I'm Just Here for the Food_ Version 2.0 - Alton Brown [17]
Why have a laser on a key chain? Because you can, of course.
Cooking over open coals, a process which, depending on who you ask, is called either broiling, grilling, or roasting, has been around since the first caveman noticed that the rack of mammoth hanging by the fire didn’t turn green and stinky as quickly as the one left by the door. Drying and the curative powers of smoke were no doubt responsible, but it didn’t take long for some Cro-Magnon klutz to drop dinner in the fire. And it was good. A lot less chewy and kind of yummy. Sure, it was gritty from lying in the coals, but soon (a thousand years, tops) some Og or Ogetta stuck a spear in the meat and, well, any Boy Scout or Girl Scout knows the rest. Grilling is huge to this day, but don’t think for a minute that this has to do with flavor or getting outdoors or any other culinary concerns.
You see, most of the grilling in this country is performed by men, and men like fire. In fact, I suspect that the backyard cooking boom this country witnessed in the late 1940s and 50s was really about playing with lighter fluid. It’s not our fault, of course. I trust that someday the lab-coaters will have identified a gene, unique to the Y chromosome, that will be dubbed the “firestarter gene.”
Whether it’s for the love of fire or food, grilling is more popular today than ever before8 despite the rise in concerns over potentially cancer-causing compounds in the smoke created when animal fats burn.
FUEL MATTERS
The average hardwood log contains around 39 percent cellulose, 35 percent hemicellulose, 19.5 percent lignin, and 3 percent extractives and such. When you burn it—well, I shouldn’t say “burn,” because wood doesn’t actually burn—it undergoes a kind of thermal degradation known as pyrolysis.9 During this process, the wood beaks down into a slew of volatile substances (carbon monoxide and dioxide, hydrocarbons, hydrogen, aldehydes, ketones, alcohols, tar, phenols, that sort of thing) and a solid carbon mass. When you see flames and smoke, that’s the volatiles burning. When those are exhausted, what’s left of the wood glows. These are called coals, and they burn much hotter and much cleaner than the stuff that fueled the flames. They are also the stuff of which all good grill sessions are made.
Charcoal is nothing more than wood that has had its volatile components removed. Although it’s a lot more complicated than it sounds, commercial charcoal is made by heating wood (or in the case of briquettes, wood chips) to about 1000° F in an airless environment. Natural lump charcoal is fired with grain alcohol; most briquette makers opt for petroleum. This cooking removes those volatile components while leaving the carbonaceous mass intact. After cooling, the lump charcoal is bagged and shipped. Chips get mixed up with lime, cornstarch, and other binders and are compressed into briquettes. This is not to say that all briquettes are bad. “Natural” briquettes still contain binders like cornstarch but they lack the nitrates and petroleum, and the non-burning filler (sand) you find in standard briquettes. Natural briquettes burn longer than lump or chunk charcoal, which lights faster and burns a good deal hotter. Consider using a mixture of the two fuels in certain situations. If you’re interested in smoking foods, remember that chunk charcoal and charcoal briquettes are processed products that burn to produce hot coals but do not alone have the ability