What in the fork is going on y’all? Welcome back to The Broiler Room and our second installment of the Kill Grill series. In case you missed the first one, here’s le link for le lazy.
This is supposed to be a holiday weekend for most of us, but right now we find little to celebrate with our Supreme Court being Supremely Cringe and stripping away human rights, safety, and our ability to slow climate collapse. America is a musty mess and to our international besties, we don’t know what the fuck is going on anymore than you do. BUT we’re not gonna give up hope and neither should you. In between fighting the power, we encourage you to get outside and enjoy summer while we still can. So slap on some sunscreen, grab your aviators, and click-clack those tongs because goddamnit we got some grilling to do.
SOME LIKE IT MEDIUM HOT
In Kill Grill vol 1 we talked about getting the grill hot and keeping it hot. Some of you guys reached out to us asking the differences between low, medium, or high heats. Fair question. Here’s our breakdown:
LOW HEAT 250-300°F
MED HEAT 300-400°F
HIGH HEAT 400-500°F
Remember to always keep an eye on your temp regardless of what you heat you think you’re cooking at. It’s a rookie mistake to walk away and get stuck in conversation while your food is getting absolutely nuked. Most grills, even the cheap charcoal ones, come with a temperature gauge now but if you don’t have one, or it broke, get yourself an infrared heat gun they’re like $20 and you’ll use it more than you think. Plus you look like you know what you’re doing.
IN THE ZONE
Speaking of heat, you need to learn your zones: direct heat vs. indirect heat.
If you’re using charcoal, your instinct might be to evenly distribute the hot coals and what an absolute fucking mistake that would be. Instead, pile the charcoal either to one side or leave the middle parted as a ‘cooling’ zone. Direct heat is going to flame kiss/cook your food faster, obviously, BUT you don’t want to burn it. So once you’ve gotten a decent char, you can move the food to a cooler part of the grill so it stays warm but it’s not cooking as quickly as direct heat.
Zones are much easier to control with gas grills. You can literally dial the heat up or down and the temperature will be almost immediately responsive. Personally, we use a propane grill at our office and we keep the back right of the grill the hottest with the cool zone close to the lid opening and towards the left.
Larger/thicker food is gonna need more time over direct heat whereas smaller foods you’ll want to monitor closely or just keep them over indirect heat zones. Using the zones method just brings you one step closer to being a grill god. Feels good right?
SEPARATE YOUR SAUCE
Every BBQ we watch in horror as someone pours the same marinade they just had raw meat in over the freshly cooked food after it comes off the grill. Do people enjoy food poisoning? Do they hate everyone that they’re feeding? As vegans, we don’t enjoy telling you how to correctly cook your food but we sure as shit won’t hesitate either.
For the record, when you make your marinade, sauce or whatever you’re smothering the grilled food in, keep a batch separate specifically for finishing on the grill or right when it comes off with a silicone brush. This is less of a problem for us since we’re vegan but we also recognize that 95% of y’all are not. Please, for your own health and everyone at the cookout, DO NOT use the same sauce you used on the raw food as a finishing sauce. Nothing screams rookie like dumping dirty marinade over the freshly cooked food. And you? Now you’re a grill god, go and make us proud.
Not sure what to grill? You can always try our elotes or Lazy Hunt burgers. Tomorrow, our paid subscribers will get the last recipe in our Salsa Lessons series and this one is a heater. Chiles de árbol, tomatillos, and tomatoes come together to make a salsa that your friends won’t shut up about. Not on the list? You can fix that.
Grilling is a confidence game. Just keep an eye on your food and make sure to click-clack those tongs every once in a while, you’ll be fine. We could honestly do an entire cookbook about grilling but for now we’ll wrap it up there. Your holiday weekend should be spent in the sunshine, not reading angry newsletters about how our government absolutely does not represent the will of the people. Anyways, happy long weekend motherforkers.
Matt and Michelle
I would love to see an episode in the Kill Grill series on smoking :) and I don't mean the kind that gives you cancer.
I vote yes for a grilling cookbook! 😻