Fire It Up - Andrew Schloss [5]
GRILLING 1-2-3
You can use your grill like an oven or a stove. Your grill grate is essentially a built-in stove-top pan with slats. Treat your grill grate just as you would a pan or baking sheet. The grill grate is your cooking surface, so keep it clean, get it hot, and oil it. If you’re using a grill tray, screen, skillet, or basket, then this becomes your cooking surface, and the same rules apply. For successful grilling, follow these simple steps every time you grill:
1. Get it hot. Preheat your grill (gas, charcoal, or wood) on high with the grill grate and/or grill tray in place and the lid down (if you have a lid) for at least 10 minutes. You want your cooking surface to be very hot. Built-in temperature gauges only measure the ambient temperature of the air inside the grill, not the grill grate itself. Any part of the grate directly over the heat should be hot enough to sear food on contact. Hold your hand a few inches above the grate and count “one one thousand, two one thousand. . . .” If you make it to “four one thousand,” you’ve got a medium-high fire on your hands—a good place to start most direct grilling. See the chartsfor more details on grill temperatures. A hot grill grate provides the best sear marks, the most flavor, and the least sticking.
2. Keep it clean. When your grill grate or grill tray is hot, scrape off any debris with a stiff wire brush. A hot cooking surface cleans more easily than a cold one. For the cleanest grill, scrape it twice: once right after food comes off the grill (that’s when the burnt-on debris will easily loosen itself from the hot metal) and once again right before you add food to the grill. Once the grill grate or tray cools, any bits of food adhering to the cold metal will be much more difficult to remove.
3. Oil it well. Rub oil or fat over the hot scraped cooking surface. We like to wad up a paper towel and drop it in a little canola or other vegetable oil. Grab the oily towel with your tongs and rub it on the grill grate. You can also use a chunk of fat trimmed from meat. Either way, the fat will pick up some fine soot and create a superclean grill grate; but more important, it will lubricate your cooking surface, helping to prevent sticking and improving heat transfer to the food’s surface for more efficient browning.
Adding Smoke
One of the great advantages of a grill lid is that it captures smoke, which infuses your grilled food with woodsy aromas and flavors. Fat and juices that drip into the fire will send a little bit of smoke back to the food, but most smokiness in grilled food comes from wood. If you grill over a wood fire or very smoky lump charcoal like mesquite, you can get some good smoke flavor in a roast or long-cooking, tough cut of meat. But when grilling over gas or a fire of charcoal briquettes, you’ll need to add wood chips or chunks to get a smoky flavor. (You can buy chunks or make them yourself by chopping up appropriate wood.)
To set up a grill for added smoke, soak wood chips or chunks in water for at least 30 minutes so they’re wet enough to slowly smolder rather than quickly incinerate. Light your grill and add the soaked chips or chunks as part of the preheating step. On a charcoal grill, toss a handful or two directly onto the hot coals, wait until you see smoke (5 to 10 minutes), then add your food, and close the lid. If you can, position the lid so that the upper air vents are on the opposite side from the lower air vents on the bottom of the grill. This