Over the last couple of weeks I have been reading and trying some different things. As you know by reading through my site trying new things is what its all about. So heres one problem I was facing, I have a bbq at home that for some reason doesn’t kick out a that much heat, so when I am grilling a nice steak it has been difficult to get those beautiful looking grill marks. Well after some reading, and trial and error, I soon came across an article that was all about super heating your grill. Here’s how it works. 1st off make sure your grill is clean, this just saves you some cleaning later and this way you don’t lose as much heat when you go to do this. So, Make sure your grill is clean to start. Crank up the heat to high, and place either a backing sheet or some aluminum foil down on the area that you will be grilling on. Let the grill get as hot as it can. When you have it to the temp that you think will be good for grilling, remove the cover that you had placed on the grill and put some oil on it. Not on the cover but on the grill. This will smoke but don’t worry, just apply the oil safely. Now that your grill is as hot as it can be, throw that bad boy on the grill and viola. You will now get those beautiful grill marks just like at the restaurant. I have been doing this every time now and it works great. Check out this pic of a Flank steak I did the other day. Usually the lines would have been pretty faint, meat was great tasting but didn’t look as good. Now this thing looks like a movie star or beauty queen.
Another thing is, I cook ribs, a lot. My wife and I would have them weekly if we could but sometimes it’s just not in the budget. So when I do get the chance, I want to make them special. I treat these things as if they were my kids. I trim them with knife skills like a surgeon, remove the silver skin, rub them down with my home made rub and just baby the hell out of them. This week I tried doing them a totally different way then what I normally would do, cooking wise that is. Now I know a lot of hardcore “q” ers are probably laughing, but just remember you had to learn sometime too. So here are a couple of things that I did differently and they turned out to competition quality. Well at least I think so. First off I removed the lower grates from my bbq. This is because I will be using the upper rack. Now on my bbq I have a three burner system left , right and middle. For this cook I only used the middle burner, set on medium this gave me the temp of 225-250 that I needed to do these up nice and slow. I put a regular size baking sheet down that covered about 80 percent of the burners. I put it all the way to the back of the grill leaving the first three inches or so of the burners exposed. This gave me an area to put my smoker box and of course let the heat rise up. Anyways, so now that the baking sheet is down and I still have my upper rack in place, we are good to go. Now the baking sheet works as a multi purpose tool at this point. One is that it will catch any drippings from the ribs, thus preventing flare ups. Two is that it makes this true indirect cooking, for the fact that there is no heat going directly under the ribs. Three, this is where you can get creative. Use this as your moisture control area. By this I mean that as the ribs are cooking above you can add beer, water or whatever you want to it. This keeps constant moisture going in the grill so that your ribs don’t dry out during the process. What I did differently this time was instead of using beer or water. I used the remaining juice left over from the bowl that I was soaking my wood chips in. The wood chips add so much flavor and smell of the wood to the water, this way not am I only getting the smoky flavor from the wood chips that are burning in my smoker but I also get the flavor from the moisture that is now coming from the baking sheet. And trust me the meat will suck this up. So every time I would baste or flip the ribs I would continue to add “wood juice” lol, to the baking sheet. There was no way these were going to dry up. And just so you know. I think they turned out exactly the way I was expecting. So heres what I did. I trimmed and cleaned the ribs first, applied a very generous amount of rub on all sides of the ribs. Wrapped them up and placed them in the fridge overnight. I removed the ribs from the fridge and unwrapped them about an hour and a half before cooking. This gets them to room temp all the way through and ensures consistent cooking throughout. Plus this will dry out the ribs on the surface a bit so that they aren’t wet when you put them on the grill. One other key thing when doing this type of cook is to make sure you leave the lid closed through as much of the process that you can, if your heat is set right and you have used the tips above you will not have to open it at all except when basting or flipping. I opened my grill 4 times in 6 hrs of cooking. That’s it. And not for longer than needed. If you follow these tips I am sure you will not be disappointed.
So there are a few tips to help make you the master of your domain next time yer grillin. I hope you try them and I hope they work for you as well as they did for me. Mmmmmm , getting hungry when s lunch.
Oh yeah, and by the way, I am enteringthe Sears: Grilling Is Happiness Ambassador program follow this link to find out more about it. www.flipgrillman.com
Take care and keep the fire hot.
www.wildfirecooking.com
