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WIRED
01-07-2025
- General
- WIRED
A Dedicated Hot Dog Cooker Is the Spirit of American Summer
Skip to main content If hot dogs are America, hot dog cookers are how America gets made. We tried a few, and liked two. All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links. Hot dogs are America: fast, cheap, often beefy, and heavily processed. The hot dog careens between extremes of puritanicalism (the mustard-onion demagogues of New York) and wild excess (kimchi dogs, Coneys, Chicago-style garden dragging). It is deeply romanticized, almost certainly bad for you, and full of controversy—mostly about ketchup and being a sandwich. Bless the hot dog. The hot dog is American holiness. And so of course we would need special cookers for hot dogs only. You can cook a hot dog on pretty much anything, sure. But why not cook them on the hot doggiest hot dog cooker, the best hot dog cooker for only hot dogs? After we tested multiple visions of dedicated hot dog machine, it turns out the best home hot dog cookers are offer the same thing you'd find at your local 7-Eleven. The Elite Gourmet Hot Dog Roller and Oven ($44) is a miniature hot dog maker, with a warmer tray beneath to lightly toast buns. For larger party vibes, the best hot dog maker is a big steamer box like the Nostalgia. Either is a beautiful match to your preference of Nathan's Famous or Hebrew National. If you need to char up a dozen burgers and 20 hot dogs at the same time, you may need to graduate. Roll with one of our favorite big stand-up griddles like the Traeger Flat Iron 3-Burner ($900)—or check out our guide to the best grills. For an otherwise excellent summer, see other WIRED backyard guides to the Best Lawn Games, Best Outdoor Lights, and the Best Pizza Ovens. Photograph: Matthew Korfhage Photograph: Matthew Korfhage Photograph: Matthew Korfhage Elite Gourmet Hot Dog Roller and Toaster Oven This is no mere hot dog cooker. This is an Elite Gourmet hot dog cooker, designed in California's City of Industry—names whose epic sweep seems to outstrip all possible meaning. But the ambitions of the hot dog cooker itself are more humble, and so is its price. And so it succeeds. The Elite Gourmet hot dog maker is, at heart, a roller-style hot dog cooker like the one you'll find at any convenience store in America. Every American summer since the 1950s has been hotter, better, and meatier with the help of a roller grill, thanks to the dogged efforts of a crackerjack young engineer named Calvin MacCracken. In a little less than 15 minutes, this cooker will cook up four hot dogs to a food-safe 165 degrees Fahrenheit (yes, I measured), on heated stainless steel rollers that'll make sure the cooking is even. It'll also slowly warm four buns in the oven space below, well shy of true toasting. Each compartment gets a crumb tray or a drip tray, for easy cleaning. The rollers are best cleaned when still rolling and when still a bit hot, by using a gingerly held wet rag and the magic of steam. And that's it. Four hot dogs. Four buns. No real problems. It's too small for a big party. But maybe four hot dogs is already a party? Just note that the cheese from cheese-stuffed hot dogs will be hard to get off the rollers, if you let American cheese burn onto hot rollers. At least one truly angry Amazon review behooves me to point this out. Specs Dimensions : 7.5" deep x 12" wide x 7" tall Power : 210 watts Type : Roller hot dog cooker with toaster oven Capacity : 4 hot dogs, 4 buns Features : 30-minute oven timer, 5 rollers, removable drip and crumb trays Photograph: Matthew Korfhage Photograph: Matthew Korfhage Nostalgia Extra Large Hot Dog Steamer There's something about the particular softness of a steamed bun and a taut-snapped, natural wrapped, kinda wet hot dog—it is a study in American contrast. It is my childhood as lived near bleachers and parking lots, or amid the sawdust and gravel of budget fun. This hot dog steamer is made by a Wisconsin company that literally calls itself 'Nostalgia,' and that's precisely what they're selling. This bright-colored, thick-plastic, triple-tiered steamer feels like a Fisher-Price toy for carnivores. The water goes on the bottom. The hot dogs—28 of them if you double-stack the small ones—go in the middle steamer drawer. The top compartment will hold a tight-packed max of 12 small buns. But don't worry, the buns cook faster than the hot dogs. Turn it on high, and the hot dogs are cooked within about 15 minutes. Don't put the buns in till about five minutes before you want them, or they'll get not merely soft, but wet with steam. Turn it down to warm, it'll hold at a food-safe 160 degrees Fahrenheit or so. This is a slightly rinky-dink device, with the heft and feel of an old Igloo Cooler. But my family has nonetheless had the same Playmate Igloo cooler since I remember being alive. Keep it clean, and you should be able to hang onto this awhile. Just note that when you pull out the hot dog steamer drawer, a little bit of hot dog water will drip onto the table. If not outside, lay out a couple paper towels before firing this thing up. Specs Dimensions : 11" wide x 9" deep x 13" tall Power : 600 watts Type : Bun and hot dog steamer Capacity : 20 hot dogs and 6 buns (advertised). But I fit 28 and 12 Features : Warm and hot settings 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. Photograph: Matthew Korfhage Photograph: Matthew Korfhage Photograph: Matthew Korfhage Photograph: Matthew Korfhage 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. 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 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.
