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HOW TO GRILL BY DIRECT HEAT

Despite its mystique, I wasn’t quite ready to buy into the grilling as a snatch-the-pebble-from-my-hand Zen thing. I asked a bunch of cook friends what factor they thought most important in grilling, say, a perfect steak. All five of them said the same thing: heat control. Then I asked them how they knew they had it right. They all said: experience. Having recently seen the film Memento, I decided to give myself a problem: what if a person couldn’t make memories and had no way to accumulate experience? Could he or she still grill a New York strip? Perhaps you could load the equation in this person’s favor by identifying a set of controllable factors (time, mass, heat), then provide the tools for their control.

Time was the easy one, so a timer would definitely be part of the kit. I thought too of weighing the steak, but figured that in direct-heat cooking, what really matters is how far the heat is going to travel, so thickness matters more than any other single factor. So I bought a strip and cut myself nine 1½-inch thick steaks. Next, the big one: heat.

Many a grill aficionado judges the heat of the grill with a thermometer mounted in the dome of the grill cover. (Although the thermometer that Weber builds into the handle of their nicer kettle grills seems relatively accurate, I always back it up with another stem thermometer inserted in the top vent.)

That thermometer can only tell me what the cumulative air temperature is inside the dome. That’s great info to have if I’m planning to grill-roast with the cover on. But if I’m planning to grill a couple of steaks, it’s useless. For that I need intelligence from the front lines, so to speak. I need to know what’s going on at the grate. And I’m not going to put my hand anywhere near it, thank you.

I figured that measuring out the charcoal was a good idea, even if it only got us into the ballpark, so I settled on a single chimney’s worth (about one quart of lump charcoal). I fired it up, and once the coals were glowing, I dumped them onto the fire grate. Now what? I tried placing a coil-style oven thermometer right on the grate, but since it’s designed to read air temperature, it got a little confused. Besides, I really needed to know not only the temperature of the radiant heat at grill level but the temperature of the grate itself.11

I was flummoxed. Standing there staring at the coals had warmed me up, so I went back to the Airstream to ponder the situation over an icy beverage.

Ice melts when its temperature rises above 32° F. That’s a known factor, so one could say that ice is a good thermometer.

Since I knew that the thickness of the food mattered a heck of a lot more than its width or length, I decided to stretch my meat supply by cutting the steaks down to 4-by-4-inch squares that were 1½ inches thick. These I seasoned liberally with kosher salt and allowed to come up to room temperature.12 I filled an ice bucket, grabbed a stopwatch, and divided my grill grates into four zones. My plan: select a cooking time and a desired doneness, then finesse the fire until it delivered my steak in that time and to that doneness. Then all I’d have to do is time how long that same fire took to melt a cube of ice and I’d have a measuring stick to steakhood.

I started the test by melting cubes in all four sectors. I used the standard cubes made in ice trays in some 90 percent of American household freezers, shaped like this:

The times were radically different, which I’d expected, given the fact that I hadn’t really arranged the charcoal but let it fall where it may (see illustrations, opposite).

I laid a square steak on each sector of the cast-iron grill grate and hit the timer. I figured that 4 minutes per side was reasonable, so I left them for 2 minutes then rotated them 90 degrees and gave them another 2. At that point I turned over all