Summer may officially begin tomorrow, on the summer solstice, but for many people, summer really begins the first time they’re able to barbecue in their backyard.
I am not one of them. I enjoy eating the fruits of someone else’s barbecuing efforts as much as the next guy, but to actually stand at the grill? Forget it. Too much effort for too little reward, to my way of thinking.
Still, barbecuing–or, more accurately, grilling–has an ancient and honorable history. Of course, the first cooking anybody did of meat was simply roasting it on a spit over an open fire, which is a sort of barbecuing. Grilling had to wait until metal could be worked into grills, but the ancient Sumerians bought grilled meats from street vendors in Ur, the world’s first city.
The word “barbecue” comes to us from the Caribbean, along with the word “cannibal.” (I’ll leave any connection between the two to your imagination.) It is distinguished by being perhaps the most commonly misspelled word in the English language. Probably because restaurants have taken to abbreviating it BBQ, everybody seems to think it has a Q in it. It does not. It’s spelled B-A-R-B-E-C-U-E. No Q. Got it? NO Q!
Whew! Glad I got that off my chest…
For years outdoor cooking meant cooking over charcoal–and for many people, it still does. The most commonly used fuel is charcoal briquets. Briquets are made of scrap wood and sawdust burned to carbon, which is then compressed with a starch binder and ground coal. Because the particles of fuel that make up the briquet are so tightly compressed, it’s hard for oxygen to penetrate it, which makes it burn slowly.. The briquets’ uniform shape also means they give a nice, even heat. Unfortunately, the binder can sometimes contain chemicals that can give food an off-taste, as can the coal.
A better choice is hardwood lump charcoal, which looks like the shape of the chunks of wood it is made from. Charcoal is simply wood that is left to smoulder without oxygen until it turns to carbon (which burns hotter and more slowly than wood). You could also cook over hardwood chunks themselves, of course, which would scent the food nicely, but they would also burn much too fast, not as evenly, and not as hotly. One way to add some of that hardwood scent is to add a few chunks of hardwood, soaked in water, to the coals. This will produce lots of smoke. (Pine or other resinous woods are a bad choice, because their fumes contain noxious chemicals. Pine sap, remember, is what turpentine is made from!)
Getting a charcoal fire started is always an adventure, and sometimes an ordeal. Most people use lighter fluid, but grilling gourmets frown on that because it can give food a chemical taste. Gasoline and kerosene are obviously taboo, since they can explode. The best way is to start the fire with kindling, but unless you used to be a Boy Scout, you may find that difficult. One suggestion is to use strips of newspaper soaked in vegetable oil. Another choice is an electric starter, assuming you’re someplace where there’s a plug-in. It’s just a high-resistance loop, like a stove element, that you stick in the coals.
As anyone who has ever gone to a barbecuing party hungry can attest, it takes a LONG time for a charcoal fire to be ready to cook on: at least 40 minutes. But it’s important not to put food on the fire too soon–that results in food that’s burnt on the outside and raw on the inside. The trick is to wait until the coals are uniformly covered with grey ash and you can hold your palm over the fire at the level of the grill for five seconds. If you can only hold it there for two or three seconds, the fire is too hot: it will sear, but not cook. (The grill will be at different heights depending on what you’re cooking, too: eight to 10 centimetres for fish fillets, 10 to15 centimetres for just about everything else, 15 to 18 for chicken with the bone.)
Once you’ve got the fire at the right temperature, the next trick is to keep it there. This is accomplished by varying the amount of oxygen available to the fire. Fires burn more aggressively with oxygen, so using a bellows or opening vents on the grill will increase heat; closing the vents will decrease heat. (But don’t close off a covered fire completely or it will go out–it has to have SOME oxygen.)
Increasingly, backyard barbecues don’t use charcoal at all; instead, they burn natural gas or propane. A gas grill has a number of advantages over a charcoal grill, not least of which is the fact that it does not require you to build a fire.. Just light the gas and let it heat up the lava stones (or clay pyramids, or metal plates, or whatever) that serve as coals. This has made barbecuing so easy that North Americans host backyard barbecues twice as often as they did 10 years ago.
Barbecue purists deride gas grills because they don’t provide any smoke for flavor–except for smoke from the fat that dripped off previous meals onto the stones, and if you’re getting smoke from that, as one restaurateur put it, “you’re eating rancid, smoke-flavored fat.” Yumm! The even heat of a gas grill also takes some of the excitement out of grilled food because everything is cooked to the same degree all the way through, whereas the less even heat of a charcoal grill results in some parts being smokier and more highly flavored than others.
But it is possible to clean the stones in most gas grills by turning them over and letting the residues of previous meals burn off, and you can add wood smoke by placing on the stones an aluminum pan filled with wood chips that have been soaked in water for at least half an hour. (You put them in the pan because otherwise the ash can clog gas lines.) Some people like to toss herbs, or grapevine cuttings, or something more exotic onto the stones at the last minute to provide an aromatic smoke that convinces the hungrily waiting guests that real barbecuing is going on. However, it’s doubtful that any of that smoke is really doing much to flavor the food. It’s not like smoking, which is done under a cover and can go on for hours or even days.
Flare-ups, caused by dripping fat, are a common problem during grilling. Spraying water on the coals works, but can give food a wet-ash flavor (again, Yumm!), so a better option is to pull the food away from the flames (even putting it onto a plate) and quenching the flames by closing the cover or the vents.
Thick food will require a certain amount of covered cooking time anyway; the cover traps heat and ensures that the inside of the food cooks as well as the outside. (If worst comes to worst, you can always take it off the grill and finish it in your kitchen oven.) Cooking continues even after meat is taken off the grill, because of the hot juices permeating it, so it should actually be taken off just before it’s done.
Barbecuing, you might think, would be one of the last of life’s simple, guilt-free pleasures. But living in the ’90s should have taught you that nothing is simple and guilt-free any more. Even leaving aside the fact that barbecuing usually involves eating red meat, which we’re constantly told is bad for us, new evidence indicates that the grilling of meat is a major contributor to air pollution in urban areas.
Grills of course release hydrocarbons into the air, like everything else that burns fuel, but besides that, ground beef emits dozens of compounds as it cooks, including hydrocarbons, furans, steroids, cholesterol and (you’ll love this!) pesticide residues. A 1991 study revealed that meat smoke may constitute the dominant source of the fine organic particles that pollute urban air–particles which, due to their small size, are easily inhaled, which means they can aggravate respiratory problems. Meat smoke proved to be a greater source of these particles (which also contribute greatly to urban haze) in Los Angeles than any other individual source, including fireplaces, automobiles, forest fires, organic chemical processing, metallurgical processing, jet aircraft and cigarettes.
Of course, to be fair, backyard barbecues are small potatoes in this problem: commercial restaurants produce by far the most meat smoke. Still, the environmentally conscious may want to think twice before firing up the grill next time.
How does sushi sound?