WIRED
14-06-2025
- General
- WIRED
I Made Dozens of Smashburgers and Tacos to Find the Best Griddles
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage Griddles are a hallmark of the American diner and short-order cooking, and also the heroes of all street tacos. And we tested each griddle's ability to make the flat-top-grill's most hallmark foods. On the seven griddles I tested for this guide, I made dozens of smashburgers, tacos, fajitas, pancakes, bacon strips, and eggs. I also crisped up skin-on fish, seared pork chops, and tested each griddle's ability to cook delicate vegetables like asparagus at lower temperatures while meat cooked at higher temperatures on a different burner. For smashburgers, this involved cooking at the highest temperatures each griddle could handle—testing each griddle's ability to quickly caramelize meat smashed down on the griddle and then release the meat to a spatula to flip. Pancakes. laid out across the griddle, were a test of the grill's evenness across the cooking surface. Thicker slabs of meat, like a prok chop, tested the griddle's ability to retain temperature during searing. But also, we just got very familiar with each griddle using an infrared thermometer—checking temperature at different points along the surface of the grill as it heated on high or low temperatures. We also raced griddles against each other, checking how long it took each griddle to heat up 500 degrees Fahrenheit. Though note that faster isn't always better: Griddles that heat faster are sometimes less temperature-stable, or less even. Our top-rated pick, the Traeger Flatrock 3-Zone, took 10 minutes to reach 500 degrees. But it did so evenly across the surface of the griddle. I assembled each griddle myself, both to familiarize myself with the amount of work each customer will face but also to get down into the nitty-gritty of how each device is put together: You really get to know a grill, while spending an hour screwing together each and every part. And especially, I put in the work of cleaning and seasoning and reseasoning each griddle over time, getting to know its foibles and hot spots, how fast it cools, and how fast it heats—learning the amount of effort each griddle requires, and the degree to which this effort is rewarded.
WIRED
09-06-2025
- WIRED
The Dome 2 Is a Silicon Valley Air Fryer That Will Cook Faster, Clean Itself, and Bake a Pizza
Typhur lets you control this the way sophisticated toaster ovens like Breville's do: through settings like 'grill' or 'broil' that modulate both fan speed and primary heat source. The grill setting combines the crispness of an air fryer with direct heat from the bottom of the basket—meaning I can brown and even lightly grill-char a pair of chicken legs at 450 degrees Fahrenheit, leading to deliciously crispy-fatty skin. This is also how the oven does pizza and pancakes, heating each from below but at a much lower fan setting to avoid drying out the crust or batter. This said, Typhur doesn't make its settings overly easy to parse, except via a recent blog post that still requires a little parsing. I'd love if the device or app offered indicators to show which burners were most active, and the speed of the fan, for each setting. But for now, below is a handy chart explaining the various cooking modes. In general, the higher the fan speed, expect more browning or crisping on the surface as the air draws across the surface and steals the moisture—which is the main reason air fryers are so effective at creating crispy food. That said, too much fan can dry out the food over time. Fan Speed and Heat Source for Each Cooking Mode on Typhur Dome 2 AccordionItemContainerButton Live By the App, Die By the App Photograph: Matthew Korfhage But you won't get full use out of the Dome 2 unless you pair it to your phone. Many functions aren't accessible from the eight-button control panel on the device itself. The app's most straightforward bonus is a 48-deep menu of recipes designed specifically for the Dome 2. These range from simple recommendations for bacon, chicken legs, or asparagus to air fryer cakes and cookies, and chicken cordon bleu. Once you choose a recipe, you can tweak both temperature and time, based on how much food you've added or how thick you've sliced your bacon. Then click start, and the device's setting will pair up with the recipe on the app. You'll still have to physically press start on the device, as a safety measure. But many useful functions are app-only, including dehydrate, bake, and roast—plus an added Steak preset. No baking or steaking if the Wi-Fi's down! (The Wings and Bacon presets, oddly, are the buttons on the device that are most similar to the baking function.) The self-clean function, which heats the oven at high temps to burn gunk off the heating elements, is also app-only. The basket and griddle grate are coated with PFAS- and PTFE-free ceramic nonstick, and it's pretty easy to wipe clean—but the self-clean, meant for monthly use, is a good backup for the oven interior. Price aside —this Typhur isn't cheap—reliance on the app is one of the main sticking points on an otherwise terrific device. (Though I'd also like more visibility on fan speed and primary burners.) I've accepted, for whatever reason, that my Google TV is a brick without a remote or a phone app. But I guess I still want to be able to bake cookies when my phone's dead. Maybe I need to learn to stop worrying and love the smart kitchen.
