Flavor,” everyone says, when you ask them why they cook outdoors. They may mention other points as well, but no one willingly swats mosquitoes all night to cook food that is merely edible. If superior flavor isn’t a goal, we may as well boil some wienies for dinner.
Many factors influence the ultimate taste of food, including the inherent quality of the ingredients and a deft hand at seasoning. The most fundamental way that a cook enhances flavor, however, is through the skilled use of a particular cooking method. If you’re going to apply heat at all-that is, cook the food in any manner-how you do it is a critical consideration. Whether you’re barbecuing a whole hog, steaming a lobster, or sautéing mushrooms, you choose a cooking method that maximizes the flavor of that food and then practice it as well as possible to achieve optimum results. The method matters so much that it can even alter our perception of substance: take a blind tasting of fried chicken and a simmered chicken soup and you may not realize they ever had a feather in common.
This simple truth is well understood inside, in our kitchens, but it’s widely ignored outside. The conventional wisdom on outdoor cooking blurs distinctions between various methods, creating many misconceptions about techniques and flavor. We’ve been taught to think, for example, that we can grill, roast, bake, and smoke using one basic approach and that we can call anything cooked on a grill “grilled,” even if it isn’t. These and other confusions over methods lead to a muddled sense of flavor. Even when flavor is an overriding goal, it’s difficult to get there if the destination isn’t clear.
That’s the focus of this chapter. We explore all the methods of outdoor home cooking, explain the different tastes and textures they produce, and describe how to exploit their potentials for maximum flavor. The recipes in later chapters constitute the heart of the book, but the general principles discussed here form the foundation for all the cooking that lies ahead. If you explore the concepts on your own, you’ll learn that they even liberate you from recipes, giving you the knowledge you need to cook creatively. When you realize where you’re going, and appreciate why, every journey becomes a joy.
Of all methods of outdoor home cooking, grilling is the most misunderstood. Many people aren’t even aware that it is a specific method of cooking, assuming instead that it’s just a generic term to cover anything done on a grill. The confusion on the subject goes back decades, to the middle of the twentieth century, when the grilling boom started in the United States. It seemed like a brand-new cooking method in the 1950s, completely unknown in American indoor kitchens at the time. Few experienced cooks understood anything about it, much less the eager but novice men who quickly claimed the turf for themselves. Any sensible-sounding idea, however misguided, could spread easily.
Actually, our ancestors knew far more about grilling than the people of that day. For the many centuries that Americans, Europeans, and others cooked on huge hearths in their kitchens, they grilled small cuts of naturally tender meats, such as steaks, over live wood coals. They called the method “broiling,” but it differed only in the setting from modern outdoor grilling and bore scant resemblance to the oven broiling of today. Eliza Leslie, perhaps the country’s greatest authority ever on flavor, explained the method in her 1837 Directions for Cookery: “Have ready on your hearth a fine bed of clear bright coals, entirely free from smoke and ashes. Set the gridiron [cooking grate] over the coals in a slanting direction, that the meat may not be smoked by the fat dropping into the fire directly under it. When the gridiron is quite hot, rub the bars with suet, … and lay on the steaks.”
Note Leslie’s insistence on avoiding smoke produced by dripping fat, agreeing with famed French chef Auguste Escoffier that it’s a “very disagreeable taste.” Unaware of these voices of professional expertise, American grillers assumed the opposite in the 1950s, one of the first missteps they made. They knew that old-time American barbecue relied on wood smoke for flavor, so they jumped to the conclusion that the smoke produced by fat and food falling into a charcoal or gas fire created grill flavor. In truth, as good hearth cooks knew, the smoke leaves only sooty overtones on the food, not enhanced taste. Rather than seeking it, we should avoid it as much as possible.
What we really want is the same result sought by Leslie and Escoffier, which is the amplification of the food’s natural flavor through high-heat searing of the exterior. Culinary scientists such as Harold McGee call it the Maillard reaction or, more simply, the “browning” effect. The great advantage of grilling as a cooking method, according to McGee in his On Food and Cooking (revised edition, 2004), is its “rapid and thorough browning of the surface,” which adds new dimensions of complexity to the flavor of the food. The fire must be hot enough to sear and crisp the exposed muscle fibers of meat, poultry, and fish, enhancing the aroma and taste, but not so hot that it burns or chars the outside before adequately cooking the inside. By the nature of the high-heat, quick cooking method, grilling works only with relatively small and tender ingredients, but that’s a broad domain including everything from sausage to scallops, asparagus to zucchini, and veal chops to venison medallions.
