Grilling

I’ve started up a new Food & Drink category here, which seems to have been a terrible oversight until now, given the nature of life at our house. It’s relatively unpopulated (I have a lot of category maintenance to do), but here’s something that will fit right in: Everything You Thought You Knew About Grilling Is Wrong.

Flip Early, Flip Often. This is the big shocker. It was hard to imagine doing this at first, and when I told people, they thought I was crazy. Think about it this way: you want a juicy steak, right? Or juicy chicken, or hamburgers, or whatever. The juice is nothing more than the blood in the meat. When you put the meat on the grill, there is more heat below the meat than above. The heat forces the liquid up, through the meat. Ever see a big pool of liquid on top of the steak when you lift the cover off the grill? It’s been on too long. You don’t want it to come out of the steak, you want it to stay in the steak. So you flip every four or five minutes. Sometimes I flip every two or three, depending on what else I’m doing. Flip it before any liquid has a chance to escape out of the top. Repeat often. Flip, flip, flip. It really works. And if you think this takes a lot of time and concentration, you’re right. There’s time enough for socializing later. Do you want to grill an excellent steak or not? Okay, then. Concentrate.

I’ve actually long been an over-flipper, and only in the last few years have I tended to go the other way, both from Received Wisdom and laziness. That’ll larn me.

Good stuff.

(via J-Walk)