WIRED
29-05-2025
- Business
- WIRED
The Best Vegan Meal Delivery Services and Kits
Photograph: Molly Higgins Photograph: Molly Higgins WIRED TIRED Fresh produce. Easy to no prep or cook time. Complex flavors. Great textures. Gluten-free. Limited availability in the US. Maybe too adventurous for some. Mostly salads. Thistle (8/10 WIRED recommends) is the best healthy, single-serving (mostly) premade meal kit I tested. With the most laborious meals requiring just a flash in a hot pan to enhance flavor, these refrigerated meals are mostly a mix of gluten-free, fruit-focused breakfasts; inventive, fresh salads; and preprepared bean- and pasta-forward veggie dinners. The Mexican-inspired corn and poblano pepper salad was solid and hearty; the lemongrass shirataki bowl—a cold noodle salad dish—hit all the right elements of savory-spice and varied texture. Thistle's vegan take on cheesecake with tres leches-esque coconut vanilla mousse and tahini caramel was perhaps the best vegan dessert I've ever had. Without a discount, this plan is a bit above my price point, but it remains one of my favorite vegan meal kit services I've tested. Is the brand completely vegan? Yes, with an optional add-on for sustainable meats for certain dinners and lunches at an additional $3 per meal. Availability: East and West Coast cities and Chicago (you can enter your zip code to see if your area is covered). Plan details: Thistle has a new, curated preset menu each week, consisting of three meals, a snack, and a dessert for six days of the week, but you can make edits based on your preferences. Delivery is one or two times per week, depending on your plan. Cost: At the time of writing, breakfasts start at $13, lunches and dinners at $17, and snacks at $8. You must order a minimum of three meals per week. Prices decrease the more you order. Photograph: Molly Higgins Photograph: Molly Higgins WIRED TIRED AI-powered menu curation. Many choices of familiar flavors and foods. Good for people transitioning or new to a vegan diet. Also offers grocery options. Difficult to view meal options before committing. Flavors could be one-note. WIRED reviewer Matthew Korfhage liked Hungryroot's AI tool that micro-customizes menus for dietary restrictions or preferences (7/10, WIRED recommends), which also makes this a great meal kit for vegans. It didn't have the adventurous element of Purple Carrot or the plant-centric freshness of Thistle, but Hungryroot would be great for those with kids who need more tame options, or for people who want familiar choices, like those easing into a plant-based diet. However, with its AI-assisted customization options, you can easily curate it to your tastes. Nearly all the meals I prepared were solid but one-note, needing an extra element to add complexity—acid from a squeeze of lemon, or red chili flakes for heat improved many of these dishes. Throughout my week of testing, meal kits required little prep and only took about half an hour or less to make. They were varied but basic, with a lemongrass tofu and broccoli stir-fry, cauliflower tacos, and American fare like a veggie burger with sweet potato fries and a bunless Beyond burger and guac. Is the brand completely vegan? No, you'll need to use filters and look for icons to find vegan choices, and AI customization curates future meals based on preferences. Availability: Delivers to the lower 48 US states. Plan details: Delivers every day of the week, and you can make changes or skip until Monday or Thursday at 7 pm before your next delivery, depending on your delivery date. The smallest plan is two or three two-serving dinners; after, plans vary depending on how many additional breakfasts, lunches, dinners, snacks, and sweets you choose per week. Cost: At the time of writing, dinners will cost you $13 a serving, lunch costs $12, and breakfast is $5. The number of meals you choose turns into 'points,' where the sum is different for every dish (for example, one dinner plate is 12 points, snacks vary as a couple points apiece). Any remaining points can be used the next week. Like many meal kit plans, the company offers heavy discounts for first-time users, like 30 percent off your first week and a free food item.
