I'm Just Here for the Food_ Version 2.0 - Alton Brown [18]
LIGHT MY FIRE
Although natural charcoal fires up far easier than briquettes, charcoal is still just lumps of carbon, and lumps of carbon aren’t exactly fireworks. Clever hairless monkeys that we are, we’ve come up with a wide range of devices designed to speed lighting. Only one of these am I wholeheartedly opposed to: fast-lighting briquettes. I’m not naming names, but you know what I’m talking about. It’s not that I’m afraid that one of these chemical-laden lumps is going to just go off in my hand, it’s just that no matter how far I burn them down before I put the food on the grill, I can swear I taste something … funny. That’s all I’m going to say … funny.
A BARBECUE BY ANY OTHER NAME
Folks like to argue about what defines great barbecue. What they really should be arguing about is what the word actually means. It is just about the only word that out-connotes roast. You could, for instance, say, “I fired up my barbecue and barbecued a mess of barbecue for the church barbecue.” (Try that out on a French cook someday—it’ll crack him like an oeuf.)
The origins of the word are traceable. When Columbus landed on Hispaniola, he found the natives smoking meat and fish on green wood lattices built over smoldering bone coals. The natives called this way of cooking boucan. The Spaniards, being good colonialists, decided to change it to barbacoa. On his next journey from Spain, Columbus brought pigs to Hispaniola. A few of them got away, and soon there was more boucan than you could shake a flaming femur at. As word got around that the get-tin’ was good on Hispaniola, bandits, pirates, escaped prisoners, and runaway slaves made for the island and lived high on boucan three times a day. The French, witty as they are, called these individuals boucaniers.
So, the folks in Tampa have a football team whose name means “those who cook over sticks.”
As far as modern usage goes, barbecue the noun refers to slow-cooked pork or beef. Barbecued chicken is grilled chicken served with barbecue sauce. Barbecuing is the act of making barbecue; cooking directly over coals is grilling.
A NOTE ON SMOKE-MAKING ELEMENTS
I’ve received angry letters for saying this, but gosh darnit I’m saying it again anyway: unless the food in question is going to be exposed to smoke for several hours, what kind of smoke it is just doesn’t matter as long as it’s from a hardwood. If you’d like to add smoke to your grill-roasting experience I suggest piling half a cup of hardwood sawdust in the middle of a 10-inch square of heavy-duty aluminum foil. Bring all four corners together and twist the pack so that it looks like a metal comet with a short tail. Poke the head of the pouch with a skewer a couple of times and you’ve got a grill-ready smoke bomb.
YOU WANT CHAR? I’LL SHOW YOU CHAR
When you want serious firepower, place a small grate (the cooking grate from a Smokey Joe is perfect) directly on your chimney. This is like cooking over an upturned F-16. It’s not suitable for everything, but I’ll sometimes do little hunks of prime tuna as a stand-around-the-grill appetizer.
Lighter fluid may be the perennial pyro-preference, but there are other firestarter options. My favorites are electric-coil starters and chimney starters. The first requires 110 volts of power and a safe place to set it down once you’ve removed it from the grill, but it does the job quickly and effectively. A chimney starter is also fast and it allows you to have lit coals standing by at all times. A chimney does, however, require a safe place to live. I keep mine on a cinder block (but never on gravel).
During a multiday grilling binge last summer I padded out to my extremely carbonaceous carport to fire up one of the three grills that always seem to be there. I loaded a chimney with chunks and reached for some newspaper to stick in the bottom. But the only paper I could scrounge was a big wad of paper towel I’d used to wipe down grill number