A Dedicated Hot Dog Cooker Is the Spirit of American Summer

Other Good Backyard Hot Dog Options

Look, if you’re trying to feed a football team, no little hot dog cooker will do. What you’ll want is one of our favorite griddles or grills. No wee steamer can beat a 33-inch Traeger griddle, my favorite griddle of all backyard griddles. There are a couple griddles, however, that seem custom made for hot dogs and buns.

This Blackstone Iron Forged Air Fryer Combo comes with two air frying baskets and a third warming basket underneath the griddle. Well, guess what? If you don’t turn on the air fryer fan, that means you’ve got three big warmer baskets, ready to make hot dog buns all toasty and nice. I haven’t tested this claim, but Blackstone swears you can fit and cook 126 hot dogs across this griddle plate, for you and 125 of your closest friends.

This Cuisinart griddle is actually a model I like best for smashburgers and steak sears, because it can get so ridiculously hot when cranked on high. But turn it down to medium, it’ll be good for dozens of hot dogs—with a warming chamber below the griddle plate that’ll lightly toast hot dog buns in a few minutes.

Photograph: Amazon

Weber

Original Kettle 18-Inch Charcoal Grill

If you’re going to ask me for the implement that has cooked most of the backyard hot dogs I’ve had in my life—the ones that come with hard black grill marks? It’s going to be something a bit like this Weber charcoal, a budget-friendly tank with low maintenance needs that WIRED has been recommending for years. It will serve you here, too. The 18-incher will serve a family of five. Bigger will serve more. But make sure you grab a cover to protect it.

Hot Dog Cookers We Don’t Recommend

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

Nostalgia

Hot Dog and Bun Toaster

This little hot dog cooker works with all the simplicity of a toaster oven: Pick a toast level, push down the lever, then wait for the spring to pop back up. The hot dog buns fit into a pair of semicircular openings that look like broad cartoon smiles. The hot dogs get thrown down the metal-caged hot dog tubes. But alas, the buns get stuck on the way down, and also on the way up. The “hot dog in a tunnel” design is not merely distracting visually, it doesn’t cook the hot dogs to high internal temps before the edges of the buns start to burn. And depending on the length of your chosen hot dog, just the tips will emerge from the toaster when it pops up. This will leave you to fish scalding hot dogs out of the cooker with a fork.