Grilling turns back to an ancient fuel: wood
When Miami restaurateur Michael Schwartz opened his South American-inspired restaurant, Amara at Paraiso, in January, he made a wood-burning Jade grill the focal point of the kitchen.
When Curtis Stone, the Australian butcher turned chef and TV host, opened Gwen in Los Angeles, he installed not one but two wood-burning grills — an Argentinian fire pit and a Uruguayan-style braseiro — alongside a charcoal-burning Josper oven.
And when Missy Robbins conceived her Brooklyn restaurant, Lilia, she situated the hearth — complete with a Grillworks wood-burning grill — on the path to the dining room. “People gather around it the way they would at a fireplace in someone’s home,” she said.
The world’s oldest cooking method has become one of its newest culinary quests.
While there’s nothing novel about wood-burning grills in restaurants (Wolfgang Puck and Alice Waters have used them for decades), what is new is the zeal of the chefs using them, the variety of equipment available, and the growing number of American home cooks who are forsaking gas and charcoal to master the ancient art of grilling over a wood fire in their backyards.
The flavor comes from the high, dry heat of a wood fire (1,000 degrees or more), which caramelizes the proteins in meats and the plant sugars in fruits and vegetables. But wood-grilled foods get even more of their distinctive flavor and edge from the fragrant smoke.
“Wood smoke contains more than a thousand flavor-producing compounds,” said Nathan Myhrvold, the former Microsoft executive who has become an evangelist for modernist cooking. That list of chemicals includes creosol (associated with the smoky peat flavor of Scotch whisky), syringol (responsible for clovelike flavors), and vanillin (source of a vanillaish sweetness in smoke).
By the time wood becomes charcoal, Myhrvold said, 99 percent of those compounds are lost. That’s why a wood fire delivers so much more flavor than charcoal. “Almost any hardwood is good for grilling, but avoid evergreens, like spruce and pine, which put out a black sooty smoke that tastes like turpentine,” he said.
Wood grilling is different from traditional barbecue, although both start with burning logs. In a barbecue pit, the food smokes at a low heat away from the fire for intervals measured in half-days. Grilling is a rapid process in which the food sizzles directly over the fire.
“Grilling gives you loud, sharp Maillard flavors you simply can’t achieve in a smoker,” said Texas barbecue expert Aaron Franklin, referring to the Maillard reaction, which produces complex savory flavors as food browns. (Franklin and his partner Tyson Cole installed a state-of-the-art 72-inch Grillworks wood-burning grill, and two traditional J&R Oyler barbecue pits, at their Austin restaurant Loro, which opened in April.)
Traditionally, people grilled with the wood that grew in their area. In much of North and South America and Europe, that means oak — a clean, hot-burning wood with a smoke that’s robust enough to stand up to red meat yet mild enough not to overpower poultry or seafood.
Southerners burn hickory; Californians use almond wood; Pacific Northwesterners burn cherry and alder. Mesquite — the go-to wood in Hawaii, the American Southwest and northern Mexico — emits a strong-tasting smoke and pyrotechnic sparks that, depending on your level of pyromania, you’ll find thrilling or disconcerting.
Grill with a single wood, Franklin suggested: “When you mix woods, you can’t really pinpoint the flavor.”
The cooking properties and smoke flavor vary subtly from wood to wood but less than you might think. For Ben Eisendrath, the chief executive of Grillworks, the species matters less than using split, seasoned, appropriate-size logs — seasoned because dry wood burns more efficiently than green, split because the wood ignites more easily, and sized to fit in your grill, which means smaller than what you generally burn in your fireplace.
Wood chunks burn faster than charcoal, so you’ll need to replenish them often. Lighting a second chimney will give you more hot coals at the ready. (When woodgrilling in a kettle grill, never close the lid, or your food will
become unbearably smoky.)
Use a flame-forward fire for chicken breasts, fish fillets, thin steaks — foods that benefit from high heat and a pronounced smoke flavor. The ember method gives you a steadier, more predictable heat source, well suited to grilling bread, pizza, thick steaks and chops, and high-moisture vegetables.
Whichever fuel you use or method for controlling the heat, be prepared to take your time.
“This is not like cooking on a conventional grill,” Birch said. “It’s a mesmerizing process and a communal ritual that takes the better part of the day.”