One of the best things about live-fire grilling is its simplicity. This is, after all, a technique that has changed very little since the day when some prehistoric genius figured out that food tasted better if it spent time over flames.
But the straightforwardness of grilling is nicely balanced by an intriguing complexity. Unlike the uniform, continuous fire of a gas flame, each live fire has a distinct personality, with complex layers of heat and veins of coal and flame that make it unique. This means that each time you approach the grill, you are facing a new venture, complete with the potential for triumph or disaster. Like working without a net, live-fire grilling contains an ever-present danger—the difference being that the risk is not of a hospital visit, but of a less than satisfying dinner.
The joy of grilling lies in rising to this challenge, and there are a number of key points on the grilling path where making one choice rather than another will skew your efforts toward success or failure. Make the right moves at each of those junctures, and you’re on your way to a great grilled meal.
CHOOSING YOUR FUEL
In the United States, pillow-shaped charcoal briquettes are the default fuel for live-fire cooking. This is certainly not a tragedy, because they actually work quite well. But they have one fundamental problem—they are not entirely charcoal. Briquettes, invented early in the 20th century by Henry Ford to make use of scrap wood left over from forms used in building cars, are made from rather low-quality powdered charcoal that is combined with binders so it can be easily compressed into those little pillows. Some also contain chemical additives for easier lighting.
For these reasons, you are better off using hardwood charcoal. Made by the traditional process of burning hardwood in a closed container with very little oxygen, this kind of charcoal is almost pure carbon. As a result, it lights more readily than briquettes, burns cleaner and slightly hotter, and is more responsive to changes in oxygen level, which means you can regulate it more easily.
Our current favorite grilling fire, though, combines hardwood charcoal with an even more atavistic fuel, hardwood logs. To build such a fire, just wait until your charcoal is completely lit, place a small log along one edge of the coals, and—using tongs or some other tool—shove the log a few inches into the glowing charcoal. This produces something close to the ideal setup for grilling: You have some smoke coming from the wood to add a little flavor, you have a portion of the fire that keeps going much longer than charcoal, and, at the same time, you have the more predictable, steady heat of the charcoal.
STARTING THE FIRE
Once you understand how easy it is to light a live fire, you’ll be inclined to do it much more often. The quickest way to gain this knowledge is to buy yourself a chimney starter, one of those rare and wonderful tools that is simple, inexpensive, and virtually foolproof.
A chimney starter is nothing more than a sheet-metal cylinder, open at both ends, with ventilation holes around the lower end, a grate located inside the flue several inches from the bottom, and a handle. To use it, set it in the middle of the grill bottom, fill the bottom section with crumpled newspaper, and then fill the top with charcoal and light the newspaper. The flames will sweep up through the chimney, igniting the charcoal. When the charcoal is red hot, which should take about five minutes, dump it out and put as much additional charcoal as you want on top of or around it. That's all there is to it—and it works every time.
But there are also other good fire-starting options. Despite its bad reputation as a source of chemical fumes, for example, lighter fluid is a perfectly fine choice. If you wait until the coals are all lit before you start cooking (which you should do in any case), all the fluid will have burned off long before you put any food over the fire, so its taste won't be affected.
Another acceptable tool is the electric coil starter, which is nothing but a thick, oval electrical coil with a plastic handle. Put it right on the fire grate, mound charcoal over it, and plug it into a grounded outlet. The coil will soon become red hot, igniting the charcoal it’s touching. At this point, unplug the starter and remove it; the hot coals will ignite the others. After you take the starter out of the coals, set it aside on a fireproof surface to cool, making very sure it is out of reach of children.
Whichever fire starter you choose, the process will be easier if you remember that you don’t have to ignite all the charcoal. Just get a couple of pieces glowing and they will in turn light all the rest. It really doesn’t take that long.
LAYING THE FIRE
However you light your fire, it’s vital to make it a multilevel one. In fact, this is probably the single most valuable tip we can give to fellow grillers. What it means is that, when you build your fire, you should always leave about one quarter of the grill free of charcoal and bank the charcoal in the remaining three quarters of the grill, so that the coals are about three times as high on one side as on the other. Setting up the coals this way is important because if your food begins to burn on the outside before it’s done on the inside, or if there are flare-ups, you can move it to the cooler portion of the fire or even to the area with no fire at all. This arrangement also provides varying levels of heat in the same fire if you want to, for instance, grill a steak over a very hot fire and asparagus over a medium fire at the same time.