When you get the grilling right, the result is a robust intensification of the food’s flavor, along with a delicious textural contrast between the crusted, browned surface and the succulent interior. It’s an outcome characteristic of grilling, unlike anything obtained by most other cooking methods. You may want to add other complementary seasonings to the food, as we illustrate in the recipe chapters, but they should never distract from the distinctive grill taste.
The only way to fully achieve that special flavor is to cook all surface areas of meat, fish, and poultry over direct heat. That’s not difficult to do, but it runs counter to another popular and widespread American notion from the 1950s. To cook entirely with direct heat requires keeping the grill open rather than covered, just as chefs do in restaurant kitchens and backyard cooks do everywhere else in the world.
When you cook covered, as the American conventional wisdom dictates, you create an oven effect and do much of the cooking with indirect heat reflecting off the lid. Even if the food is directly over the fire, you are in effect grilling and baking at the same time. The resulting flavor reflects the methodology, providing a modicum of grilled texture along with a basic baked taste. If your food isn’t right over the fire, giving you only indirect heat, you aren’t grilling at all, just baking or roasting. You can even bake a cake that way in any covered grill that will maintain a steady temperature, but it won’t be a grilled cake.
Using a cover does simplify the cooking process, particularly for inexperienced cooks, which is one of the main reasons it caught on in the United States in an era when convenience dominated culinary priorities. You put the food in and leave it there until ready, just like in a standard kitchen oven. The cover helps control flare-ups-which used to be a big problem with the fatty meats and oily marinades of the 1950s-so you seldom if ever torch your dinner or your eyebrows. The cover also traps smoke from dripping fat, allowing the food to absorb more of it, as many American grillers still consider desirable.
Open grilling requires you to pay more attention to the food, to get personally involved in the cooking process. You have to turn the food every few minutes and move it around as necessary to avoid flare-ups. You must control the intensity of the fire and keep track of time well enough to gauge doneness. We enjoy the active role in the cooking ourselves, but even if we didn’t, the flavor trade-off would make the slight extra effort worth-while.
Controlling the temperature of the fire is essential. Every food grills best at a particular heat level, so you must make adjustments in the intensity of the fire for different foods. The only effective way to measure and then maintain that temperature on an open grill is the time-honored hand test that people have used for eons in all forms of cooking. Place your hand a couple of inches above the top of the cooking grate and count the number of seconds until the heat of the fire forces you to pull away. One to two seconds signifies hot, three seconds indicates medium-high, and four to five seconds denotes moderate. You seldom grill meat, fish, or poultry at lower temperatures, though some fruits and vegetables thrive at a reduced range.
The hand test may sound a little primitive for our technological age, but it provides a more accurate and universal gauge of heat than any modern gadget made for a grill. The thermometers built into the hood of many grills today register only the oven heat when the cover is closed, not the true grilling temperature right above the fire. In open grilling, the gauges don’t measure anything. The temperature knobs on gas grills marked hot, medium, and low may provide more help over time, but not until you’ve determined how those settings compare with your hand measurements.
Use the hand test on all types of grills–charcoal, electric, gas, infrared, and wood-to establish an appropriate heat level before you begin grilling. Temperature adjustments are simple on gas and electric models, of course, and not much more difficult on charcoal and wood grills. With a charcoal or wood grill, fine-tune the heat level by adding or removing coals, opening or closing vents, or moving the fire closer to the food, depending on the design of your grill. An adjustable firebox makes the task particularly easy, but even on a standard kettle-style grill, you can rev up or dampen the fire effectively by varying the quantity of fuel used and the amount of air getting to the coals through the bottom vents.
Thick steaks, some other cuts of red meat, and a few other foods grill best on a two-level fire, usually starting for a few minutes on high heat and then finishing on medium. On gas grills with three or more burners, you can usually keep a hot fire and a medium fire going simultaneously from the beginning, and on smaller models you simply turn down the heat at the appropriate point. On charcoal and wood grills, you establish two different cooking areas, one with coals in a single layer for moderate heat and another with coals piled two to three deep for a hot fire.
