BBQs - Gas or charcoal?

spacey2012

George Foreman grill and extension lead.

diywhynot

Gas

Gas: can't stand the stench of BBQ lighting cubes and you get greater control and larger surface area with gas.

This

or



.

No contest.:D

Edwardia

Neither. Gas means paying a deposit and changing bottles. Charcoal means humping the stuff home but disposables one per person are cheap and if you dump the cold ash on your garden and the foil and metal grill and card in recycling, eco-friendly.. well apart from the obvious carbon footprint of charred sausages..:D

Persiflage

Charcoal

MSE_Andrea wrote: »

Haha!

Welcome to the forum Persiflage, great first post

Anyone else fancy adding to the great debate? The poll's neck and neck at the moment.

Aw shucks, thank you ma'am

I should probably confess at this point; I was once, years ago, a regular MSE poster - mainly in the helping-people-with-technology forums - but I now can't remember what my forum ID was, which e-mail address I had at the time or what password I may have used. So, as I've just bought a house after 12 years off the housing ladder (that's what moving from Rochdale to Gloucestershire will do to you!), I find that money-saving is once more a major priority for me and I'm starting afresh.

Back to the more important matter at hand...

Anybody who can cook, can cook on a gas BBQ, which is a drawback rather than a strength as far as I'm concerned. My brother is an excellent chef (literally: before he became an architect, he was a chef in a Michelin-starred restaurant) but he hasn't the faintest clue how to cook *properly* on a charcoal BBQ, which means that I will forever have more man-cred in the alfresco cookery stakes. This is important, dammit!

I've spent a great deal of time cooking in even more challenging circumstances (multiple dishes for 5-12 people on an open fire - made of whatever will burn - during mediaeval re-enactment events) and charcoal is relatively easy. So, in order to preserve the vital art of charcoal BBQ'ing (you too can annoy experienced and talented cooks!) I'll share some tips.

Without further ado, allow me to present Barbeque for Dummies! (Alcoholic Edition). It's just possible that not everything I've written here is entirely serious.

Note: All cooking times are approximate: they will vary based on your individual alcohol tolerance, whether you drink wine, cider or beer, whether or not you're cooking in the shade, how often you have to stop to chase wasps away from your wife and whether or not you've got a helper to do the all-important job of restocking the fridge as the drink levels run down.

Step 1: Shopping (duration 30 minutes - 3 days)

This is the only step it is acceptable to perform sober!

The first mistake people make is to buy cheap and nasty food for their BBQ. Cooking over charcoal (particularly with added wood chips) imparts a lovely flavour, but you can't make a decent meal out of rubbish ingredients. Buy good sausages, chicken portions (skin on), burgers and so on from a decent butcher. Allow plenty of time for marinading and whatnot.

The night before, make a stupendous potato salad (with chopped-up hard-boiled egg, finely-chopped onions soaked in balsamic vinegar, pancetta, etc.); if you get too drunk too quickly to cook well, at least people will remember the salad (you lightweight).

Step 2: Setup (duration 1 - 2 bottles, or 3-4 glasses)

Don't muck about. The thing about a charcoal barbeque is that you can't - unless you have more than one barbeque to play with, in which case "congratulations" - easily restart if your barbeque runs out of go... So, Man Make BIG Fire. I use a sort-of-rectangular kettle barbeque to maximise the cooking area with an adjustable charcoal-bed height and "warming shelf" in the lid; I prefer it to the round ones. The warming shelf usually ends up being another cooking platform, allowing me to start things off when the main grill is still too hot or too full.

The first step, having taken the cover off your barbeque and scraped out the nesting insects/rodents/missing cat, is to open your bottle and take a hefty swig. This both fortifies you for the work ahead, and ensures that any discovery that you don't have a bottle-opener or corkscrew takes place early in the proceedings. For this reason, NEVER begin your drinking with a screw-top beverage, or you might be too drunk to drive before realising you can't open the rest; the greatest conceivable barbeque disaster is a stockpile of alcohol you are unable to access.

