Zen and the art of meticulous braaiing
ASK braai or grill fanatics where they learnt their craft and they typically cite their back yards.
They’ll recall their father at the grill, sometimes flipping burgers, other times smoking a whole hog. In that sense memory is often the inspiration for a braaiing passion.
Not for me. My father rarely cooked outdoors. He was more a Saturday farmhouse-breakfast or weekend spaghetti-and-meatballs kind of guy. The only times I recall my dad even being around a grill is at large family gatherings at a public park.
So, I was a true novice when, in my early 20s, I moved to Texas in the mid-1970s. I made a lot of mistakes while learning this most elemental of cooking methods. I committed those errors so you don’t have to. Here is my take on 11 mistakes rookies make, and how to correct them. Mistake: Crowding the grill The weekend after I bought my first grill, I threw a party. I put so many hand-formed burgers on the grill it looked like I-395 at rush hour. Within minutes, I was scooping the discs of meat off the grill, each one more burnt than the one before.
Correction: Leave enough space between your items to comfortably tend to each one.
Pro tip: Live-fire cooking creates different heat intensities. Know your hot spots and move your food around to avoid burning. Mistake: Using lighter fluid Shortly after getting married, I squirted a hydrant’s amount of lighter fluid on a mountain of charcoal and torched it with a match. Impatient with the fire’s progress, I did it again. And again.
Don’t use it. The odour is foul. The stuff is flammable, so it is a needless accident waiting to happen when stored in the garage.
Correction: Use a charcoal chimney. Stuff wads of newspaper in the bottom, put charcoal in the top, light the newsprint and, within 20 minutes, your coals ash over and are ready to use.
Pro tip: Fill your chimney with only as much charcoal as you need for cooking.
Mistake: Building a single, large fire
For more time than I care to remember, I did this, spreading hot coals over the base of the grill.
Firing up the whole grill is like having all the burners on your kitchen stove top stuck at the same heat level. No one can cook like that.
Correction: Create two zones, one with fire for direct cooking, the other without fire for indirect. That way, you can cook as fast or slowly as you want.
Pro tip: Sear over a direct fire. Then, more often than not, close the lid when cooking on the indirect side, to gently roast your food. Mistake: Cooking too hot In Austin in the 1980s, there was a barbecue legend named CB Stubblefield. You may know him as the inspiration behind the Stubb’s line of barbecue sauces.
A towering and solidly built man, his presence loomed large at the back of the fabled blues club, Antone’s. Nothing ended the dancedrenched night like a plate of his pork ribs, meaty, lightly charred and as tender as an Elvis Presley ballad, so wondrous that I credit them with sealing the deal between my wifeto-be and me.
Correction: To cook slower, extend the fire and give the ribs that smoky flavour, set the lid on the grill. You can also cook at a low temperature by using fewer coals or allowing the coals to cool down a little, but both of those techniques are for foods such as fish and chicken pieces, which cook faster, not big meats such as ribs.
Pro tip: Your grill is a convertible. Leave the top off for fast grilling of steaks and chops. Put the top on for slow cooking and smoking, and adjust the vents. Mistake: Watching My first experiments with beef brisket were so abysmal that I threw out a couple of woefully underdone briskets rather than eat them.
The problem is, I was opening the lid too often to see how the meat was doing, as if it were a movie and I didn’t want to miss any of the good parts. That was messing with the temperature, which was messing with the cooking time.
Correction: On big meats, like brisket and pork shoulder, don’t peek.
Pro tip: Fire management and patience are the two most important ingredients to creating great barbecue. Learning how to feed the fire helps with both. Buy a hinged grate to more easily add coals or wood chips to your fire to keep the fire steady over long cook times. If using an offset or other smoker, use larger-size hardwoods, such as chunks and split logs. Mistake: Saucing too soon There was a chain restaurant known for its ribs that I used to enjoy. The ribs came out shellacked with sauce.
I tried to do that at home. But my ribs inevitably came out as cinders.
Correction: Baste during the last 10 minutes of cooking.
