CHAPTER 7

Firing Up

So, okay, after however many dozens of pages, it’s finally time for the main event: putting meat to fire. Well, we’re almost there. (This kind of reminds us of the last book, where you’re not cooking brisket until the third act.) Anyway, this long-winded display isn’t intentional (though we do like to yak), but you’ve got to walk before you run and you’ve got to have good fuel and meat before you can produce transcendent steak. And you’ve also got to have some good tools, as they will make the job better, easier, and less painful. What’s a surgeon without a scalpel? What’s a painter without a brush? So in this chapter, we’re going to look at the basic stuff you should have at hand in order to get a fire rip-roaring, manipulate hot coals and sizzling meats, and do it all without hurting yourself or making too much of a mess.

Then we’re going to offer some ideas for grill setups and coal-bed alignments. We’re basically making the simple act of cooking a steak more complicated. But it’s oh, so good!

Equipment

As with cooking almost anything, being prepared when the food hits the fire is an important key to success. Make sure your mise en place (prepped ingredients) is perfect, that all the tools you’ll need are nearby. These tools are neither expensive nor hard to find, so no excuses on cutting corners.

CHARCOAL CHIMNEY: LET THERE BE FIRE!

You’d think this simple piece of technology would be so common now that everyone with a backyard grill would have to own one, but surprisingly that’s not the case. Every year we meet a couple of people who, on seeing a charcoal chimney, say, “Wow, I’ve got to get one of those!” Go figure.

A chimney is nonnegotiable. Every home griller should have one. They’re not only the easiest, cleanest, and most effective way to light charcoal but also a cooking medium in and of themselves. All you need is some newspaper or other dry paper and a bag of your favorite charcoal. Within twenty minutes you’ll have a glowing mound of incendiary charcoal hot enough to grill anything you want.

A chimney is just a thin metal cylinder with an insulated handle attached. The cylinder has two chambers. The smaller bottom one is separated from the top one by a perforated sheet or thin steel bars, and the top chamber is open to the sky. Air holes have been cut out around the sides.

Here’s how to use it • Turn the chimney upside down so the shorter chamber is facing up. This is where you stuff a couple of sheets of crumpled newspaper, a scrunched-up paper bag, or even a few wads of paper torn out of your bag of charcoal. Don’t compact the paper too much, as this is what you’re going to light and it needs channels for oxygen to power the flames.

Pro tip • To ensure that the paper burns completely, squirt it with a little cooking oil.

Now turn the chimney right side up and set it down on a hard stone surface or even on top of your charcoal grill. Fill the top with charcoal, as much as you think you’ll need. For short, small cooks where you don’t need too much heat, maybe you need to fill it only halfway or less. A reverse sear (see this page) on a thick bone-in ribeye is a good example. If you’re grilling a bunch of steaks or need extremely high heat, fill it up.

Light the paper in the bottom. In less than a minute, you’ll see plumes of thick, white smoke emanating from the chimney. This is the paper burning and starting to catch the bottommost pieces of charcoal (which create a lot of smoke). Within a few more minutes, the paper will have burned out and you’ll see a much smaller trail of smoke coming from the chimney. This means it’s lit. In the next few minutes, you’ll hear popping and crackling and see sparks starting to shoot out of the top like miniature fireworks. If you don’t, add some more paper and relight the chimney.

After about fifteen minutes, you’ll see coals glowing orange and turning white with ash, a sign they are really heating up. When they are on the cusp of turning from black to white, dump the contents of the chimney into the space on your grill you want to heat. It’s that simple.

The reason to have two chimneys on hand is if you need to start with a larger coal bed or need a quick refresh of hot coals. A standard-size large chimney, like the Weber Rapidfire (at fifteen dollars a very good buy; it holds about five pounds of charcoal and has a helper handle to supply more leverage when pouring the coals out), will fill up only about one-third to one-half of the grill space on a PK Grill. So if you’re cooking for a lot of people and you need a broader coal bed, you’ll want to start with more coals. Lighting consecutive batches of coals in the same chimney won’t quite do the trick, as the first batch will have cooked down by fifteen to twenty minutes before the second one is ready to go.

