Why It Works
- Instead of the typical store-bought dough, the hot dogs are encased in an extra-flaky homemade (but still easy!) biscuit dough.
- A spicy hot honey–mustard glaze puts the “fire” in these firecrackers, boosting them with spice and offering an attractive, burnished sheen.
Recipes for firecracker hot dogs (also called rocket dogs) started popping up on the internet circa 2011. (One of the earliest appearances seems to be from the now defunct Family Fun Magazine as a recipe for “rocket dogs” around 2011.) These social media darlings—hot dogs wrapped in pastry and baked until golden to look like little fireworks—are a fun concept for a Fourth of July barbecue or other summertime party. But I’ll let you in on a secret: While they look adorable, they don’t usually taste great. I set out to change that—and as the recipe below shows, I succeeded.
Tips for Memorable Firecracker Hot Dogs
Skip the canned dough and make a quick biscuit dough instead. Most of the recipes out there for firecracker hot dogs rely on store-bought doughs for ease. Canned refrigerated biscuit or croissant dough are most commonly called for, and a handful of recipes call for premade pie crust or breadstick dough. I don’t know if you’ve tasted a canned biscuit recently, but its appeal pretty much begins and ends with popping open the can. While it’s an understandable shortcut for a quick and easy dish like this, I knew a from-scratch biscuit dough would be a step up in buttery flavor and flakiness, and would still be easy to make, requiring just one bowl and a handful of pantry ingredients.
Serious Eats / Amanda Suarez
I found a recipe in the Serious Eats archives for honey biscuits that uses a simple one-bowl method, and I liked the idea of a sweet-salty biscuit dough to pair with the hot dogs. With some scaling and tweaking, this easy-to-make dough was perfect for wrapping the dogs (no wrestling of canned dough required), and a few quick folds and turns while shaping gave the pastry beautiful striated, ultra-flaky layers when baked.
Refrigerate the dough briefly for easier shaping. Briefly chilling the dough while making the glaze and skewering the hot dogs ensures the pastry keeps its shape and puffs into defined layers in the oven. The dough should be pliable and easy to stretch as you shape it. If the dough is too stiff straight from the fridge to wrap around the hot dogs easily, let it warm up a few minutes on the counter before trying again. Conversely, if the dough becomes too warm and sticky to handle as you assemble, chill it back down in the fridge for a few minutes before continuing shaping.
Add some fire with hot honey in the dough and a sweet-spicy glaze on the franks. To my mind, anything named “firecracker” should have a little kick to it. Since I already had honey in the mix for the biscuit dough, I wondered if switching to hot honey would turn up the heat. If you’re not familiar with it, hot honey from brands like Mike’s Hot Honey is chile-infused, resulting in a delightful sweet-spicy condiment (I looooooove it drizzled on pizza). Using it in the dough adds a tingle of spiciness.
To bring in even more flavor and heat, I created a sweet-spicy glaze to brush on the hot dogs before baking. I mixed yellow mustard (a classic hot dog accompaniment) with more hot honey and a touch of soy sauce to amplify the hot dogs’ umami. The flavor was almost there, but a spoonful of sriracha added to the glaze really boosted the spiciness and rounded things out to take these dogs up and over the top. I offer a teaspoon range for the sriracha amount, so you can adjust depending on how spicy you like it. Taste the glaze and add more sriracha as you see fit.
In the oven, the glaze becomes slightly caramelized and offers a burnished, glossy sheen to the crisp pastry and the juicy hot dogs. Crowned with a flaky pastry star, these hot dog firecrackers are the perfect combination of salty, sweet, and spicy—in other words, these festive franks finally taste just as good as they look.
