Can You Microwave Hot Dogs or Hotdogs?

Who doesn’t love a hotdog or hot dog? Especially New York hot dogs will the soft buns and every kind of topping and relish there, including special spicy chili? Just writing about it is making me and the rest of us here have our mouths watering at the thought. Hotdogs are delicious for sure.

With that said, can you microwave hot dogs or hotdogs? Absolutely. Just take note that you can also ruin hotdogs by microwaving them wrong or overdoing the microwaving. Keep on reading to find out the right way to microwave your dogs.

How to Cook Hotdogs with Your Microwave

Cooking hot dogs is one of the easiest things to do because you won’t have to worry about undercooking them. They’re not like eggs or raw food that can endanger you when you cook them too raw or medium-rare (that there’s still blood on it).

Rather, because hot dogs are pre-cooked, you’re assured of a good microwaved meal with varying degrees of “success” (or rather, the temperature in Celsius or Fahrenheit). The whole point of cooking hotdogs is to get them warm enough to eat.

As long as you get the dogs unfrozen or defrosted then heated up by steam or frying, you’re good to go. It’s already cooked just warm it up or “reheat” it, in a manner of speaking.

You may also like: How to Toast Bread in a Microwave Convection Oven

Prepping the Hot Dog for Microwaving 101

Put your hotdog or hotdogs into a plate lined with paper towels. The towels are there to ensure it’s easy to cleanup the dishes when all is said and done. The paper towels basically absorb the resulting moisture ad grease that should leak out from your dog as it’s heated up or microwaved.

If you’re heating a multitude of hot dogs, you should have them lined up in a row onto the towel. It’s like one of those steaming grills on 7-Eleven convenience stores. They have hotdogs lined up together on the grill to evenly cook them.

The plate below should rotate the hotdogs to ensure equal exposure to the microwave radiation from the inside to the outside. Make sure to cut small marks on one side of the hotdogs to serve as pressure release points or holes to allow the resulting steam to escape easily.

The Best Containers for Hotdog Cooking

Don’t use metal plates or plastic containers when heating up these hotdogs. The bowl could be open or come with its own lid. A plastic plate is microwave-safe as long as it’s thick and it’s marked as such. Don’t use any single-use containers or damaged microwave-safe Tupperware though.

These containers are too compromised to be used in your microwave oven. A damaged container could leach off plasticizers or deadly chemicals that could contaminate your hotdogs when push comes to shove.

Ceramic and glass plates are your best bet. With them, you can err on the side of caution. As long as they’re nice and thick, they’re most probably microwave-safe even if they’re not marked as such.

To Cut or Pierce the Hot Dogs or Not

These franks could be pierced or cut. Either way is fine. Slicing or pricking the dogs a few times with sharp utensil prior to cooking allows you to keep them from exploding or ballooning from all the heat. This is especially true of microwave cooking.

The steam should have a place to escape to in order to avoid pressure from building up from the inside until it bursts like a balloon. There are some sources who claim pricking or slicing isn’t necessary because there’s no explosion or burst risk involved.

Piercing the dogs is actually detrimental. The holes allow the hotdog’s juices to run out of it, resulting in a dry hotdog when push comes to shove. Choose which one best suits your tastes.

Cover with Towel and Microwave Cooking Times

Roll the paper towels up or cover the franks with another towel. Covering them with a second towel layer holds the water inside them as they’re heated up by the microwave rays. This should then result in a juicy, tender, and plump hotdog by the time you’re through cooking it.

Tuck the ends of the towel so that it doesn’t unroll during the microwaving process. At this point, you should heat the franks on high. Different units have different wattages, but a typical baseline wattage for recipes is 700 watts.

A middle-of-the-road microwave should have 800 watts to 1 kilowatt of wattage. Shorten your cooking time if your microwave has a higher wattage than a kilowatt. At any rate, here are the varied cooking times for the average microwave:

40 seconds for a hotdog.
1 minute to 1 minute 15 seconds for 2 hotdogs.
1 minute 30 seconds to 2 minutes 30 seconds for 3-4 hotdogs.
Around 3 minutes to 3 minutes 30 seconds for 5-6 hotdogs.
4-5 minutes for 7-8 hotdogs.
Around 6 minutes or so for 9-10 hotdogs.

Checking on the State of Your Cooked Hotdogs

Check the state of your hotdogs halfway through the cooking time. For example, around 40 seconds, check your franks at around 20 seconds before microwaving it for the remaining 20 seconds.

Cooking power varies from microwave to microwave. Therefore, if you’re unsure of the wattage, check to see if the hotdog is already cooked halfway through or not. See if they’re already cooked at the half-finished mark or cooking time.

This also prevents you from overcooking the hotdogs (since undercooking them is a low likelihood) to the point of them becoming dry or even charred. Shorten the cooking time or reduce the remaining time if the hotdog is almost good to go.

Remove the paper towels carefully and avoid getting scalded by the resulting steam. Serve the hotdog hot. Put the hotdogs in a bun full of mayonnaise or Thousand Island dressing, pickle relish, ketchup, and/or mustard for good measure. Also, enjoy!

Over the Horizon

You can microwave hot dogs or hotdogs. In fact, it’s one of the fastest ways to cook hotdogs. It’s even faster than deep-frying them! You can pop it into the microwave and let the radiowave rays boil it from the inside using its own moisture or water content.

When using a microwave, you can possibly have a hot dog that’s ready-to-eat in under a minute. It’s even faster than instant noodles, come to think of it! However, when cooking multiple hotdogs, it takes a bit longer. However, it’s worth it because you’re getting more hotdogs per minute!

References: