So after several years of obeying the legal restraints on putting grills on balconies, I finally moved to a jurisdiction with lose enough fire prevention laws (Alexandria). I picked up a Weber 22.5" - the CLASSIC grill - and I've been using it almost every night since I moved in a month ago.

I've made sausages, vegetable kabobs, marinated steaks both flank and flat iron, swordfish, burgers, dogs, buttermilk biscuits, etc. Veal, pork, chicken, bacon and lamb will soon follow.

I use all natural lump charcoal (no briquets here), and lighter fluid never gets near my food. I start the fire with a chimney starter, although I use scrap paper from the office instead of newspaper (hopefully the toner vapor isn't giving me cancer).

So like I said the first time I've ever grilled on my own was a month ago - I'm a grilling novice. Since this is such a savvy and sophisticated group, I was hoping I could solicit some tips, techniques, recipes, etc. from you all.

Luckily, what I lack in experience I make up for in the apron my fiancee bought me after I got the grill - "Sophisticated, Seductive, and Full-Bodied (and the wine isn't bad either)."

Don't play with your meat. In other words, flip and re-position as little as possible.

One specific item - I can't seem to consistently get good grill marks. I don't move the meat, and it SEEMS like my coals are plenty hot enough... Should I invest in a heavy duty cast iron grate?

Short answer, yes. It is not easy to get good grill marks with those flimsy grates that come with the webbers. However, you can still get good final results. Look into reading one of the grilling books by...damn cannot remember the guys name...although I think Alton Brown has some good info.

Steven Raichlen?

Raichlen?

Speaking of whom, there is an interesting dialogue going on over on Slate

Bingo, bingo...

One of the best ways to get the grill marks is to place a little EVOO on the meat, it will help transfer heat from the metal more efficiently than just the meat. You can also do this by oiling the grates, but I find I get a better caramelization by rubbing the meat with a little oil.

My advice: Do not grill Man's Best Friend. The bad karma is intense.

The grill on my weber has a cast iron grate insert.

A couple of tips:

1. I spray my food with Pam before putting it on the grill. This not only keeps the food from sticking, it also promotes a nice char.

2. I always cook my steaks for 5 minutes per side and let rest for 5 minutes. They invariably are a perfect medium rare.

3. When cooking chicken, I cook for 20 minutes, turning 4 times, and then I close up the vents and let sit for 5 minutes.

4. When cooking a butterflied leg of lamb, I cook for 40 minutes, turning 4 times.

time to try some indirect cooking: smoking and roasting. Big webers are good for that

Smoking and roasting make me nervous. I like me food to cook fast - I feel more in control that way. I should really buy a meat thermometer.

Get one of those digital thermometers with the remote digital readout. I think they even make some wireless versions. A boneless pork loin, coated with some olive oil and herbs, roasted on the Weber using indirect heat does real well.

Do a cheater's smoking. Prepare a nice pork shoulder roast with a spice rub, smoke for an hour, then take out, place in a covered pan in the oven and bake at 250 until the meat is fall apart tender. This takes another 4 hours or more at my house but the result is quite good for those days you just don't feel like tending the smoker throughout the day.

Incidentally, I can't recommend Raichlen's book on Indoor Grilling. The concept is sound - working within the constraints imposed on a typical citydweller, each recipe is accompanied by a sidebar explaining how to adjust the cooking technique if using a built-in range grill, a grill pan, a contact grill, a hibachi or Tuscan grill, etc. But in practice, maybe three-quarters of the adjustments are the same from recipe-to-recipe...a la "preheat the pan over medium-high heat for X minutes, then reduce heat to medium before cooking". Instead, figure out how your particular piece of kit works best, then pick up a few of his other wonderful books and adapt.

In the Post food section this week, Walter Scheib, former chef at the White House, talked about grilling and provided a recipe for ribs. He said that he simmers the ribs until tender, and then puts them on the grill and bastes with BBQ sauce for a few minutes on each side with the grill covered. Do others here use that technique? I have never grilled a rack of ribs and was thinking of trying his recipe for Father's Day. At Whole Foods, baby back pork ribs were about $6.99 or $7.99 a pound.

My mother pointed that out to me, my response was "Now I know why he was fired." Boiled ribs suck! If you want a simple cooking method, rub them, place the ribs in the oven at 250 for two and a half hours, and if you want to sauce them place them on a hot grill baste with sauce and turn them several times to sear it on. This is not as good as slow smoked ribs, but will do in a pinch. But DEAR GOD, DON'T BOIL OR SIMMER YOUR RIBS!

I believe that Weber stopped making the cast iron insert grates a few years ago, so you'll need to check for other sources, eBay perhaps, to find one. They are superior in every way, and especially good with hardwood charcoal. Good luck.

Let your grate get good and hot before you put the meat on. This may take 10 minutes or more. It's hard to resist the temptation to put the meat on to cook right after you've dumped the coals and set the grate in place, but you won't get good grill marks that way--more heat will hit the meat between the grids of the grill if you don't heat the grill enough before you start cooking.

