Now, as a bit of a disclaimer, I am not much of a griller (if that is even a thing). I don't currently own a grill due to being in tiny apartment space and not having much of a balcony to put one one. However, I am one to try different things and look up how to try them. So for this installment of the Thursday Food series, I am going to relay what I have found on the subject. Now that we've gotten that bit out of the way, let's get to going into this culinary art form.
First off, there is prepping food and food safety. Yes this is all basic stuff but it is good to remind yourself that these things are not things to cut corners on. For example, don't grill right next to your home! Make sure there is some space between your house and your grill (recommended roughly 10ft so not too far) so if the worst happens you only have burnt burgers. Another important one is to not use the same place that held the raw meat for the cooked meat. Saving a dish is not worth getting sick over. Same goes for using brushes for sauces; wait until the meat is fully cooked before you pour that sauce on. It also prevents your sauce from burning too so that's a big plus. Of course you should treat your grill well, cleaning it so nothing collects and causes flare ups. Speaking of flare ups, you have two major options to deal with them: move the food out of the way until it dies down or to use a lid and cover it. Either or will work pretty well, just try not to use water on it unless you want your food covered by an ash plume. As cool as they are to watch, they make the food gross. Lastly, as much as I believe in reusing ingredients whenever possible please don't reuse your marinade as a sauce. You just had raw meat in there, no one wants that as a sauce.
So now that we got that out of the way, what can you even grill outside of the usual standards of meat, meat, and maybe a hamburger bun? A lot of things actually. Most veggies take well to being grilled. One of my favorites is portobello mushrooms, but corn, asparagus, romaine lettuce, cabbage, and plenty of other dark greens are great on the grill, especially for your vegetarian friends. What surprised me is there are plenty of recipes for grilled fruits like mango and peaches. I would never think to grill a fruit, but if any of you have tried it, let me know!
Lastly, I found a few tips on making hamburgers because for me, they always seem to look easy until they fall apart. Two major tips I found though mostly involve burger juices. If you have issues with dry burgers mixing bread crumbs and mix with the meat will help keep the burger juicy. If you're like me and have soaked bun issues, put your burger on a serving plate for a few minutes so all the excess has time to run out from the meat.
Any other tips you got? One fun one I found was to label meats with different colored toothpicks if you have a crowd with different rareness styles. I thought that was rather clever, especially if you leave the code for the guests to look at so they know what meats are cooked for their preference. Let me know of any other ideas for grilling and I will see you for August's first horror tuesday.