WIRED
23-05-2025
- Business
- WIRED
I Got a Sneak Peek of the Ratio Eight Series 2 Coffee Maker. Lord, It's Beautiful
Ratio's new coffee maker is a luxury machine that avoids plastic and makes delicious coffee. All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links. I've made no secret about my love for coffee makers from the Portland-based company Ratio, ever since it came out with the Ratio Eight model a decade ago. Two of WIRED's favorite drip coffee makers on earth are made by Ratio, in fact. As well as anybody, the Portland company has managed to take the finicky techniques of third-wave barista pour-over and merge them with automatic drip coffee to create some of the most full-bodied and aromatic cups of coffee I've had the pleasure of tasting. To taste it, all I have to do is press a single button. The machine does the work, not me. The Ratio Four (8/10, WIRED Recommends) remains my favorite single-serve drip coffeemaker made by anyone, anywhere. It's a masterclass in simplicity. But it all began a decade ago with the Ratio Eight, which helped change the conversation around what a home drip coffeemaker could be, adopting the aesthetics and a lot of the techniques surrounding barista café pour-over but applying them to an automated home coffee machine— using locally hewn wood and the shapely curves of a Chemex-style pour-over coffeemaker. Photograph: Matthew Korfhage Well, now the Ratio Eight has gotten a makeover, for the new world of drip coffee it helped inspire—informed by all the coffee makers that Ratio has developed in the meantime (and even one they haven't released). The new 8-cup Ratio Eight Series 2, slated for release in September, is now available for presale on Ratio's website. For a limited time, preorders are discounted to $639. But by September, when the Eight Series 2 is projected to go on sale for real, that price will shoot up to $799. That's among the highest prices I'm aware of for a drip or pour-over coffee maker. Is it worth it? I can say I got to try out the new Ratio Eight Series 2 at Ratio's offices this week, just before preorders launched. I was very impressed by what I saw, and even more impressed by what I tasted. I won't know everything until I get to play around with the device at home. But the coffee I had was full-bodied, full-flavored, and delicious. And it's a beautiful machine. Here are the specs on the upcoming Ratio Eight Series 2—and my early thoughts based on trying the device. Ratio Eight Series 2 Design Specs Redesigned for More Consistent Coffee If you're a fan of the original Ratio Eight, chances are you were drawn in first by the aesthetics: the walnut wood accents. That pretty hourglass shape of the blown-glass carafe, with the conical brewing filter best known from café pour-over. The sturdy walnut trim stayed. But Ratio has learned a few things since making the original Eight, said Ratio founder and CEO Mark Hellweg, at a meeting this month that also included the Eight's designer, James Owen. One of the things Ratio learned is that using a closed, flat-bottom brewing chamber leads to much more consistent coffee than conical glass. It's easier to control both in terms of water flow and brewing temperature, and is more forgiving if you don't have a super-expensive grinder. (That said, you know, we like expensive grinders and recommend a few.) 'Once we went flat, we realized, 'This is the way,'' said Hellweg. I'll admit, I'll miss that pretty glass carafe, just on the visual level. Hellweg says they'll indeed keep making the Chemex-style carafe as an option. But the Series 2, by default, will look much different, though it still has its hourglass shape as a link to the past. Instead, the new brewing basket will make use of technology that Ratio developed when making two of my favorite coffeemakers, the Ratio Four and the Ratio Six Series 2, which consistently feel like magic tricks to me when I use them at home. I often find new homes for coffee makers I test. I keep my Ratios. Few others can manage such full-bodied, consistently thick extraction on automatic drip or pour-over-style coffee, while being so simple to use. Photograph: Matthew Korfhage Brews Like Café Pour-Over The Ratio brewing method is somewhere between what a barista does in a third-wave café and a classic drip machine. First, there's the 'bloom,' which is a poetic name for pre-infusing coffee grounds with a small amount of hot water. This releases the carbon dioxide trapped in fresh beans, which would otherwise interfere with extraction when the hot water begins flowing in earnest. Another thing that makes café pour-over coffee express flavor so well is agitation. Basically, if you drop water onto coffee, or shake it, or spin it, the coffee will release its secrets better. It's like shaking an interrogation subject. (Actually, on second thought, don't do this.) One of Ratio's signal technologies from the beginning has used a 'Fibonacci-inspired' spiral showerhead, a shape often touted as a means of maintaining water efficiency. On the Eight Series 