The ripper is the New Jersey hot dog that is deep-fried until it tears itself open, and the name is a literal description of what the cook is waiting for. The dog goes into hot oil rather than onto a grill or into water, and it stays there until the casing blisters, splits, and curls back on itself, the skin rupturing as the inside expands. That split is the entire point. The frying renders the surface into something crackling and crisp while the meat inside stays hot and juicy, and the ruptured casing gives every bite a contrast between a snapping, oil-fried skin and a soft interior that a griddled or boiled dog never develops. The order is graded by how far you let it go.
The craft is in the fryer time and almost nothing else, which is what makes it unforgiving. Pulled too early the casing only tightens and you have a hot dog that has merely been in oil; held longer it ruptures and crisps into a true ripper; pushed to the far end it becomes a "weller" or "cremator," fried hard until the skin is dark and shattering and the dog is half its original moisture, ordered by people who want the crust over the juice. The sausage has to be a natural-casing dog, because the snap and the split depend on a skin that tightens and then bursts under heat; a skinless dog cannot rip. The bun is kept deliberately plain and soft, a neutral split roll whose only job is to insulate the hand and stay out of the way, because the surface of the dog is doing all the textural work. Mustard and a relish or raw onion are the standard dress, sharp and acidic against a sausage that has been fried in its own fat, applied fast at a roadside stand built to turn these out by the dozen.
The ripper sits in the dense regional hot dog map next to the builds that change the bun and the load rather than the cooking: the Chicago order dragged through the garden, the coney under meat sauce, the Newark Italian hot dog packed into a pizza-bread pocket, the bacon-wrapped street dog griddled in pork fat. Each is a codified build with its own rules and deserves its own article rather than being crowded in here.