The 2-Step Hack to Making Every Hot Dog Absolutely Perfect
By Nick Kindelsperger, Epicurious
It was the kind of call every writer dreams of getting, the one where an editor rings, poses a silly question, and tells you he’ll pay you to give him the answer. This time, it was the editor of this site on the line. “What’s the best way to cook a hot dog?” he asked.
I accepted the assignment and locked down the money. Then, a few weeks later, I turned in my answer. The best way to cook a hot dog? Open the package.
That’s it. Really. Rip open a package right now. Those dogs are fully cooked—they’re not sold any other way—and those cold, flaccid sausages are perfectly safe to eat immediately. (Unless you’re pregnant. Or a baby. In which case the USDA says to stay away.)
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It was the easiest story I’ve ever written. Except for one thing.
A hot dog isn’t a hot dog unless it’s hot, dog.
Hot hot dogs are plump and ooze juice, tasting like a shot of unrestrained beef, with garlic and paprika haunting around the edges. They don’t mess around with subtlety. They go right for the kill. And they beat out cool, and even tepid, hot dogs every time.
So the the real question about hot dogs is not how to cook them, but how best to heat them up. And that, it turns out, is a harder question to answer.
HOW HOT IS HOT?
I set out to heat up hot dogs using every cooking method I could think of, including poaching, roasting, steaming, deep frying, sautéing, broiling, microwaving, and, of course, grilling. But before I started, I needed to figure out just how hot to go.
If you listen to the USDA, you should “reheat hot dogs and luncheon meat until steaming hot before eating,” which, if you ask me, is a bit vague. Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn, in their seminal cookbook, Charcuterie, get a little more specific. “Sausage may be the most commonly overcooked protein in America, after the chicken breast,” they write. They recommend cooking sausages to a final temperature of 155°F.
To accurately measure, I got extremely comfortable with my meat thermometer and probed every hot dog I could get my hands on. The testing confirmed a window between 150 and 160 is ideal. Below 140, hot dogs have a spongy, muted flavor. Above 165, they start to burst and dry out. This logic applied to both skinless hot dogs and natural-casing hot dogs (the kind that have an animal intestine wrapping). I know the latter sound less than ideal, but trust me, natural casing hot dogs beat skinless ones, for one very good reason: the casing’s snappy texture. (Of course, skinless dogs are much more popular, because they’re cheaper to produce and life is unfair.)
THE GRILLED HOT DOG DILEMMA
Now that I knew how hot I had to get my hot dogs (and had gotten pretty expert at probing them), it was time to start testing methods. In my head was that long, aforementioned list of techniques. But in my heart there was only one method: grilling.
Because we all know that hot dogs were practically engineered for the grill, right? They’re custom-built for the lick of a live flame. Sure as hell beats one of those dirty water dogs pulled out of a mysterious vat of water from a hot dog cart.
So why do most of the classic hot dog stands in the U.S. not follow this innate logic? Take a peek inside the kitchens at Gray’s Papaya in New York, Ben’s Chili Bowl in D.C., Pink’s in L.A., or Lafayette Coney Dogs in Detroit, and you’ll find a number of different cooking methods—not one of which involves a grill.
The more I thought about this, the more the grill became problematic. The problem is the high, hard-to-regulate heat, which tends to scorch the outside of a dog before the interior temperature is right.
Soon I was having flashbacks to cookouts full of blackened wieners, dried out wieners—why had I not realized this before?
And so I tested other methods. The microwave was disqualified almost immediately—the box has speed on its side, but it distributes heat unevenly, so one end of the sausage could be bang on 150°F, while the other would be scorched at 180°F. Roasting, broiling, steaming, and sautéing were all far better. But the best cooking method? The method that uniformly warms hot dogs to that magic 155°F with the least amount of fuss? Gently poaching the dogs in water set at 155°F.
Poaching at a fixed temperature is a lot easier than it sounds. Simply heat water in a saucepan over high heat, measuring occasionally with a thermometer. When it gets to around 150°F or 155°F, drop the heat to low. Slip in your dogs and let them warm up. (If the water gets too hot, drop a few ice cubes in.) After 10 minutes, your dogs will be the absolutely perfect temperature.
The only problem? It’s 100% unsexy. It’s done indoors. The dogs don’t get any color. There’s no smoke, no seared surface. It’s poaching, for God’s sake.
I couldn’t stand it. I fired up the grill.
THE HOT DOG TWO-STEP
Poached dogs are good. Damn good. And as I placed them on the grill I knew I was taking a risk. Would the grill suck out all those juices that poaching so expertly created?
Nope. Because my poached dogs were already at the perfect temperature, and because the grill was operating at high heat, the dogs got a nice char in mere seconds. And because I removed them the moment they got a little color, they never had a chance to dry out.
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Now, do I really expect everybody to fire up their grill just for a few seconds of cooking? Well, yes. But there’s good news: The broiler works just as well. Position the broiler tray as high as it will go (you want it roughly 6 inches from the heating element) and broil for a few minutes, just until you see a bit of char. Remove. Now eat.
What you’ll experience is an absolutely perfect hot dog, one that exhibits the best of two simple cooking methods: a plump juiciness from the poach, and a lightly seared surface from the grill or broiler. A damn good sausage, yes, but more than that: An answer.
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PHOTO BY CHELSEA KYLE, FOOD STYLING BY ALI NARDI