Thanks for all the advice, all. I can finally get decent grill marks.

I've been trying to emulate the famous "high heat, high char" style of Ray's the Steaks. I picked myself up some hardwood charcoal from BBQ Galore (I don't think I'll EVER go back to softwood).

I ended up with steak that was PERFECTLY cooked on the inside, but on the outside I had BURN instead of CHAR. It was like eating a briquette that someone hid a NY strip inside (okay, so it wasn't THAT bad, but STILL).

Where did I go wrong? Why did I get blackened, crusty burn instead of carmelized, flavorful char? Was it because I:

a) Piled the charcoal in a high mound to get it as close to the steak as possible for EXTRA high heat?
B ) Took the charcoal out of the chimney starter too soon so I still had a lot of flame and not enough smolder?
c) Did not have a water spray bottle with me to control flare-ups?
d) All of the above
e) None of the above

Anyone have any ideas?

Would I be out of line to PM Michael Landrum for some advice? I always worry that it's rude to ask to peer behind the curtain like that.

It is likely that the flares from dropping fat caused the burning. So you need to control the flare-ups in some manner. I am not a fan of the spray bottle since it tends to lift ash into the air and onto the meat. I control the flares by having an extremely hot grill with some spots that do not have charcoal. I guess you could call this indirect grilling, but the heat is still rather intense over those areas.

Probably "all of the above." A better way to control flare ups is to trim excess fat from your steaks. It is the melting fat that causes the flareups. Spread out your charcoal evenly and let it heat up the grill for 5-10 minutes. By that time, any flames should have subsided. I always cook my steaks for 5-minutes/side, rotating 90 degrees (to get cross-hatched grill marks) half way through each side. I always have a nice char and I let the steaks sit for 5 minutes to let juices redistribute.

So it's definetely the flare ups, then, that are causing the burning? And not the very high heat?

Cross-hatched grill marks.... fancy. oesn't lifting the cover to turn the steaks those 90 degrees let all the heat out?

Why would you leave the cover on? You are grilling not roasting, right?

'cause my manual said I was supposed to. Should I not be?

Although Weber suggests that you keep the grill cover on to avoid flare-ups and achieve uniform heat, the manual was basically written for briquette users, and they burn at a lower heat than real hardwood. My advice to you would be not to use the cover for anything except roasting/smoking. With the cover off, and cooking at very high heat, it's much easier to assess the degree of doneness-- basically, as the other gentleman said, five minutes on each side for a thick steak should give you a perfect medium rare.

So I was grilling burgers last night, and my friend suggested that instead of putting the blue cheese on top of the burger toward the end, that we stuff it in the middle of the burger, so when biting in, you get cheese throughout. Great in concept, bad in execution -- the cheese melted away leaving us with the faintest hint of a blue cheese flavor in the burgers, and blue cheese covered charcoal.

Anyone have any tips for making burgers this way? More cheese? Better seal of the burger around the cheese? A less creamy blue cheese? (We used Oregonzola from Cowgirl.) Or should we just go back to throwing the cheese on top near the end?

(I didn't see a burger-specific thread -- if there is one, Don, go ahead and move this.)

I did this once with Stilton and it worked okay. I tend to think this is too gimicky-- just put the cheese on top. It also seems to me you have to manipulate the ground beef too much to get a "seal" on the cheese, thereby toughening the burger itself.

I've done this a number of times, usually with Maytag. I was always very careful to make sure the burgers were fully sealed.

Lately, though, I've decided that you get much more in the way of appropriate flavor by just putting it on at the end. Blue is better at room temperature, anyway.

For me, the perfect burger should have several very DISTINCT flavor profiles. With something like chili, you're combining tons of different ingredients to try and come up with something new, something that's a synergy of the different parts.

But with a burger, when you bite into it, you should taste each element seperately - the beef, the cheese, the lettuce, the tomato (or, depending on your taste for extravegance, the foie gras, the truffles). Each ingredient should be appreciated for its own quality and flavor before combining in your mouth.

Stuffing the beef with the blue defeats this purpose, and you're left with beef whose flavor is masked by the cheese and cheese whose flavor is masked by the beef.

I stuff my burgers with pizzas and Christmas yule logs. It gets a little messy but makes my R&D friends at Pizzahut blush.

For burgers, try this. It's one of the best I've ever eaten:

"The Squealer"
Grind (or pulse in a food processor) 1 part bacon
Mix together with 2 parts ground beef
Add salt, garlic, thyme, whatever

You'll need to cook them well-done due to the raw bacon, but it won't matter (it will be plenty juicy). And the flare-ups will be out of control from the bacon grease (thought I was going to burn my parents deck down the first time I tried this... just move them off the flare-up until it dies off). Consult your cardiologist and then fire up the grill.

And the best part is, 'cause it's ground into the meat, none of your kosher friends will be the wiser!

So long as the patties don't look like Gloda Meir, or Muhammad. If I'm trying to impress my PO I stuff mine with braised veal cheeks, puréed garlic confit, demi glace, bit of anchovy, herbs d'prvnce steeped in butted and shape them like Ziggy. Good and good for you, and the spirit of Ferdinand Point, and then some.