(If you're being all lah-di-dah AND are drinking wine, it is permissible at this early stage to pour some into a glass and drink from that rather than directly from the bottle. If the local vicar or other respectable pillar of the community is present, make sure they have their own bottle open and in front of them: you don't want to be wasting time running backwards and forwards with other people's drinks, as you have a serious job to do.)

Now get your fuel. Everyone has their own preferences as to charcoal type and will discuss the point endlessly, but that doesn't matter in the slightest because unless this is your first-ever barbeque you'll be dragging out half-used cobwebby sacks of three different kinds from the garage, same as always. BBQ lighting cubes are hopeless; gel is better. Assuming a decent-sized barbeque, spread a two-lumps-deep layer of charcoal across the bottom grill, put your last two bags of self-lighting lumpwood stuff on top of that, liberally coat everything with what's known in our house as "barbeque snot" and light it.

Swigging heavily from your beverage of choice, regard the resulting conflagration thoughtfully from several angles to impress upon any watchers that you are someone who really knows their cooking fires. It's important to remember to move around: if you stand still and stare glassily at the flames, you will cease to project "skilled outdoor cook" and instead project "pyromaniac".

If you've done it properly, it will be a big fire and it will look as though it's never going to die down. There will be a visible heat-haze at least as far as the roof-line of your house, and local hang-gliding clubs will congregate over your garden to catch the updraft. That's exactly what you want; it means you'll have a good, long cooking time.

If you haven't already, get your wood chips and start soaking them.

Now go and get your food and cooking equipment. You want a reasonably sturdy table of some kind, with plenty of room for raw things, bottles, cooked things, cans, condiments, foil trays, bottles, cans, lots of plates, glasses, bottles and cans. It's miserable tracking in and out of the house, so make sure you have all your cooking, eating and fire-poking utensils to hand. Personally, I try to have two sets of important things like tongs (for raw and cooked stuff), and always always always have plenty of kitchen towel. And heat-resistant gloves. And burn cream.

Step Two: Cooking (duration: the rest of the day)

The SECOND mistake people make is to try to cook too soon. Despite the Burger King and Harvester adverts where "charcoal grilling" involves tongues of yellow flame leaping about around lumps of meat, flames are BAD. Let's say that again: Flames. Are. BAD.

I don't know why, because every single set of instructions I've ever seen for barbeques includes the same advice (don't start cooking until the charcoal is covered in a layer of ash and there are no more flames) but people dive right in anyway, time after time, and thus end up with little tubes, discs and squares of carbon where food used to be. Do not do this. Allow AT LEAST twenty minutes, probably more, for the barbeque to be ready after lighting.

The third mistake people make is to try to just cook everything in whatever order they feel like and serve it. No, no, no: bad barbequer! Unless you're doing just a couple of things for a small number of people, this is NOT going to work. You're there for the rest of the day but that's OK: people will be impressed by your diligence and you need not feel bad about letting everyone else clear up.

It's just as well: you'll be far too drunk at that point to help.

This isn't like cooking indoors, where you produce dishes using controlled temperatures and serve them to a table full of people all at once. This is the elemental stuff, and you're at the mercy of the flames, just as it should be. Barbequeing on a gas grill is like turning up to a darts match and shooting the board with a pistol; it's quicker and more accurate, but to what end? You'd just as well cook indoors on a real cooker and wheel everything out into the garden on one of those obnoxious hostess trollies.

A charcoal barbeque takes all afternoon, and this is the point: it is right and proper that it should be so, and the sissies with their gas grills will never experience true cooking satisfaction. (The only way you can be more badass than this while cooking food is to actually be Heston Blumenthal and prepare dinner with lasers and liquid nitrogen, but that's like comparing Buck Rogers with Fred Flintstone: it's just a different milieu).

At the beginning, there is fierce heat and you cook things that can stand to be at a high temperature for a short time. Steaks, burgers, and foil-wrapped fish (unwrapped comes later) are cooked at this point. If you have a barbeque with some means of controlling the distance of the food from the heat source you have a little more flexibility, but not much.

