I'm Just Here for the Food_ Version 2.0 - Alton Brown [20]
Now it just so happens that during this time Ford’s company was manufacturing an automobile called the Model A, and it was a ragtop. When engaged, the fabric top was held in place by wooden staves. The factory that made these staves had a lot of leftover wood chips to get rid of. One of Henry’s buddies started thinking about the chip problem and the campfire problem and in a true flash of genius conceived the charcoal briquette. The fellow’s name was Kingsford. Up until the 1950s, you could only buy Kingsford charcoal (boxed not bagged) from Ford dealerships. To this day, Kingsford charcoal controls 50 percent of the country’s charcoal market.
Grilling
When Brillat-Savarin made his famous remark “We can learn to cook but must be born to roast,” he was actually talking about the process we know as grilling, the cooking of foods (especially meats) via the radiant energy and convection heat generated by glowing coals or an actual fire. B-Savarin was right inasmuch as grilling cannot be taught; it can, however, be learned through experience. In other words, the only way to learn to grill is to grill.
Many people do not want to hear this. They want a recipe to follow, which is why there are so many books about grilling published each year. The problem, of course, is that besides the usual considerations that go into the cooking of a given food, there are many other factors unique to grilling. Among them:
• The size, shape, and style of the grill
• The type of charcoal
• How much charcoal is involved
• How that charcoal is positioned in relation to the target food
• The outside temperature
• The outside humidity
• Available airflow
All of these factors are concerned with the management of heat. Many fine grill teachers have wrestled with this issue, and one prevailing method has emerged: It is to hold one’s hand a certain distance from the fire and count how many seconds you can stand to hold it there.
This is a fine method for the experienced griller who has learned how to interpret the information his hand/sensor gathers, but for the novice it is a buggy system at best. (See illustrations, opposite.)
The other popular method is to use charcoal volume as a guide. You often see references to “a chimney starter’s worth of charcoal” or “about a quart.” This is not a bad point of reference if you’re using something standard like briquettes, but for lump it’s a little dicey. Besides, the volume system doesn’t take arrangement and distribution into account, and that’s probably the biggest factor in grilling.
MORE LORE
Until 1951 all grills were “table” grills. Since the food had to be cooked directly over the coals, the only way to control the heat was to move coals around by reaching though the grates and pushing them. Such devices were extremely limited in scope—not to mention incredibly unsafe due to their high centers of gravity.
Then along came a genius. Like the rest of postwar America, George Stephen enjoyed backyard cooking. But George chafed at the lack of control he had over the grills of the day. He lived in Illinois, where the wind would whip in from the prairie and blow out his fire.
George worked at the Weber Brothers Metal Works, a company known for its darned fine marine buoys. Legend has it that one day George was fastening the bottom to the top of a buoy when, like the monkey picking up the bone in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the potential gradually dawned on him. He took home some scrapped parts and created the first kettle grill. Friends and coworkers were shocked and surprised by both the quality and consistency of his creation. George headed up the new barbecue division