Hot dogs are a delicious food that can be brought out at parties, barbecues, and mealtimes. However, hot dogs often come in large quantities that cannot always be eaten right away. Luckily for us, hot dogs can be frozen and defrosted at a later time so that you don’t have to waste any food.
Today we’ll be looking at how you freeze hot dogs without the bun and onions, how to defrost the meat, and factors to consider before freezing your hot dogs. You can freeze hot dogs in their original packaging as well as separate.
While hot dogs can be left in the refrigerator for a week after opening the packaging, the meat can remain in the freezer for up to 2 months. As you can see, there are great benefits to freezing leftover hot dogs. Let’s take a look at how you’d go about doing this.
How To Freeze Hot Dogs
Freezing hot dogs in their original packaging might sound enticing and easy, but you’ll regret it once you’re trying to defrost a block of frozen hot dogs in the original brine. Alternatively, you can freeze your hot dogs separately so you don’t have this problem.
To freeze the hot dogs separately, you will need some wax paper, a freezer bag, and your leftover hot dogs. Simply lay a sheet of wax paper out on a table and place half of your hot dogs on top of it near the top edge.
Fold the wax paper over the hot dogs so that there are gaps between the meat. You can place the other half of the hot dogs in between these gaps. There should be no hot dogs touching each other as the wax paper is in between them.
Now you can fit the wrapped hot dogs into the freezer bag. Don’t forget to write the date on the freezer bag so that you don’t forget how long the hot dogs have been in the freezer. Remember that hot dogs remain in the freezer for up to two months, so don’t surpass this date.
Place the hot dogs into the freezer and wait for them to properly freeze. This should take up to 24 hours. See, freezing hot dogs is incredibly easy and quick to do. Using the method above allows you to grab one hot dog rather than defrosting them all at once.
How To Defrost Hot Dogs
There are a few different methods on how to defrost your hot dogs, so you’ll have to find which is the best for your personal preference and circumstances. The first method is the quickest - using the defrost function on a microwave.
Take the number of hot dogs that you need out of the freezer bag and put them on a microwavable plate. Make sure that they’re not overlapping one another. Lay a paper towel over the hot dogs to soak up all the water that will come out of the hot dogs.
Use the microwave on 30% power and cook them for 30 seconds to one-minute increments at a time. You’ll need to keep checking the meat so that they don’t start cooking. Make sure that they are completely thawed all the way through before cooking them.
The second method is to place the hot dogs in a new freezer bag and put that in a bowl of cold water. Make sure that the bag is completely done up so that none of the water reaches the hot dogs.
Check the hot dogs every half an hour for up to two hours. Check them by squeezing the hot dogs lightly to see if they’re soft to touch or not. Once they’re thawed you can cook them straight away.
The final option is to defrost your hot dogs in the refrigerator. Take them out of the freezer and place them on a dish. Leave them in the refrigerator for up to 24 hours to ensure that the hot dogs are properly thawed before cooking them.
Factors To Consider Before Freezing Hot Dogs
So, we’ve established that you can freeze hot dogs, but the question is - should you? There are a few factors to consider before freezing your leftover hot dogs. The first consideration is that you’ll need to remove your hot dogs from their original packaging before freezing them.
If you don’t and freeze an unopened package of hot dogs, the liquid inside the packaging will also freeze and prove to be very difficult to break apart. Doing this will mean that you need to defrost all of the hot dogs at once, which might still lead to wasted food.
For this reason, we think that our method of using wax paper to keep the hot dogs separated is the best way to freeze them. Having said that, some people prefer to freeze them with the brine still around the hot dogs.
If you’d prefer to freeze the brine as well as the hot dogs, bear in mind that you’d need to defrost all of the meat at once when you want to use them next. Another consideration is that hot dogs do not last as long as other foods in the freezer.
Hot dogs can remain in the freezer for up to two months, so make sure you know when you first froze them to avoid getting ill from bad hot dogs.
Summary
To sum up, you can certainly freeze your leftover hot dogs if you don’t want to cook all of them at once. You can either freeze them with some well-placed wax paper or in the original packaging, but we prefer the former method.
There are three ways to defrost hot dogs - the microwave, the refrigerator, or with cold water. Each works fine but everyone seems to have a preference on how to defrost their hot dogs. The microwave is the quickest method and the refrigerator is the slowest.
Before you freeze your hot dogs, make sure that you consider the benefits and drawbacks of freezing the meat in the original brine or not.