If you're doing something fatty that drips onto the coals (like, say, lamb kebabs) and the fat catches fire, move the food around. Don't fill the grill so there's no space. I'll say it again: Flames Are Bad. If there's fire licking around the food, you might as well have saved yourself the bother and eaten the briquettes.

Cook stuff that works at the temperature you've got right now. Serve it, eat it, lay back and chat, drain your drink, go back to the grill and start the next stuff. When you've had some practice it gets seamless and you learn what you can leave on for a while without attending to it, but to begin with you should exercise vigilance. By now, you should have imbibed enough alcohol that the passage of time is of minimal importance to you anyway.

If you think about it, you'll realise that this is as the Gods of Fire intended: you cook at a high heat near the beginning while you've still got some fine motor skills and can deftly turn your burgers and steaks... Later, as the grill gets cooler and the long, mellow alcoholic downslope into fumble-fingered oblivion takes hold, you cook things that require infrequent interference. There's an undeniable beautiful symmetry to the experience.

Should people get hungry while they're waiting, break out that potato salad. If there are vegetarians present who complain about the fact that you added bacon, kill them and eat them.

DO NOT PUT SAUSAGES ONTO A VERY HOT BBQ! The outside will burn, the inside will not cook (because quarter of an inch of carbon is a poor conductor of heat), and everyone will get food poisoning and assume you are English, whether or not you are. The right time to cook sausages and other tricky items is when you can get your hand to within a couple of inches of the grill without screaming and/or bursting into flames.

If you are using wood chips (I like mesquite personally) on a barbeque with a lid, do NOT close the lid if there are vegetables of any kind (mushrooms, peppers and so on) on the grill. They will soak up the water-soluble volatiles from the woodsmoke as water bubbles out of them, and will taste like you dipped them in Ronseal. Smoking food should really be done at a lower temperature, when you can afford to leave the lid down for a while and are confident that the results won't look like the contents of a head-shrinker's mantlepiece.

Cooking times

Note: All swig-times assume some intervening conversation. If for some reason you're grimly barbequeing all alone, double or triple the listed number of swigs, or consider a microwave ready-meal instead. They're designed for people with no friends.

(Early on, hot grill. And when I say "hot", I mean "your eyebrows are smouldering at arm-plus-tongs length from the grill")

Steak: 4-5 swigs, taken in-between turning. Add one more swig if they (or you) are thoroughly marinated. Get these right and it doesn't matter what you do for the rest of the day, as everyone will be stuffed to the gills on steak, bread rolls and potato salad. And too drunk to care.

Burgers: Assuming 6 4-oz burgers, 4 swigs. No more, no less. The burgers should be fresh. If using frozen burgers, ensure they are *thoroughly* defrosted, then throw them away and use fresh. Don't try to do too many at once: either you will burn them, or you'll take too long to get back to the first ones and they'll have welded themselves to the grill bars, or - more likely - both. Brushing them with a little olive oil before you start can help with the welding problem.

Chicken wings: 3-4 swigs. These are great sacrificial offerings to the Gods of BBQ, as they tend to slip through the grill at the slightest provocation. This is a vital part of the process: if the gods are not properly appeased, a volcano will erupt in your garden (which can be particularly troublesome in rental properties, or when barbequeing on a patio in a 3rd-floor flat).

Pork/lamb chops (can also be done later, smoke-style): 3-4 swigs. They will drip. The drips will catch fire. Be prepared to deal with it. It's tempting to get fatless loin cuts or somesuch, but this is a bad idea as they'll almost certainly dry out; thoroughly saturate them in something nice if you're going to attempt this. They'll still dry out, but the flavour means people will forgive you.

While you're waiting for the heat to come down below the melting point of lead, ensure everyone's drink levels are adequate and replenish your sun-screen. You will soon be far too intoxicated to notice little things like 2nd-degree sunburns.

(Later on, medium grill. You should be able to spend more than 20 seconds at arm's length without taking a break to be hosed down.)

