Is Cooking Hot Dogs In An Air Fryer A Good Idea?

Air fryers' growing popularity has raised an interesting question: Can you — and should you — cook hot dogs in everyone's new favorite appliance? Actually ... yes. Air-fried hot dogs turn out tasty as heck; if you have an air fryer, you should try it sometime.

Hot dogs are a classic American food. And for all of the jokes about them being made of raccoon meat or whatever gets scraped up off the slaughterhouse floor, it's hard to deny their value for convenience, portability, versatility, and — frankly — deliciousness. 

One great thing about hot dogs is that you can cook them in tons of different methods and they'll turn out okay. You can cook them on a grill, boil them, or even microwave hot dogs with water if you're in a hurry — the sky is pretty much the limit here. But if you haven't tried making hot dogs in an air fryer, you're missing out.

The main benefit to cooking hot dogs in an air fryer is that what you're working with is basically a miniature convection oven, which operates by evenly circulating hot air around food. The end result is an extremely even cook — far more even than you'd get from a grill — that results in an unusually crispy hot dog exterior. Where boiling a hot dog will result in something with the same uniform texture all the way through, an air fryer hot dog will have that satisfying slight crunch when you bite into it.

Air fryers have the added benefit of cooking faster than any other method, save the microwave. Boiling a hot dog generally takes four to six minutes, plus the five to 10 minutes it takes to bring the water to a boil. Grilling hot dogs takes five to seven minutes, plus the time necessary to fire up the grill. And if you're working with charcoal, that might be a while. 

Air frying hot dogs, by contrast, only takes around three minutes (and probably another three to pre-heat the fryer). It's convenience cooking at its finest.

Some professional chefs hate on air fryers, but they're a useful tool for everyday consumers. And air fryers can cook pretty much anything about 90% as well as other, more time-consuming cooking techniques. Hot dogs are no exception to this rule.

There are, however, a few purposes to which air fryers are suited as well as (or better than) pretty much any other way to cook. It's the premier method for reheating deep-fried foods; if you've ever wondered how to get leftover Popeyes chicken to the right texture, an air fryer is the solution. Buffalo wings cook so well in an air fryer, you'll have trouble ordering them for delivery ever again. And much like their cousin, the hot dog, bratwursts also do very well in air fryers.

Using an air fryer is like any other cooking method; you have to know what you're going for. Not everything cooked in an air fryer will turn out as well as a hot dog, but that doesn't mean this tool isn't a valuable addition to your kitchen.