Grillin, on a Sunny Afternoon

Even though the terms are used interchangeably, there is a difference between barbecue and grilling. BBQ is cooking over heat that is low and slow moving, like my ambition. It is a pace I understand, the rhythms are almost second nature. Grilling give me some trouble, the cooking style is the opposite of the desultory BBQ. The heat that is quick and dry and occasionally searing. Like my wit? There is part of me that understands this focused, in the moment style of cooking but it vexes me

In a way I can’t stand the heat even though I’ve gotten out of the kitchen: I gained access to a gas fueled, shinny, powerful outdoor grill. To date, I’ve managed to over-cooked 4 out of the 6 things, a 2/3 failure rate. Worse than actually overcooking a few things is the knowledge grilling in the classic kitchen and the current causal-dining restaurants grilling is only a step above the deep fryer in the kitchen hierarchy. Sauce, sauce maker, the heir apparent of the classic kitchen, seems to be an over reach when I stand at the grill unable to cook a piece of meat.

Both fire-friendly cooking methods use radiant heat to help cook. Radiant cooking is done with an electromagnetic wave – the wave isn’t hot itself, but it generates heat when it is absorbed by another material. A radio broadcast is an electromagnetic wave - Energy radiates from its source but all the transmission power in the world wouldn’t do a matter if you didn’t have a receiver to pick it up. Radiant heat is also like a radio, the closer you are to the broadcast transmission the stronger the signal. Barbecuing is a good distance away from the source so it must also rely on convection heat, the movement of air currents to carry heat to the food. Grilling is close to the heat source, close enough that the energy from the fire gets conducted/transferred/exchanged to a metal grate, which heats up and in turn, passes the heat to the steak-salmon-tofu.

Even understanding the mechanics of how grilling works is little help and I want to grill. There is something primitively satisfying about cooking over a flame. Added to the primal sensation of cooking over a fire is the counterbalance of a cold beer. Hot fire/cold beer just makes sense on some fundamental way that is hard to explain but easy to understand. Now if I can just master the technique, I have a chance even for a fleeting moment to stand in front of a flame, spatula in one hand, beer in other and have everything be right in the world.