barbeque choice cuts
outdoor cooking equipment featured in home designs, renovations
The wafting odor of singed meat is particularly prevalent around the summer holidays: Memorial Day, July 4th, Labor Day. It’s a sign that pops is on cooking duty, holding court over his favorite apparatus, the ubiquitous gleaming grill.
The aroma quickly sets the salivary glands a-dancing and creates an instant jolt, arousing the appetite.
Oh yes, the anticipation can be torturous as the burgers or steak or dogs or chicken are brought to the perfect temperature in a frenzy of charcoal or propane. Sometimes even veggies like corn on the cob take their turn atop the metal of honor.
Bringing these mouth-watering delicacies to fruition require many types of cooking arrangements.
For ease and simplicity, it’s hard to beat the long-standing and ever-popular UFO-shaped charcoal grill. Inexpensive with little variety in settings, this grill has been mastered by many a generation, said John Berg with Builder’s Source.
It generally runs about $40, but the grill master has to be particularly diligent because there are usually only one or two heights to put the grill above the coals, he said.
From there, it just escalates in terms of complexity.
As a matter of fact, the real big trend now is barbecue units that are part of an entire outdoor set-up, Berg said. Barbeque units are plumbed with natural gas, with the advantage of never running out of cooking fuel.
“These are complete outdoor kitchen units,” he said. “They have storage doors, produce bins, refrigerators. Literally, you could almost spend as much on a outdoor entertainment area as on midgrade to high-end indoor kitchen.”
On new, custom homes that are being built, it’s going even farther as units include outdoor sinks with plumbing, Berg said.
“That’s probably the biggest thing that is growing with your custom homes is these massive outdoor kitchens that have just about everything you have in the inside kitchen, even sinks and running water,” he said. “That is what we see as the biggest push for the kitchen areas.”
For folks not looking for quite that much investment, or are not ready to build a custom house, there are other options.
“We use a couple of manufacturers that have ready-made set ups,” he said. “They have granite counter tops and
“The real big trend now is barbecue units that are part of an entire outdoor set up.”
john berg builder's source
stucco, with steel, 2x4 framing. They’re broken down and shipped.”
After an expert puts the electrical and gas lines in, it becomes a relatively simple, do-it-yourself home project and doesn’t cost nearly as much.
“A contractor gets you the electric and the gas where you need it and when the unit arrives, you put together the framework,” Berg said. “The refrigerator and drawers all slide into place. It’s a little more cost effective if you’re not looking to do a huge project. It’s ready-made so you don’t have to have some contractor construct the whole thing for you.”
When it comes to gas grills, the traditional propane-fired grill is still a mainstay, he said, primarily because of its ease of use and its mobility, allowing them to go anywhere.
“Portability is a big factor with those because you can take and move them wherever you want,” Berg said. “If you don’t want to plumb for natural gas to the grill areas, a propane grill is great. You just have the propane tank and you just change those out.”
It’s a great way to go for people unwilling or unable to make the commitment to the large, outdoor cooking area.
“Those appeal more to the folks just looking for an outdoor grilling area and not looking for that massive kitchen space,” he said. “Of course, you do have to pay attention to when the tanks start to run out of gas. Sometimes it will run out right in the middle of when you’re cooking something.”
But both the natural gas and the propane cook about the same, Berg said.
“Really, as far as construction goes, the only difference is the surface size of the burners and the regulator,” he said. “Natural gas burns hotter with less gas and it’s heavier in carbon. Both of them cook the same. There’s no difference.”
A growing niche in the market place is hybrid burners with one half a propane fired grill and the other, separate side fired by charcoal.
“The interesting thing with that is, you can light the charcoal side with gas instead of the old traditional way of newspapers, or lighter fluid,” Berg said. “But they are two separate units with two separate grill heads. They actually have a separator between them with a separate hood for the gas side and the charcoal side. We’ve done a couple of those. Charcoal for some folks is still a big deal.”
Indeed, it’s such as big deal that charcoal grills remain high atop many lists, include those who make smoking meat a pursuit.
“If you start moving to the higher end ones, there is more adjustability with temperature control and ventilation at the top and bottom,” Berg said. “And you have more adjustability with how close what you’re cooking is to the coals.”
The charcoal adds a unique flavor that can even be heightened through the use of different types of wood that are added to the coals, he said, although there are now smoker boxes that can be used with the gas grills that can be filled with wood chips to produce a wood smoke flavor.
The big thing with the charcoal grills or smokers is the ability to create a lower temperature to cook the meat slower, making it more tender and flavorful.
“It’s a matter of using less oxygen, letting in less at the bottom and less venting at the top so it burns low and slow and very controllable,” Berg explained. “Like with a smoker, sometimes the actual coals are in a different chamber so you’re cooking with indirect heat at a very low temperature, 175 to 200 degrees. With a smoker, you don’t have to flip or rotate the meat. It keeps it all at one temperature as opposed to one side getting most of the heat.”
Then there are the egg-shaped Komodo grills.
“Those are more like a convection oven,” he said. “What the heat is doing is being absorbed by the exterior shell, giving you an all around heating as opposed to an open surface. It just all depends on what you want to do.”