Making Peace with Home Grilling
I want to talk about grills today. But I quickly realize I need to clarify that statement. A bit of a spoiler here, but I think it’s important to set expectations. I’m not here to talk about high-end specialized grilling equipment. If it costs more than $1,000, this post won’t cover it. No Komodo, no Kalamazoo, no Hestan…if that’s where you’re at, that’s great for you…consider me legitimately jealous. But today I’m gonna speak to the Char-broil, Weber, Nexgrill users of the world. Those of us who don’t have the time/money/interest to invest in massive heavy-duty ceramic eggs or stainless steel Argentinian asado making masterpieces…well…we need to grill too.
If you’ve read all my posts to date, you’ll have at least a vague picture of my living situation. What’s important for this post is that my family and I occupy the second and third floors of a three-story house. Getting to the backyard from my kitchen requires a trip down a winding, steep, narrow flight of stairs to a heavy back door. Then when you get to the tiny urban-size backyard, we’re really not equipped with any sort of tricked-out deck or “party style” space. There are no tables and shelves at the ready. It’s a simple, small open space with a little grass and some slightly sloped pavement. One of the drawbacks to this situation is that I have a grilling dilemma, and it has helped to shape some important insights.
But first, you need to know a little more about my baggage relative to grilling…
I was a professional cook during the summers between 1986 (age 16) and 1992. This is what I did to earn money during high school and college (including the summer after college). I cooked a little in Prague in 1993, then came back to the Boston area where I cooked hardcore until walking away from it all in 2000. I was pretty f*’kin’ good at it if I do say so myself. There are many special things about the professional kitchen, one of which is the privilege of cooking with industrial-grade equipment.
The vast majority of grills with which I worked were gas powered, heavy duty, and powerful. The usual configuration was a series of long tube-shaped burners (not unlike your gas grill at home) that often sat beneath a layer of ceramic or otherwise fire-resistant stones. These stones were meant to conduct heat in a more even layer. Then there was the actual cast iron grill upon which you cooked. This last piece is, of course, how the contraption gets its name. Some of these grills were fairly large, designed to handle 100-200 pieces of meat, poultry, or fish over the course of a four-hour dinner service…maybe about 20 pieces at any given time.
I never worked in a steak house or any sort of restaurant that had an exotic fixation with meat. But almost every restaurant in which I worked had a good-sized grill. I did work in one restaurant that had a full blown, partially enclosed wood grill and it was spectacular. Don’t get me wrong, the gas models were great. They had good power and, importantly, an irregular distribution of heat. They taught the cook how to be observant and learn every square inch of the grill. Over time, the burners would get banged up or some of the holes for the flames might get clogged or the ceramic stones would crack and fall away. This would create hot and cool spots that a good grill cook would learn to use as an advantage. Where it was screaming hot (given away by the black cast iron surface turning light grey), this is where you could get a good sear on red meat or where you would want to lay the fish down first so it wouldn’t stick. This is where you’d grill scallops. You’d also avoid this spot for marinated or fatty meats that would drip and cause flames to flare up. Where it was cooler on the grill, you’d place your meats that needed more time or move meats that had already been seared for a slower finish. The half chicken, the leg of lamb, and the double thick pork chop occupied this space. You rotated your food over the course of the evening and, over weeks and months of this practice, your connection to the grill became almost personal. It’s probably similar to the feeling you get when you drive a car for years and, in a strange way, you become attached.
But the wood grill was something else entirely. With a wood grill, you were no longer adapting to what the grill was giving you, you were in complete control. If the gas grill was another entity you communed with over time, the wood grill was an extension of your mind that worked in real time. While you were cooking food, you were also building and moving fire, regulating heat and smoke. Part of your decision making over the course of dinner service was not only controlling the overall temperature of the unit, but also the pattern of the heat across the span of the grill. You created your own hot and cool spots and would control their size and location based on how busy you expected it to be on a given night and whether tuna, duck breast, or flank steak would be the most popular item. And if orders weren’t coming in the way you expected, you could reshape your fire to adjust. In addition to building and moving fire from below, many wood grills could be enclosed with a “roll top” cover that would immediately turn the unit into an oven. This allowed you to concentrate the smoke and add an element of convection to the cooking process. Where a gas grill might typically range from 350-600° F across the surface, a wood grill could easily span 200-1,000° F at one time, creating incredible versatility. If you could think of heat in the same way we normally think of color, it’s a palette with a vast spectrum.
Years have passed since my last shift in a professional kitchen, and even more since I worked with that blessed wood grill. Since then, I’ve had a string of grills at home, almost all charcoal, almost all the standard bowl-shaped Weber. When I moved to my current house, I tried to set up a more ambitious grill operation down in the tiny back yard. I wanted to have some semblance of the glory days when I set myself to cooking dinner. But it was a fool’s errand. With no real “set up” outside, cooking on the grill required me to haul (down two flights of stairs) the food, tongs, knives, kitchen towels, oil, salt, pepper, spices, and clean bowls/plates for finished food. Then it all had to go back upstairs afterwards. I used to get paid for that kind of labor, even if the pay was dirt. Doing it at home just wasn’t sustainable.
It was clear that if I wanted to grill regularly, it would have to be more convenient. To be more convenient meant the grill would have to be located closer to our living space, on the second-floor porch that comes off the front of the house…maybe ten steps from my kitchen.