CHECKING THE FIRE TEMPERATURE
One of the biggest misconceptions among novice grillers is the assumption that all food should be cooked over the same temperature fire. But if you cook a steak over a low fire, for example, you won’t get that strong surface char, and if you put a delicate fish fillet over a very hot fire, it’s going to be incinerated on the outside before it’s done on the inside. So always check your fire temperature before you start to cook. To do so, allow the flames to build up and subside. Then, when the coals are uniformly gray, put your hand about five inches above the grill grid, palm side down. If you can hold it there for five to six seconds, you have a low fire; three to four seconds is within the medium range; and one to two seconds means you have a hot fire.
COVERING THE FIRE
The covered grill is a marvelous invention because it allows you to smoke-roast, barbecue, and even cold-smoke in your backyard. But too many grillers overuse the cover. Here’s our basic rule: Don’t use the cover when the food that you are cooking is directly over the coals; it gives the food an “off” flavor, which we believe comes from the fat that drips directly onto the coals, vaporizes, and is trapped inside the cover. Many sources of grilling advice say that you should use the cover to douse a flare-up. Don’t. Instead, if you have built a multilevel fire as described above, you can simply move the food away from the coals until the flare-up has died down.
Of course, when you are smoke-roasting or otherwise cooking by indirect heat on your grill, covering is no problem—just remember to leave that cover off when you’re doing direct-heat grilling.
SALTING PROPERLY
Although this principle has nothing to do with the fire itself, it has a lot to do with how your food will taste when it comes off the fire. To begin with, please forget that old rule that you shouldn’t salt food prior to cooking because it draws out moisture. The small amount of fluid drawn to the surface by salt is more than compensated for by the fact that the salt has a chance to interact with the food to amplify its flavors. And because the moisture drawn to the surface contains proteins, early salting also intensifies the browning process, which is a good thing for flavor.
Secondly, consider using a bit more salt than you are used to. Of course, this is all a matter of taste. You know what you like; we’re simply suggesting that you try a slightly bolder approach and then see what you think. We’re pretty sure that your grilled food, particularly if it’s meat, is going to taste better. (Incidentally, if you are worried about the health effects of using more salt, remember that more than 75 percent of the sodium consumed by the average American comes from processed food. So if you cut down on foods like hot dogs, luncheon meats, chips, and frozen meals, you can add more salt to your cooking without worry.)
KNOWING WHEN FOOD IS DONE
Knowing when the food is a skill that separates a merely good cook from a great one. This is particularly true when grilling; since each fire is different, the cooking times given in recipes are only approximate. Testing for yourself is therefore crucially important.
Other than a meat thermometer (used when smoke-roasting large items) there are two basic options for testing doneness when grilling. The first is known as the “hand method”; the second is what we like to call “nick, peek, and cheat.”
The hand method, used by many professional chefs, rests on a rather simple scientific principle: When proteins, which are like little coils, are subjected to heat, they uncoil and bond with one another, squeezing closer together in a kind of lattice. The process is known as coagulation. The more the proteins coagulate, the firmer the texture of the food will be. Because of this, professional cooks can judge the degree of doneness of a piece of meat or fish simply by prodding it with a finger. Next time you go to a restaurant with an open kitchen, take a look and you’ll see that the chef is always poking at the food to see whether it’s ready to come off the heat.
This approach is called the hand method because, in teaching young cooks, chefs have come up with a system of comparing the texture of food at certain levels of doneness to the texture of various parts of your hand. The general idea is that well-done steak feels about the same as the ball of your thumb, while a rare steak is similar to the fleshy area midway between thumb and first knuckle, and so on. But the basic point is that the firmer the meat (or fowl or fish), the more done it is.
The only problem with this method is that it requires a good amount of experience. When you’re cooking 20 or 30 steaks every night, five or six nights a week, and you’re poking each one several times, it eventually becomes second nature to know when a steak is anything from rare to well-done. You don’t even have to think about it. But for home cooks, who may cook a steak once a month, it takes longer to get that feel into your fingers.
So we recommend that every time you grill, you practice the hand method. But we also suggest that you rely on our old tried and true method, “nick, peek, and cheat,” as a backup. As the name implies, you simply pick up one of whatever you are cooking, nick it slightly with a knife so you can look inside, then take a peek at the interior to check its state of doneness. It doesn’t get much easier—or more accurate.
Unfortunately, many cooks are reluctant to use this method because of an old-school culinary myth which holds that cutting into a piece of food lets all the juices run out. It’s true that when you cut into a piece of meat, some juices do escape. But it’s not like putting a hole in a balloon; losing a tiny amount of juice is insignificant when set against the prospect of serving raw or burned food.
Just remember that food continues to cook a bit even after it’s off the fire. To allow for this carryover cooking, take that steak off when it looks rare if you want it medium-rare.
And that’s enough technique. Simple but subtle, the flames await you; so get out there and grill.