The older I get, the more I love the Fourth of July. (This might be because, as a kid, I cared about only the promised pyrotechnics: fireworks, sparklers, kissing my seventh-grade crush on the Ferris wheel at the county fair.) When the calendar flips from June to July, it activates some sort of happy Pavlovian response in me. Bring on the hot dogs and the corn on the cob, the neighborhood parades and the John Philip Sousa marches, the mini flags in one hand and melting dip cones in the other!
Speaking of hot dogs — Ali Slagle has figured out how to make grilled hot dogs that keep their juicy snap and don’t turn into dried-out husks. “Instead of setting the dogs perpendicular to the grates,” Ali writes, “nestle them between the rods like the ones rotating in cases at a ballpark or convenience store. This setup exposes more of the meat to the flame, toasting the dogs more quickly and preventing them from rolling.” Pair your hot dogs with Eric Kim’s delightful pink lemonade or, for something just as sour but with a little more kick, Robert Simonson’s daiquiri.
Featured Recipe
Grilled Hot Dogs
We have lots of excellent recipes for your Fourth of July feasts on New York Times Cooking. If you need a potato salad, here’s Eric’s new honey mustard potato salad, the flavor for which was inspired by those snack-aisle honey mustard pretzel nuggets. There’s also Melissa Clark’s vegan lemon potato salad with mint (a reader favorite) and Kenji López-Alt’s umami-rich Japanese potato salad with mentaiko. These are all superior spud-based sides.