I'm waiting for someone to post what they did with those raw steaks they carted away from Ray's yesterday afternoon.

Hopefully not the above...

Ours were great.

Oh god, now I have all this pressure to perform. Hopefully with yours and Michael's tips, I can do right by the steaks I "carted away."

Another tip that I learned from my many years of grilling: when doing hamburgers, assuming you are using store bought hamburger meat, get the fattiest meat you can find. I find that using ground round or ground sirloin, which are very lean, produces a dry, crumbly burger. Ground chuck is acceptable but I prefer the 75/25 lean/fat version, It produces a juicy burger with plenty of flavor. I like it when the juice runs down the sides of your chin when you take a bite. It will flare up some so using the lid once in a while to squelch the flames is OK. Also, the extra smoke you get does a good job of perfuming the neighborhood.

It took me a minute to realize that "it will flare up some" referred to the burgers on the grill, not the juice running down your chin.

Since it's now a day later than you bought them, I will pass on words from Michael when I asked about keeping the steaks.

YOU MUST COOK THEM WITHIN 24 HOURS.

I didn't get the full reason about why, but when I inquired about buying steaks to grill on the 4th, he made it very clear I would not be happy with the results.

Please excuse my massive ignorance (or sheltered existence), but what is PO ... Parole Officer?

I bought them at 4:30 on Saturday, and cooked them at 6:30 on Sunday. Although to be fair, much of those extra two hours were spent bringing the steaks up to room temperature in preparation for the grill. So really, I DID start cooking them withing 24 hours, it's just that much of said cooking was done over extremely low heat over a long period of time.

They came out fantastically. I didn't get the grill marks I was hoping for, but that's because I had to move the steaks off the coals every once in a while to prevent flare-ups. This was done very quickly and only long enough for the flames to die down.

The steaks were cooked a beautiful medium-rare (expect for the barbarian at the table who insisted on medium), with great char. There was no burning at all - just a crispy, carmelized, sweet-tasting char. Where does that sweetness come from, anyway?

For sides, we had some VERY LIGHTLY creamed spinach to which I added some roasted garlic, vermouth, and lemon juice, mashed potatoes with truffle salt and roasted garlic, and garlic bread made with a composite butter of paprika, herbs, garlic and parmesan. Please note that those are three separate sides, not a continuation of the things I put in the spinach.

Can you tell I like garlic?

The steaks themselves were seasoned (per Michael's suggestion) with some Montreal steak seasoning (who knew America Jr. knew how to do steak so right?), then on the plate topped with crumbled Maytag blue cheese.

Oh, and did I mention that this was all cooked by candlelight because our damn power was out from 6PM to 6AM?

Today for lunch I'm having some leftover potatoes and spinach. I also made a sandwich out of the garlic bread, some slices of the NY strip, and the Maytag blue. It took all my willpower not to eat that sandwich last night after making it.

I like 80/20, myself. This is pretty much what you get if you buy an average chuck roast and grind it at home. Your humble food processor works well for this and, as a bonus, you can solve the cheese conundrum by simply incorporating it in with the meat. I also find a dash of cognac at this stage promotes an agreeable outcome.

But what the fuck do I know? I just broke down and bought a gas grill.

Food processor vs meat grinder - is there a difference?

Absolutely! You have to be much more careful when using a food processor as you can easily end up with mush. The grinder also provides an even and consistent size, plus you can use a grinder to make sausages!

I like the grinder as well, I have one that attaches to my Kitchen Aid, and as mdt stated, it is great for sausage as well. I have found that a mixture of several types of beef gives me the best flavor results. I like to use chuck, sirloin, short ribs, and brisket. The ribs and brisket add a wonderful beefy flavor.

That sounds very good. Any particular ratio? Also, has anyone tried adding pork belly for extra succulence? I recall seeing that recommended in some recent food rag.

If you use the food processor, use the pulse function and pulse no more than 10 times. Do not turn the blade on continuous or you will be more likely to wind up with the mush. SFW has the 75/25 mixtue on sale for $1.39/lb. I had some last night for dinner, great juiciness.

I do have a particular ratio, but you don't expect me to share it do you
Actually, I am still playing around with the ratio, but I have found that you need to ensure that the majority of it is made up of the sirloin and chuck.

Georgetown Farms used to offer an 80/20 mix of odd cuts to be used for ground beef. I wonder if any farms in the area now are offering that?

I also recommend the meat grinder (mine is a Kitchen Aid attachment) over the food processor, for better texture. The FP will do in a pinch, but if you're really serious about burgers, a grinder is a good idea (much better tasting than already-ground beef in the supermarket).


Um, I did.

Actually, Canada is so different from the US that I wouldn't even consider calling it "America Jr.".

One thing Canada is known for, particularly western Canada, and especially the province of Alberta, is beef. Been there, had that, and it was fantastic! Carpaccio in Edmonton--yum!