TONGS WHEN FINGERS ARE NOT ENOUGH

Tongs are as essential to a steak griller as a sword was to a musketeer. Like the sharp-tipped sword of a dueler, they allow you to deal with dangerous elements while keeping your distance. As extensions of our hands, tongs are useful for much more than just flipping meat and vegetables. You’ll find yourself using them to convey individual coals or even small chunks of wood from one grill to another. You can poke them through the grates to stir up a dying coal bed to get it roaring again. And you can pick up the entire grate, if need be, to add more charcoal or wood to the fire. Have several pairs of tongs handy at all times; you’ll constantly find yourself reaching for them.

We’ve all probably cooked with ninety-nine-cent tongs from the supermarket—and let us remind you, singed knuckles and burned hands are no fun. Spend a few extra dollars for heavy-duty, well-made tongs.

GRILL BRUSH: SCRAPE THIS

Cleaning the grill is an annoying task and therefore one that doesn’t get done nearly as often as it should. The less often, the more annoying, as you quickly find yourself dusted in ash and your hands covered with greasy, sooty streaks. Not only is the task annoying, but it’s also inconvenient. The best time to clean the grill is immediately after you finish cooking on it, when it’s still hot and covered with new oils, fats, and crusts. Of course, the moment you take steaks off the grill, you’re inevitably concerned with getting everything to the table, not to mention monitoring your steaks as they rest. Cleaning the grill is the last thing on your mind, which means that it often doesn’t get cleaned until the next time you use it. That could be the next day, the following weekend, and even weeks or months down the road.

But clean grates are essential to good cooking. First, they help keep food from sticking. Baked-on sugars and proteins create a surface for your meats to bind to when you put them on even a hot grill. Second, sooty or carbonized grates will add a bitterness to whatever you’re grilling on them. And last, the thought of picking up traces of old foods cooked on unclean grills is nasty.

A durable grill brush can grind a grill clean with only a few passes. Find one that holds up to continuous use and won’t fall apart (leaving dangerous wire bristles behind) or break. We’ve had the best luck with brushes designed with a trio of brush extensions coming from a single handle. These allow you to press with the greatest force on the grill without breaking the stem.

To get the most out of your grill brush, scrape the grates when they’re hot and the coals are reaching their peak. The detritus you scrape off will simply be incinerated by the coals. If you want to spray some water onto the brush to get the benefit of some steam while cleaning, that can help, too. Scrape often, even after cooking one round of meats and before the next.

TROWEL AND STEEL PAIL: THE BUCKET LIST

If you read our first book, you’ll remember Aaron’s favorite tool for working the big fires in his cookers was a full-size shovel. So you shouldn’t be surprised to learn that small fires call for a small shovel and a bucket. These classic garden tools double as useful props on a trip to the beach, but for the home griller, a sturdy little shovel and a durable bucket always come in handy. A trowel or small shovel can be used to shovel out hot coals or for prodding and working the coal bed, lifting the grill grate, and tidying things up. It’s also good for scooping ash when you’re cleaning out the grill.

A bucket is one of the most useful tools, not just in grilling but in life. Use it to transport coals from a wood-burning fire to a grill, for instance. Dump ash into it when you need to clean out your grills or fireplace. If your needs are few, fill it with ice and beer. And if nothing else, turn it over and sit on it.

SHEET PANS: YOU’RE GOING TO SHEET YOUR PANS

When you’re grilling, trekking between kitchen and grill is inevitable. You need trays sturdy enough to hold a load, yet light enough to be easy to carry with one hand while opening doors. Hence, the good old-fashioned sheet pan will always be your friend.

Equip yourself with a few each of half, quarter, and eighth sizes of commercial sheet pans. Their standard one-inch depth is plenty for collecting any juices a finished steak might leave. Also, purchase a couple of cooling racks that fit inside of them. This setup is good not just for carrying steaks in and out of the house but also for holding the meat (if you’ve presalted it) for a day or two in the refrigerator or you simply want to dry it off. Sheet pans are great because they’re tough enough that you can actually put them on the grill grates or in the fire (handy for the three-zone cooking setup, this page) and they’ll hold up (even if that will likely render them useless for the kitchen again).

