Basic Cooking Techniques: How to Grill
Summertime and the grillin’ is easy. The barbecuing, too — although in cheffy parlance, grilling is quite different from barbecuing. When you grill, you cook foods directly over medium or high heat. That’s what most of us do on a grill.
When you barbecue, by contrast, you cook food over “indirect,” low or medium heat — that is, to the side of a lower heat source, not directly over it. We’ll have a lot more to say about that
method in next month’s column.
For now, let’s concentrate on grilling. First a little background: Grilling works because the high heat caramelizes the external proteins and sugars naturally found in food. When heated, these complicated chemical compounds begin to shake and vibrate, tossing out all sorts of simpler compounds which are in fact the very things most of experience us as flavor.
The grill’s intense sear, therefore, causes lots of chemical breakdown — and thus, lots of flavor. No wonder we all love to grill.
A Grill’s Heat
Although not as exacting as an oven’s, a grill has three basic levels of heat:
- High Heat: 500°F
- Medium Heat: 400°F
- Low Heat: 300°F
These temperatures are guidelines; not rocket-science but mere approximations.
Experienced grillers test their grills by “feeling” the heat. If you want to do the same, place your open palm 5 inches above the grill grate. The fire is . . .
- High if you have to move your hand in 2 seconds
- Medium if you have to move your hand in 5 seconds
- Low if you have to move your hand in 10 seconds
To Be Continued ....
Source : Weight Watchers