Now you may recall from a previous post that my house was built in the year 1900. There are many ways to describe a house like this: historic, charming, high-maintenance, rich in character, and so on. But the important adjective for our discussion today is “flammable.” For any of you who have done any basic home improvement in a house 100+ years old, you know what I’m saying. There’s so much more wood in these houses, and it’s absolutely bone dry. Scientifically speaking, putting a charcoal grill on a wooden porch that attaches to my house ranks high on the universe’s List of Bad Ideas.
So, if I want to grill more often, I need to grill on the upstairs porch, which means I need to buy…………………a gas grill.
A domestic gas grill. I owned one once, briefly, before it just stopped working. I’ve cooked on other people’s gas grills. The place where we vacation has a gas grill. My parents have a gas grill. Many of my friends and relatives have a gas grill. And now I’m going to join this vast nationwide tribe of “safety first” backyard food experiences. For every “soccer mom,” there’s a “gas grill dad” and I was about to be anointed.
That about covers my baggage related to the grill situation. We’re all up to speed. Now we can move forward.
I’m going to get opinionated here, so I want to set the table by acknowledging my own limitations. I recognize that my experience with industrial-grade grills probably starts me off with some serious biases and unrealistic expectations. With that said, using prefab charcoal or wood lump charcoal can create amazing results in a simple bucket-style grill. My issue is really with the gas grills that are readily available to the average consumer…such as myself. I just have to say, I am not impressed. At the risk of sounding like a grill-snob…every time I crank a gas grill all the way up and then watch my food slowly die I think, “You’ve got to be kidding me.” What pushes me to complete disbelief is when gas grill owners will talk about how “powerful” their grills are and how they “cook just as good as the charcoal thing I used to have. I’m soooo glad I made the switch.”
Let’s be clear, and this is not an opinion, this is science…your Home Depot three-burner special does NOT perform as well as a charcoal grill.
I think most gas grill owners feel the need to celebrate these under-powered, aluminum Boy Scout campfires because they shelled out $700 to bring that giant four-burner unit home and spent three fairly frustrating hours putting it together.
It does not cook better. It does not compare with the results of cooking on real fire. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have value.
Simply put, gas grill owners like these units more because they’re more convenient. The grill can get to a workable cooking temperature in about five minutes by turning a couple of handles and clicking the starter button. No matches, lighter fluid, building a fire, or waiting 20-30 minutes for it to get to the right place. No need to plan ahead. No need to clean out the ashes when you’re done. So simple. I know this because I am a professionally trained cook. But I also know this because I had to compromise and buy a gas grill. I’ve got a brand new, little two-burner unit out on the porch. I bought it because I want to grill often and simply won’t do it often if I have to move half my kitchen down and up two flights of stairs every time. So, despite being a bit of a grill snob, I’m making the best of the situation and trying to be thoughtful about it. I’ll close with four basic observations that might help others make a real impact on their (reasonably priced) grill game.
IT'S NOT ‘EITHER/OR’
This is the most important insight I can offer on this issue. Don’t get sucked into the false construct of owning EITHER a gas grill OR a charcoal grill. I don’t know where this rivalry started, but it ends here. If you want to be truly intentional about your cooking, and you have a limited budget, consider purchasing both. Save your pennies, be resourceful, and you can easily buy both for under $400 total. One obvious advantage to having both is the redundancy. If you get caught without propane or something goes wrong with the gas grill, you’ll always have the charcoal grill as backup. But more importantly, if you’re cooking something that will be noticeably better on a wood/charcoal grill, you’ll have that option. Steak (in any form), sea scallops, and tuna steaks are three examples where super high temperatures make a huge difference. Your guests will be impressed as you point out the seared crust along the outside of your perfectly rare skirt steak that just isn’t achievable on a typical gas unit.
THE SHAPE OF THINGS
I talked earlier about the ability to move fire and create a heat gradient, what some websites call “zone grilling.” This is something you should really work on with your charcoal grill. Generally speaking, a charcoal grill with a flat bottom will do this better. Rectangles and squares are better designed for this sort of thing. Depending on your setup, a tabletop model might even be worth considering. The circular Weber can do zone grilling too, but getting a larger model might be necessary as you’ll have more space to work with inside.
THE SIZE OF THINGS
Having just bought a cheap gas grill, one of my best decisions was to go with a smaller model. I have a family of four, and it suits us fine. I’d be more than comfortable cooking for 10 people with this small unit. The takeaway here is you should carefully consider how big the unit really needs to be. Think about how you plan on using your gas grill, think about how many people you’ll be feeding. If you’ll be regularly serving up a dozen burgers with some chicken breasts and hot dogs…yep…you need a bigger grill. But all I’m saying is, maybe you don’t, and take a minute to figure that out.
BRIQUETTES AND LUMP CHARCOAL
If you go the route of getting both the gas grill and the charcoal grill, you’ve set yourself up for specialized cooking on the charcoal unit. With that in mind, you probably need to make the switch to lump charcoal. Those of you who already have made the switch know what I’m talking about. The extra effort needed to start a fire with lump charcoal is worth every second. This stuff burns HOT, much hotter than briquettes, and also makes a positive contribution to flavor. In defense of briquettes, they will burn much longer, so be aware of that if your event needs the grill to be active for a while. But, again, being able to reach 800° F is a ticket to flavor heaven when you’re cooking the grass-fed steak you emptied your wallet for at Whole Foods. Go with the lump.
Happy grilling everyone!