Don't Skip This Simple Step For Perfectly Charred Hot Dogs On The Grill, Every Time

Hot dogs are just about the simplest food that you can grill. They are fully cooked and ready to eat straight out of the package, so you really can't mess things up too bad. Even if they're still a bit cold in the center, no one is getting sick. That said, having a few tricks up your sleeve can turn a perfectly okay grilled hot dog into the kind of sausage that will have folks coming back for seconds. The simplest, most tried-and-true way to do this is simply to split your dogs right down the middle.

The trick here is to cut down the length of the hot dog, keeping the knife right in the middle, and cutting almost all the way through while still leaving behind a bit that will serve as a hinge for the two halves of the sausage. When cut like this, the hot dog opens like a butterfly, exposing the center and providing many culinary benefits.

The biggest problem with hot dogs overall is their perfectly cylindrical shape. They roll around the grill awkwardly, struggle to secure a nice char on all sides, and don't fit particularly well in a bun with certain toppings that only elevate them. Splitting the sausage solves all these problems. By opening the dog up, you have a flat surface that stabilizes it on the grill, exposing a larger surface area to cooking. This means more surface area and edges to crisp up and char, and when you pop it in a bun, that v-shaped center can be easily filled with toppings for a mess-free meal.

There is, however, one problem with this technique. Once you start modifying your hot dogs, it can be hard to know when to quit. That simple slice down the middle can quickly become a slippery slope, and suddenly every sausage headed for the grill requires minutes of knife work.

The next level of hot dog hacks is the crosshatch technique. For the crosshatch, slice the hot dog with opposing sets of parallel lines at a 45-degree angle — first from top left to bottom right, then from top right to bottom left — so that you end up with diamond-shaped cuts. You can do this directly to the outside of the sausage, creating more edges to crisp and adding flavor and texture to your dogs.

Perhaps the pinnacle of overcomplicated-but-wonderful prep is the spiralized hot dog. There are multiple ways to do this. Skewering the sausages and then slicing them at a downward diagonal while rotating is the simpler of the two techniques. You can also use the banh mi spiral hot dog technique, carefully cutting the hot dog at opposing angles with skewers on each side to stop the blade, thus creating an accordion effect. Either way, these spiralized sausages maximize the potential for crisp, delicious edges, though at a significant labor cost.

As it turns out, there are at least as many ways to slice a hot dog as there are hot dog styles in the U.S. — though most of those use a plain old boiled-water dog. The best place to start with these char-enhancing techniques, though, is with a plain old slice down the middle. That's true whether we're talking about the grill or the griddle.