In grilling, the temperature of the fire is more important to flavor than the fuel you use to generate the heat. Some people love to argue over the merits of charcoal versus gas, but in our own extensive experiments we get similar results with both fuels when we’re grilling the same food at the same temperature for the same period of time.
Even the finest lump hardwood charcoal contains only modest amounts of wood residue after the controlled burning used in charcoal manufacturing. For a real hint of this flavor, you have to grill entirely with wood chunks or cuttings. If you simply add these to a charcoal or other fire, you reduce their impact significantly. Grilling on wood alone does contribute subtly to your results, but the exposure to the smoke is so brief and fleeting (unlike in traditional barbecue) that the dominant flavor still comes from the direct heat of the fire.
Until recently at least, charcoal and wood grills did have an advantage over electric and gas models in generating a full range of open grilling temperatures. That’s gradually changing as more manufacturers recognize the need for serious searing power. A fair number of gas grills, particularly in the top price ranges, and some electric models now offer as much heat as any charcoal or wood grill.
The development of infrared technology helped to spur this change and continues to reinforce it in beneficial ways. Both electric and gas infrared grills, which are just out of the patent period and dropping in cost, excel at searing. They crust a steak as well as or better than any other grill and even cook it to the desired doneness slightly faster.
For us, the choice between the fuels is mainly a matter of mood rather than flavor. We choose gas and infrared for everyday grilling because of their speed and convenience and change to charcoal or wood for entertaining to create a more casual, relaxed party atmosphere. Ultimately, we don’t care what lights our fire as long as we can grill on it.
Cooking with full direct heat and tending the temperature of the fire are the most important considerations in grilling, but other factors also contribute to success.
* Grate Expectations. Before you start grilling, make sure the cooking grate is hot lightly oiled, and clean. Always preheat it, with the cover down, until it reaches the appropriate cooking temperature for the food you’re grilling. Then apply a thin coat of oil to the grate, using a cloth rag, a wad of paper towels, or a kitchen brush (but not a sprayer). Avoid excessive amounts of oil, which can cause flare-ups. After you’re through grilling, scrape the grate clean before it cools.
* Control Flare-Ups. Burned food doesn’t taste good. If dripping fat ignites flames in the cooking area, move your food to a different part of the grate, at least temporarily. Reduce the odds on flare-ups in advance by maintaining a clean grate, cutting excess fat from meat, and keeping oil in marinades to the minimum needed.
* Get Organized. Lay out in advance everything you will need for grilling. Once the fire is hopping, it’s too late to start looking for ingredients, tools, plates, and the rest
* Time the Grilling. Before you start grilling, estimate the time required, consulting a recipe if necessary. Set a timer to alert you when you need to turn food or check it for doneness. We use a small, inexpensive pocket timer available at most kitchen stores.
* Check for Doneness. You don’t want to serve raw meat, fish, or poultry, at least in most cases. If you’re grilling a relatively thick or large cut use an instant-read meat thermometer to test doneness, taking care that the probe isn’t touching bone. With other food you may need to make a small cut to make sure the center is cooked through.
Since cooking temperature is the critical consideration in good grilling, you build charcoal and wood fires with a firm focus on controlling the heat level. The main temperature variable is the quantity of fuel you use, which should always be relative to the size of the grill and the amount and type of food you’re cooking. We use charcoal chimney starters as a combination measuring cup and igniter. On a standard 22.5-inch kettle-style grill, we light one full charcoal-chimney load of briquettes, lump charcoal, or hardwood chunks to cook four chicken breasts over medium heat, spreading the fuel evenly in a single layer. For the same number of thick steaks on the same grill, we would increase the amount of charcoal or wood by 50 percent or more to build a two-level fire with both hot and medium ranges, piling the coals two or three deep on one half of the firebox and then scattering the others in a single layer on the opposite half. Briquettes reach a prime cooking temperature when they start turning ashen, usually about thirty minutes after you light them. Lump charcoal and hardwood chunks usually ignite faster, get hotter, and burn more quickly. With any of the fuels, you can bump up the heat by bunching the coals together, opening vents fully, or, if your grill provides the means, moving the food closer to the fire. To reduce the temperature, spread the coals apart, dampen the draft, or increase the distance between the food and the fire.