Chicken pieces: 6-7 swigs. These are tricky. Ideally you want a sustained medium heat to ensure they cook through thoroughly, but for a perfect result it has to be just hot enough to ensure that the skin crisps up by the end of the cooking time. The two best ways to check that chicken is done are:

1) Meat thermometer
2) Unpopular relatives

Method 1) is reliable, but method 2) has its advantages. The idea is that you serve to the unpopular relative first and wait for them to exclaim that the middle isn't done. If they say nothing, they're either thoroughly inebriated or the chicken is properly cooked: by serving them first you've managed to give the impression that you like them and thus they might leave you something in their will. If it isn't properly cooked, you can return the rest of the chicken to the grill and at least nobody you care about will get salmonella. Also, the unpopular relative might die before having the chance to write you out of their will. Basically, there's no losing scenario here.

Thicker cuts of meat that don't require searing and large cuts of fish (put foil underneath even if you leave them open) can also be done at this stage. This is also when you want to get your smoke started.

Pro-tip for BBQ wood-smoking: It's tempting to just throw your soaked chips on the charcoal, but chances are very good that they'll eventually catch fire. Flames are bad, remember? A better way is to make a well-wrapped parcel of soaked chips using foil, then make a number of small holes in the top to allow the smoke to escape. Put the parcel straight onto the coals. Unorthodox, I know, but trust me: it's slower but it works a treat and if you wanted fast food, you should have gone to McDonald's.

(Much later, lower heat. You should be able to put your hand near the grill and nod sagely, without wincing.)

Sausages: Approximately 1 bottle (beer) or 0.5 bottles (wine). This is when you cook them. I know you didn't listen though - nobody ever does - but this is when you do it if you want to end up with something that is both properly cooked and still recognisable as food.

Things you want to smoke: assuming we're still talking about food and not the contents of your cousin's "greenhouse", allow plenty of time/drink for this. If you're planning on doing this for all of your food, don't make the fire so big to start with and/or buy a proper bin-style smoker. There's a limited window of opportunity for getting this right, and hardly anyone does, so I'm not going to bother writing any more about it.

Relax, have fun, experiment.

Everyone's full already, the couples are glancing at their watches and saying how they really ought to go but not actually moving, the single people have pushed their garden chairs together and are gazing at each other meaningfully prior to pairing off in the thoroughly mistaken belief that everyone else hasn't noticed, the kids have sneaked enough sips of drink that they're about to pass out and your wife is telling a protracted anecdote in far too loud a voice to a comatose elderly relative
[*]. Whatever you produce from here on in, everyone's going to think it's amazing, so don't sweat it.


Finis.

___
[*] If this was the person you used for the Chicken Test, get her to check for a pulse. It's best if you're not seen near the body.

pinkmami

Gas

I've only ever owned a charcoal one (tiny one) but been to friends BBQ's and they have a 4 burner gas one & its brill!


We're in the process of doing up our garden so next year I'm gonna buy a 4 burner gas one. Great size for our parties!

wallbash

Had a BBQ for 27 yesterday , lucky with the weather.
Had two , one gas . one charcoal, of the two , the gas was better for cooking for so many .I wonder what's the optimum number for a charcoal BBQ. To few , easier to go gas , too many , you need the gas . But there is more fun with the charcoal ..... how many guests ? 7/11 ??

Violetta_2

`Excellent post Persilflage, can we come to your next BBQ?

Biggles

Neither; don't like the smell, don't like the taste. What's wrong with a kitchen??

phoebe1989seb

Charcoal

Definitely charcoal - much more fun, although I agree that if cooking for larger numbers either gas or a combination of both is probably better When we had our Outback gas BBQ, we always managed to either forget how much gas we'd used previously and as a result run out halfway through or else had issues finding somewhere local to supply/top them up.......

Persiflage

Charcoal

Violetta wrote: »

`Excellent post Persilflage, can we come to your next BBQ?

Please do.

It'll be a bit of a trek from Dundee, but I'll try to make it worth your while!