennet varies by maker.

8. Banana and Nutella

Nutella exists because cocoa was scarce. In 1946, after the war, Pietro Ferrero in Alba, Piedmont, made Giandujot, a sweet paste made mostly from local hazelnuts and “just a little of the precious cocoa.”

It came as a loaf you sliced, not a jar you spread. The spreadable Supercrema followed in 1951, and the Nutella name arrived in 1964, “nut” plus the “-ella” suffix.

Classic Nutella contains skim milk powder. Nutella’s 2024 Plant-Based version drops the milk and adds chickpeas and rice syrup, though don’t count on finding it at every store.

9. Apple Pie Filling

“As American as apple pie” has one problem. The apple isn’t American.

Domestic apples come mainly from wild Malus sieversii on the western side of Kazakhstan’s Tian Shan mountains. In a 2017 study of apple genomes, researchers found about 46% of the domestic apple genome comes from that population and about 21% from the European crabapple, with Silk Road travelers spreading the seeds.

10. Asparagus Spears

Here’s a fact to save for after the party. In a 2016 BMJ study of more than 6,900 adults of European-American descent, about 60% reported that they couldn’t smell “asparagus pee.”

The researchers linked it to 871 genetic variants in smell-related genes and called it asparagus anosmia. It ran in the BMJ’s famously light-hearted Christmas issue.

So whether your guests notice anything later depends partly on their genes.

11. Mushroom Duxelles

Duxelles is the mushroom layer hiding inside a Beef Wellington. It’s minced mushrooms, onion or shallot and herbs, cooked down in butter to a paste.

In crescent dough, it turns into a mini mushroom wellington with no beef involved.

The name comes with a famous backstory that may not hold up. It’s often credited to the 17th-century chef François Pierre La Varenne, who supposedly named it after his employer, the marquis d’Uxelles.

Merriam-Webster calls the word’s history “obscure,” though. La Varenne’s 1651 cookbook, Le cuisinier françois, describes a similar preparation under a different name, and the earliest known use of “duxelles” dates to 1877.

Traditional duxelles uses butter (dairy). Olive oil is the easy swap.

12. Kimchi and Cheese

Kimchi isn’t vegetarian by default, and the jar won’t always make that obvious.

Traditional kimchi often gets its deep savory kick from jeotgal, fermented seafood such as salted shrimp (saeu-jeot), anchovy sauce or fish paste. UNESCO describes kimchi as “the Korean name for preserved vegetables seasoned with spices and fermented seafood.”

That seafood is there for umami, and some makers get it elsewhere by swapping in miso or other plant ingredients.

So shop on purpose. Buy a jar labeled vegan or vegetarian, or scan the ingredient list for fish sauce and shrimp.

Once that’s sorted, sour, spicy kimchi with melted cheese in a flaky roll is hard to argue with. The cheese is dairy, so vegans can leave it out and keep the kimchi.

13. Tater Tots

Tater Tots were born from scraps. In 1953, the Ore-Ida founders, including F. Nephi and Golden Grigg, needed a use for the potato slivers left over from french fry production, which otherwise got thrown out or sold as livestock feed.

They mixed the slivers with flour and seasoning, extruded them into little cylinders and had them on the market in 1954. “Tater Tots” is an Ore-Ida trademark, so any generic potato tots work just as well here.

14. Pesto and Sun-Dried Tomatoes

Parmigiano-Reggiano, the cheese in classic pesto, is made with calf rennet by law.

Pesto alla genovese is basil, garlic, pine nuts, olive oil, salt, Parmigiano-Reggiano or Grana Padano, and Pecorino. Parmigiano-Reggiano’s PDO rules require calf rennet, so the authentic stuff is never vegetarian, and Pecorino is typically made with animal rennet too.

Flip over a jar of store pesto and you’ll often see it spelled out: “Parmigiano Reggiano PDO (milk, salt, rennet).”

For a vegetarian version, look for a jar made with vegetarian hard cheese, or one with no cheese at all. The cheese-free kind covers vegans, too.

Then let the sun-dried tomatoes do their thing. Chewy, sweet and a little sharp, they’re what keeps a pesto roll from tasting like basil and nothing else.

15. Marshmallows

Wrap a marshmallow in crescent dough and it vanishes. That’s the whole idea behind resurrection rolls, also called Empty Tomb rolls.

In this Easter tradition, a marshmallow coated in butter and cinnamon sugar goes inside the dough and melts away in the oven. The roll comes out hollow, standing for the empty tomb. (That butter is dairy, if vegans are at the table.)

The candy is named after a plant. The marsh mallow, Althaea officinalis, has root sap with a gel-like texture, and ancient Egyptians are said to have mixed it with nuts and honey.

In the 19th century, egg whites and then gelatin replaced the root. That’s the catch today: most conventional marshmallows contain gelatin, usually from pork.

Gelatin-free ones exist. Dandies, from Chicago Vegan Foods, are vegan and made with tapioca syrup, cane sugar, tapioca starch, carrageenan and soy protein.

The Best Filling Might Be Nothing at All

The marshmallow settles it. You can wrap crescent dough around something that completely disappears, and people still want the roll.

The hot dog was never the point. The dough was.