SIZZLE PLATTERS: SIZZLE ME THIS

You’ve seen them before: thin, small, oval metal plates stacked up fifteen or twenty high in hot restaurant kitchens, typically where jet-blasting flames are firing smoking woks and food comes off fast and furious every couple of minutes. They are really just miniaturized sheet pans, and they have much the same function. But they are handier than your ceramic plates at home, as they can go into hot ovens or onto hot grills without being damaged. And if you somehow manage to damage one, they’re only a few bucks each at any restaurant supply store.

KITCHEN TOWELS: THE MOST MASSIVELY USEFUL THING

If you don’t already have towels in your home, I’m not sure you should be cooking or serving anyone food. Stock up and always keep a generous supply handy. Let’s just remind ourselves of some of the many uses of towels. Dampened, they should be spread out underneath cutting boards to offer stability. They can be used instead of pot holders or gloves to pick up hot things or to protect hands from the fire while manipulating tongs. They clean up messes and spills. They dab the edges of sloppy platters. They can be soaked in cold water to wipe the brow of overheated grill cooks or to clean up the grill itself or any work surface or tool. Find a towel style you like and plan to keep three or four clean ones at the ready.

DIGITAL THERMOMETER: HOT OR NOT?

Because of the short cooking time of steaks and their relatively small size, changes in temperature happen even more rapidly and dramatically than in larger pieces of meat, making a fast and accurate digital thermometer a necessity. Our favorite is still the ThermoWorks Thermapen. It’s spendy, running between eighty and one hundred dollars (it goes on sale fairly often), but no other device matches it for speed and precision. When checking the temperatures of ribeyes still sizzling on top of a smoldering coal bed, you don’t want to wait seconds to come up with a questionable reading. The Thermapen gives accurate results quickly. It’s simply one tool no home chef should be without.

PLASTIC BOTTLE OF COOKING OIL: MAIN SQUEEZE

Surely you already have a bottle of handy cooking oil lingering around your stove. But keeping a plastic, restaurant-style squeeze bottle of cooking oil (Aaron uses grape seed because of its neutral flavor and high smoke point) handy is a low-maintenance, unfussy, easy-cleanup alternative to schlepping around a big glass bottle of oil. Use it to add a sheen to a steak before it goes on the grill, to moisten a paper towel that’s about to be used to lubricate the grates before cooking, or to lightly prime the newspaper before lighting the chimney.

Bed Times and Fireside Chats: Setting Up Your Grill and Coals

Okay, here is the moment you’ve been waiting for: prepping your grill and lighting ’er up. At this stage, you have perhaps your biggest decision to make: how to set up the grill. This should always be determined by what you’re cooking. For a handy cheat sheet, turn to this page. But first we encourage you to think about all of the variables that go into a successful grill session. Do you have one steak to cook or six? Are they all going to be medium-rare or do some guests want medium and others want rare? Are you also cooking other proteins or vegetables?

Once you’ve got a sense of everything that’s going on the grill, you need to plot out a workflow of when each item is going on, approximately how long it will take to cook, where it’s going after it’s done, and what’s going on next. We’re not saying you need to draw Venn diagrams or plot anything out on a computer. But do have a plan.

THE TWO-ZONE SETUP

This is elementary stuff that’s been written about hundreds of times before, so we won’t belabor it too much. And for those of you who already do a lot of grilling, this won’t be anything new. But for those of you who have spent the last couple of decades living in a cave or a city or the Matrix and are just emerging into the world of grilling for the first time, this is the basic configuration you need to know for cooking steaks (and many other things).

You will want to cook any steak significantly thicker than one inch in two ways: quickly and slowly. Quickly uses direct heat radiated by close proximity to a bed of glowing-hot charcoal. Slowly cooks via heat carried by the air circulating around the meat, as in an oven. In the case of a wood or charcoal grill, the quick searing of meat happens via direct grilling, that is, right above a pile of massively hot coals. Slow cooking meat with hot air can also take place on a coal-fired grill, but it needs to happen in a “safe space”—a much cooler spot that makes it hard for the meat to burn or overcook—hence, the classic two-zone setup.