As suggested, much of the confusion in the conventional wisdom about the grilling process and grill flavor comes from supposed similarities to traditional barbecue, a method of cooking practiced in the United States since the colonial period. When grilling gained prominence in American life in the mid-twentieth century, many fans assumed a likeness to the older custom because both featured an outdoor setting, a celebratory atmosphere, and men holding forth at the fire. Many grillers even went so far as to adopt the venerable name, referring to their craft as “barbecuing.”
In truth, the two cooking methods are nearly polar opposites. In contrast to high-heat grilling, traditional barbecue relies on very low cooking temperatures. Instead of measuring cooking time in minutes or even seconds, barbecue usually takes hours and sometimes days. Rather than tender meats and other foods weighed in ounces, barbecue marks its scales in pounds and boasts of turning almost inedible cuts into fall-apart delicacies. While grillers argue over charcoal and gas, barbecue masters count on wood as both the medium and the message, a fuel that doubles as the agent of flavor by generating clouds of smoke to blanket the food over the long, slow cooking.
New World natives developed the basics of the cooking method before Europeans discovered and settled their realm. The Europeans knew about “cold smoking” as a food preservation process, but not the “hot smoking” they found in the Americas. The former uses smoking temperatures below the internal doneness point for meat, fish, and poultry, helping to preserve them without cooking them, and the latter goes above the doneness range, resulting in fully cooked foods. The new settlers adopted the hot-smoking method for themselves, using it mainly at first as a way to cook and tenderize whole sides of wild game. They dug a trench outside, filled it with logs, burned the wood down to smoldering embers, suspended carcasses above the coals, and smoked the meat overnight The cooking typically kicked off a big party, which culminated the next day in a community-wide feast.
Gradually, as the nation became more urban and industrial, Americans lost touch with the old tradition. Barbecue survived in the South and in some areas of the Midwest, but mainly as a commercial venture. The cooks turned into restaurateurs, opening businesses that they frequently and proudly called “BBQ joints.” They invented metal and brick pits for smoking, to replace the underground trenches, and began to specialize in cheap, tough, and fatty cuts such as pork butt, spareribs, and beef brisket. Home cooks eventually returned to the craft in the last few decades, spurred on by rollicking barbecue cook-offs across the country and the development of good backyard smoking equipment.
The competitions focus primarily on the traditional BBQ-joint meats, which also remain popular at home. A diet of butt and brisket gets heavy, however, and many outdoor cooks like to balance it with chicken, fish, shellfish, and vegetables smoked in a similar way. This contemporary smoke cooking maintains the slow and low principles of traditional barbecue, but only to optimize the smoke tang, not to tenderize the meat and melt off its fat. The flavor goal in both cases is to infuse the food with the husky aroma and robust savor of the wood smoke, adding a new, strapping, and complementary dimension to its inherent taste.
A handful of wood chips or a few grapevine cuttings won’t do the job. They will add a subtle hint of the desired flavor, similar to what you can get in grilling with wood, but for true barbecue and smoke cooking you need a stack of hardwood logs or chunks. You want to keep the smoke coming steadily, in most cases, throughout the long cooking process, with wood either as the only fuel or as a major supplement to another heat source. Depending on the design of your smoker, you may have to raise the lid to add wood as you go, but you should keep it closed most of the time to trap and circulate the smoke.
With the cover down, you can usually depend on temperature readings from built-in thermometers. Unlike in grilling, you really want to know the oven temperature inside a smoker. The gauges that register ranges such as warm, ideal, and hot won’t tell you much, but a real thermometer proves a valuable guide in the cooking process. In traditional barbecue, most pitmasters try to maintain a cooking temperature between 180°F and 220°F, adding fuel and opening or closing air vents as necessary. For contemporary smoking, temperatures from 200°F to 250°F work well, and that’s usually within the capabilities of the most popular and affordable home smokers.
In all cases, be sure to use untreated hardwoods, not soft, resinous woods that contain a lot of foul-tasting sap. Avoid pine, cedar, and spruce, for example, in favor of hardwoods such as hickory, oak, pecan, alder, apple, and cherry. Stay away from plywood and odd construction scraps. When you want chunks instead of logs, buy the wood at stores that carry outdoor cooking supplies.