Pro tip: Don’t use sauce, period. (I rarely do, anymore.) The flavour of meat, spice rub and smoke is sublime. If you must use sauce, offer it as an option at the table.
Mistake: Not cleaning the grill
When I started out barbecuing, my food often stuck. I would take a spatula and pull a burger or salmon filet up from the cooking surface, leaving parts on the grates.
There is no self-cleaning function on a grill.
Correction: After cooking, while the grill is still warm, use a hard-bristle brush and scrub the grates. Then, dip a rag or wadded-up paper towel in vegetable oil and, using long-handled tongs, oil the grates. You can also wait until the next time you cook and, after starting the fire, scrub and oil the grates.
Pro tip: Wait a little longer than you think you should before turning food. Once it caramelises or gets dark grill marks, the food releases much easier from the grate. Also, you might lightly oil your food.
Mistake: Limiting your menu
From everything you’ve read so far, you probably think that all I ever grilled or smoked was meat. Until recently, you’d be right.
Then I travelled to Italy. It was a lightbulb moment.
Correction: Grill fruits and vegetables, especially in season when the flavours are at their peak. Try smoking tomatoes for gazpacho. Do the same with blueberries for a pie that will rock your world.
Pro tip: Use the grill as an outside version of your stove and oven. Liberate your imagination. Mistake: Cooking solely by “feel’ The quality of my grilled and smoked foods was inconsistent. I started keeping a log of seasonings, heat intensity and cooking duration to help reduce mistakes. My food improved. But it wasn’t until I purchased one simple tool that dependability became part of my barbecue vocabulary.
Correction: Use an instant-read thermometer. Stuck into the thickest part of the meat, it provides a reliable guide to doneness.
Pro tip: Don’t rely on the thermometer alone. I may not use feel exclusively anymore, but I still use it a lot. A thermometer doesn’t tell you whether that brisket jiggles the way it should. Trust your instincts.
Mistake: Thinking you know it all
As much as you learn, there will always be more to learn. To this day, I will ask a friend a question about something he did on the grill that I hadn’t seen before or inquire how he achieved that perfect crust and succulent interior. Correction: Remain curious. Pro tip: Read grilling and smoking cookbooks and check the internet. Two reliable sources: Meathead Goldwyn’s exhaustive site, AmazingRibs.com, and barbecue yoda Steven Raichlen’s BarbecueBible.com. Mistake: Not preparing I wasn’t even a rookie for this one, but mistakes can happen to the best of us. In late June, I was in New Orleans visiting my son and helping his crew of friends throw a barbecue. The fire was as ornery as any I can remember. It would smoulder at far too low a temperature, then spike horrendously.
The reason? No wood. More accurately, the wrong wood. They only had logs.
Adding a whole, big, round log to the firebox of a smoker is more likely to put out the fire (no oxygen) than to keep it going. Which is basically what kept happening.
Correction: Prepare, of course, but also improvise. Even if we had exactly the right wood and it was cut to our specifications, who knows what else might have gone wrong? Live-fire cooking is unpredictable. The climate, the moisture in the wood, the wind, any number of things can affect the way the food cooks.
We were cooking two racks of ribs, a mess of chicken wings, some links of sausage, an eggplant and a few wedges of watermelon.
Nowadays, I’m adept enough to handle many different foods at once. I know about how long each one takes, over what intensity of flame.
On that day in New Orleans, approximate cooking times perished in the slow-fast fire.
We ad-libbed furiously, moving foods far from the fire to directly above hot flames, then back again, all the while fiddling with the fire’s intensity with wood chips I found at a local grocery store and split logs provided from a barbecue joint that took pity on me.
Pro tip: Don’t panic, and slow down. Always allow a buffer zone of time of at least an hour for big meats (pork shoulder, brisket, ribs) and 20 minutes for quick-grill items (steaks, fish).
If you think the ribs will take four hours, allow five. The extra time allows you to stay calm when things go south. And if everything goes perfectly? Great. Meat should rest, anyway.