To achieve this, just dump the charcoal from your chimney on one side of the grill. In a rectangular, relatively shallow grill like a PK, this is incredibly easy, as the two sides are well defined. It’s a little trickier in a round grill like a Weber; that’s why some manufacturers have produced metal separators. And as mentioned previously, this is a pronounced challenge in the Big Green Egg and other kamado cookers: you can put the hot charcoal on one side of the base, but because of the awesome heat retention of the cooker’s ceramic walls, if you shut the lid, the whole unit will heat up uniformly. If you don’t shut the lid, the distance from the coals to the grill allows the heat to spread out, also nullifying the whole point of going with two zones.

THE THREE-ZONE SETUP, GRADUATED AND SPLIT

What could possibly be greater than two zones? Three, of course. Two zones just give you hot and cold. Why not treat yourself to hot, less hot, and cold? With more range, you can achieve greater nuance in the steaks, mimicking a little bit of the flexibility that an adjustable-height Santa Maria grill can offer.

There are a few ways to achieve the mythical three-zone setup. The first is just an elaboration of the two-zone grill, but in this one, you vary the depth of the coal bed to give you more options. A conventional two-zone configuration calls for coals on one side of the grill and nothing on the other. The graduated three-zone grill involves an inclined coal bed, using more coals on one deep end of the hot zone, fewer in the middle, and then nothing on the other half. This is perhaps easiest with briquettes: just pile your hot charcoal three or four pieces deep on one side, then as you move to the other side, slope the coal bed downward using less and less coal until in the middle the bed is just one briquette deep. This offers you very strong intense heat on the far left, declining all the way to indirect heat on the right.

Another variation, the split three-zone setup, calls for piles of coals on both ends of the grill and zero coals for indirect heat in the middle. This unique setup can be especially effective when cooking larger cuts, say two rib steaks two to three inches thick. You can lay the steaks flat on the grill in the middle, exposing them to heat from either direction. Or you can lay them on their sides. Then, to finish, you have two zones for direct cooking already prepared. For some meaty pyrotechnics, try placing a sheet pan or sizzle plate in the middle between the two coal beds. It will heat up quickly and catch the drippings and vaporize them, allowing their meaty mist to curl back up and infuse the steak, much as happens on a gas grill.

CHARCOAL AND ACCENT LOG (THE FRANKLIN FORMATION)

If you bought this book, you’re probably wondering what Aaron’s preferred grill setup is. Jordan calls it the Franklin Formation. Aaron calls it stickin’ a log in there. It may sound simple, but the Franklin Formation (yes, that’s what we’re going with) is a terrific hybrid of cooking mediums, leveraging the convenience of charcoal while still tapping into the flavor of real wood. This method works especially well on a PK (see this page) because of the rectangular shape of the grill, but it could be adapted to a round Weber, too.

First, lay a charcoal bed on one side of the grill. Don’t leave the other, the indirect side, empty—
oh no, this is when you stick a log in there! In the case of the PK, a log trimmed to twelve inches with a chop saw fits perfectly into the cooker’s fourteen-inch width. The presence of the log provides a natural boundary against the coal bed. It also makes the indirect side cooler than if there was nothing filling the space, providing more of a contrast from the direct side and allowing even more nuanced cooking. The best part? The point where the hot charcoal contacts the log becomes a small area of combustion. The slightly burning log provides a bit of wood smoke and perhaps some flickers of flame. But because this is a large, dense, and not-too-seasoned piece of wood, there’s no danger of it igniting and creating a conflagration, which is what happens if you toss small wood chunks onto the coal bed to get smoke. You can keep this going for a long time, and all you have to do is regularly replenish your charcoal bed; the piece of hardwood will take its time burning down. And it looks cool!

THE WOOD COAL SETUP

The Franklin Formation is handy because it’s convenient, yet still has the allure of a wood fire. But we know there are folks out there who are only interested in the purest, most primal and existential grill setup: 100 percent wood fired.

We get it. Meats grilled over wood taste better than meats cooked over charcoal, pure and simple. Grilling over wood showcases the defining components of physical existence, time and space. First, time: When starting with logs, it takes a long time to develop a good coal bed. And timing remains a challenge throughout the cook because wood coals burn faster and don’t last nearly as long as charcoal, and catching them at their peak and maintaining them for as long as you need is a difficult proposition.

