Lazy Hostess | BBQ Tips and Tricks

Chef Adam Perry Lang jumped from some of the world’s top four-star kitchens to the backyard BBQ, transforming the art of grilling in America along the way.  Just in time for the holiday weekend, we have collected a few of the chef’s expert BBQ tips and tricks from an article on Epicurious.com written by JJ Goode, Laing’s co-author of Serious BBQ: Smoke, Char, Baste, and Brush Your Way to Great Outdoor Cooking.

Clean Your Grate
Perry Lang debunks the myth that dirty grill grates somehow help flavor your meat: They add flavors all right, he says—bitter, unwanted ones. So he urges you to get a sturdy brush and clean your grate before and after each use.

Go All-Natural
You should never use lighter fluid or charcoal treated with the flammable liquid, warns Perry Lang. Building a natural fire might take a little patience, but it’s very easy and far preferable to spoiling your food’s flavor with the chemical taste of lighter fluid.

Moderate the Flame
Showing off your grill’s BTUs can be fun, like speeding around in a Corvette, but sky-high heat isn’t always best for your meat. Perry Lang cooks thin cuts with very high heat, but for thicker ones like the steaks in this menu, he sticks with medium or medium-high. After all, you don’t want the meat’s exterior to over-char before the interior is done. To that end, he also creates zones of lower heat—places to retreat to when food threatens to burn—by turning down the burner or putting fewer coals under a particular portion of the grates.

Work With Flare-Ups
To some outdoor cooks, flare-ups are to be avoided at all costs. But Perry Lang embraces them. Not only are they inevitable—the result of fat dripping onto the coals or gas flame—but within reason, they produce flavor-boosting caramelization.  Here are his three easy strategies: jockeying (moving your meat to a different part of the grill); stacking (putting a piece of meat that needs a break from the heat on top of another that doesn’t); and flipping (yet another way to keep tasty char from becoming bitter).

PHOTO CREDIT:  Epicurious.com