2, when Hellweg brewed a batch at Ratio's Portland headquarters, this meant that water extracted evenly across the entire brew basket, with no obvious channeling. So the falling water droplets extract both faster and evenly. Photograph: Matthew Korfhage Temperature control is a more interesting and complex conversation. Ratio is one of a small number of coffee-maker companies who've had their devices certified by the international Specialty Coffee Association as hewing to a very tight set of criteria, which includes holding temperatures within a tight 4-degree (Celsius) range during the entire brewing process. But even this doesn't tell the whole story. I can attest from experience that not all SCA-certified coffee makers produce great coffee—and that great coffee definitely can come from noncertified coffee makers. Ratio does a lot of sophisticated firmware rejiggering to play around with temperature curves during brewing—what chief operating officer Bradley Walhood, in an excitable moment, called 'a literal crapload' of testing and firmware updates. In the Eight, this means that they mess around with wattage to change how the heating element works. Though the Ratio Eight Series 2 is a 1,400-watt device, they intentionally don't use all of it at all times, changing energy consumption in order to change how the heating element works over time and get the best-tasting brew. Like Ratio's previous Four, the Eight Series 2 will have two different brew modes for small and large batches of coffee, to further refine temperature curves and keep them in optimal ranges. Plastic Contact Is Minimized One of the biggest selling points on the Eight was always minimal plastic. There's a lot of interest in plastic-free everything, in these days when new and frightening revelations about microplastics seem to come once a week. But it's difficult, and very expensive, to make a truly plastic-free automatic coffee machine. Plastic-free brewing is a bit of a holy grail, achieved mostly by much older, lower-tech methods like French press, moka pot, and pour-over. The Eight Series 2 comes as close as any automatic drip machine to achieving this. The cold-water reservoir is a BPA-free Tritan copolymer. The base is also made of polymer. And there's a bit of plastic used in the heating element that doesn't come into contact with water, said Hellweg. But the tubing, inside the device, is made of glass. The pipe connectors are silicone. The chassis is stainless steel, and so is the brewing basket. The thermal carafe is stainless steel, while the nonthermal option is borosilicate glass. What all this means is that heated water or coffee never touches plastic. This also has the side effect of giving each part on the Eight a truly satisfying heft. 'Check this out,' said Hellweg, with evident pride, handing me a small and weighty piece of steel that could double as a stress fidget. It was the lid to the water reservoir. It actually did feel good, the weight of this lid. Plastic makes you forget the satisfying solidity of cast metal. These more expensive materials are reflected, of course, in the price. But It's Quite Pricey The preorder window offers a quite substantial discount on the anticipated retail price, but it's still not low. The $639 preorder price for the Eight Series 2, and the $799 anticipated retail price in September, are at the very highest end of drip coffee machines on the market. They're also double the price of Ratio's own Six and Four. Will the coffee alone justify this higher price? It's hard to know based on one delicious carafe of coffee. That's the sort of thing I'll only learn over time, when testing side-by-side. Compared to the Ratio Six, the Eight Series 2 offers the same 40-ounce batch size but some new programming and new technology—including the ability to optimize its brewing program for small batches of 20 ounces or less. But really, as with a lot of luxury goods, much of the cost is going into luxury: intangibles, style, loveliness, and of course, more expensive materials. In the case of the Eight Series 2, these costs will have a lot to do with the steps Ratio took to avoid plastic: the double-walled stainless steel, the borosilicate glass tubing, the American walnut wood. The new thermal carafe, with its stainless steel construction, is sturdy and lovely. Ratio's owners and designers also cited uncertainty surrounding tariffs, which is almost certainly a factor in announcing a price that'll first take effect six months from now. The Eight Series 2, like a large portion of products from small companies in the United States, is manufactured in China because American factories aren't set up for custom tooling on small production runs. All I can say is that it's pretty, and it brews delicious coffee, and it feels in my hand like a thing that costs what it does—in a year when a lot of things suddenly cost a bit more. But based on past experience with Ratio, the Eight Series 2 will probably remain the best-tasting cup of drip coffee I can get by just pressing a single button.