Next, space: A good wood fire needs space to hold enough wood to provide a consistent source of hot coals. This cycle of constant replenishment of wood and coals is why many restaurant grills sport some sort of reinforced metal cage in which logs are stacked high over a coal bed. As the lowest log starts to burn into coals, cooks rake those newly formed embers out under the grilling surface, allowing the fresh wood in the cage to slide down and keep the process going.

In the home setting, there are a number of ways to accomplish this. For instance, you can make a small wood fire in your grill using wood chunks. But once they get going, they burn up quickly, and if you need a stable coal bed for more than fifteen minutes or so, you’ll have to add fresh wood to the coals. Fresh wood also produces a ton of flames and smoke, which might be overwhelming if you’ve got meat on the grill. So the answer is to do as the restaurants do and burn your wood down to coals at a little distance from where you’re cooking the meat. But where?

At home, the best solution is to employ two grills. Trust us, it’s actually much easier and cheaper than you imagine. If one grill is primarily going to be used to burn down logs, it needn’t be fancy. It could be a light, inexpensive Weber with the grate removed so it can hold three or four standard-size logs. It can be handy to have a second grill anyway, for expanded space on the grates or an alternative shape. (If your primary is a PK, for instance, keep a round Weber on hand for things like pizza or paella.) A quick check on craigslist or another local listing site can often land a used Weber kettle for under fifty bucks. Another option is one of those premade firepits. These round, solid-metal pits are made to burn down logs, and they can double as a backyard campfire site to sit around on cool evenings.

With your trusty shovel and bucket to convey said coals to your primary grill space, you’re ready to get cooking. You’ll have enough coals to grill thick steaks (or rounds of them) over medium to low heat. Enjoy the fragrant whiff of wood smoke and flickering flames. Wood-fired grilling isn’t just a cookout, it’s a ritual.

Starting a Wood Fire and Building a Coal Bed

On this page, we showed you how to light a fire if you plan to use charcoal, using our favorite charcoal tool, the chimney starter. Starting a wood fire is a bit trickier. First, make sure you have a few small wood chunks (four to six inches) as well as larger logs. The easiest way to get it all started is to light a handful of charcoal pieces in the renowned chimney and either put the wood chunks on top of them or simply dump the charcoal into your firepit and arrange the small pieces of wood on top. Throw on some crumpled newspaper to accelerate the process (which you can prime with cooking oil or tallow if you’d like).

Once you have a small fire going, put on a couple of larger pieces, and as the fire gets hotter and expands, some even larger pieces. Aaron does indeed like to build his little log cabins over a few glowing charcoal briquettes. And when he doesn’t want quite a log cabin–size fire, he builds a tepee with three logs angled over the coals. The point is to have airflow coming in at the base so the heat catches the logs above.

If you just burn down one or two logs and take the coals to fire your grill, there won’t be enough to sustain your wood fire. Instead, burn through a round or two of logs to establish a solid and enduring coal bed. (Hey, we said a wood fire takes time.) This is a philosophical, communal, meditative activity that requires an hour or two to ease into. If you’re used to barbecuing ribs or brisket, which take even longer, you get it. Hanging out and drinking a beer as burning wood crackles and hisses and the smoke tickles your nose is one of life’s great pleasures. The steaks taste better for it, too.

CHEAT SHEET
Grill Setups

The configuration of your grill is the second thing you should consider after what kind of steak you’re going to cook, as it will determine what you can and can’t do with a fire. There aren’t too many variations, but the differences between them are important to note. More detailed accounts of each method were in the previous pages, but we’ve summarized them for you here.

SETUP	USES
Two zone	The standard setup, good for all steaks thicker than skirts and flanks, or any cut that needs to cook a little longer on the inside without overcooking the outside. The key is to make sure your zones are distinct: one superhot and one much cooler.
Three zone	When you need a bit more nuance, such as the thick tweener cuts between roasts and steaks, like tri-tips and thick-cut bone-in ribeyes.
Franklin Formation	The quick and easy way to cook using two zones with charcoal while getting a steady, even dose of wood smoke and a serious contrast in heat levels.
100 percent wood fire	The best historically, the best today, and the best forever and ever. No combustion-based heat source provides the depth of flavor, the sweet complexity, and the connection to our earthy souls like a coal bed made of real wood.