Modern grills, particularly newer gas models, offer a variety of ways to roast everything from meat to vegetables. On almost any grill, you can close the cover, move the food away from the direct heat of the fire, and roast it at a moderate to moderately high temperature much like you do in an indoor oven. Some people like to call that “indirect grilling,” because it’s done on a grill, but the actual cooking method is roasting, and so is the resulting flavor. The food differs little in taste and texture from a regular kitchen preparation.
That’s fine for any food that’s best suited to the roasting method. A pork loin, a prime rib, and a whole chicken are too large for either direct-heat grilling outside or pan sautéing inside, so you roast them in both settings. You can also roast smaller cuts, such as a tenderloin or a side of salmon, but we prefer to grill these for bolder intensification of their flavor.
If you want to add a distinctly outdoor tang in covered grill roasting, add wood chips or chunks to the fire. Just don’t kid yourself that a brisket cooked in this manner is going to taste like real smoked barbecue. You’re still roasting, using the smoke like an extra seasoning. The cooking temperature is too high and the cooking time too abbreviated for traditional barbecue or other forms of smoke cooking.
For the most authentic outdoor take on roasting, cook on a rotating spit in front of a searing fire. This is basically how cooks roasted on hearths for centuries, and it truly gets meat, fish, and poultry “done to a turn.” No contemporary indoor roasting technique matches it for full flavor and succulence.
Rotisserie attachments come standard or optional on many gas grills today, usually mounted over the grill grates in front of an infrared or even a live-flame burner. It’s the only frill we look for in a new grill. Spit cooking produces results more similar to those of grilling than oven roasting, with crispy, browned surfaces and juicy interiors.
On charcoal grills and older gas models, you sometimes see rotisseries that sit over the fire. They roast reasonably well, but the placement allows fat to drip into the fire, producing undesirable smoke and the possibility of flare-ups that can be difficult to control. The hearth cooks knew exactly what they were doing by situating their spits facing the flames of the fireplace rather than sitting over them. For these home cooks of yesteryear, roasting was the preeminent way of preparing meat, game, and birds. You’ll understand why when you try the newer outdoor rendition of their rotisserie method.
Another time-honored American roasting technique, planking seems to be on the cusp of a major revival. The idea developed in centuries past primarily as a means of cooking freshly caught fish, usually shad on the Atlantic coast and salmon on the Pacific coast. The cooks built an outdoor fire near their fishing site, nailed or otherwise secured their catch to a soaked wood plank, and positioned the board at a tilting upright angle facing the flames. The fire singed the plank, adding wood-smoke flavor to the meal, and seared the fish on the outside while cooking it through at a roasting temperature.
Some people still practice the technique around a riverside fire, but since we’re focused on home cooking in this book rather than camp cookouts, we deal with it as a different way of roasting on a grill. You place the soaked plank across the grate, put the fish or other food on top, cover the grill, and cook, preferably over moderately high direct heat.
A growing number of companies-such as Sautee Cedar (sauteecedar.com, 404-355-2981)-sell sturdy, reusable planks or less versatile, thin, one-time-use versions at cookware and grill stores. You can also go to a lumberyard and ask to have an untreated cedar or alder board cut into lengths that fit into your grill and under your food. After you’re finished roasting on the wood, present dinner at the table on the singed plank for the epitome in outdoor serving ware.
Some of the liveliest American outdoor cooking traditions center around a huge kettle. From blue-crab steams to crawfish boils, from catfish to smelt fries, people in every corner of the country love to gather a crowd and cook their favorite local food in a piping-hot big pot.
Originally, the ingredients of choice were seldom available in other regions, but now most of them can be found everywhere with a little luck and looking. For a true break from the routine, adopt one or more of the traditions-described in the recipe chapters-for your own home entertaining. If none of the old customs seem right for you, then consider a Thanksgiving turkey fry, a popular newfangled notion out of the same heritage.
The various methods of cooking and their flavors don’t really differ from their indoor counterparts, but the level of fun escalates with the quantity of food and guests. You can’t cook on this scale in a home kitchen, which reinforces all the other joys of being outside. For distinctive outdoor flavor, we prefer grilling, barbecuing, smoking, and rotisserie roasting, but when we’re in the mood for an authentic and festive American celebration, we’re likely to bring out the big pot.