Grill Maestro

Curing is a food preservation technique where salt, and other ingredients, are used to change the chemical composition of a meat or fish so that it will last longer. Back before refrigerators, curing was a popular way to have you food last longer. Curing, since you can use a lot of spices and sugar in [...]

Consumer Reports put out a great five minute video on how to buy a gas grill. If you don’t know how to pick one, this video will give you a good start.

The key to starting a charcoal fire is to be patient and not get too overzealous with the lighter fluid. Here’s what you need to do:

Make a pyramid of charcoal briquettes.
Soak the briquettes in lighter fluid and then wait as it soaks into each coal.
Then, after about five minutes, pour on a little bit more.
Wait [...]

Having grown up in New York, I’m an avid reader of the New York Times and absolutely love their Style section, where you can also find the Dining and Wine subsection. In that Dining and Wine section you’ll find a great little column called The Minimalist written by Mark Bittman and this week his article [...]

The potato is the perfect grilling vegetable because you can pretty much mess everything up and the potato is still pretty good. You can slice them, dice them, cube them, or leave them whole and they’ll turn out great on the grill no matter what you do. The key is simply letting them cook all [...]

Grilling with wood chips is one of the great secrets in barbecue and getting that smoky flavor into the meat is something most weekend grill maestros don’t often do. That being said, grilling with wood chips in charcoal is a relatively easy task – you simply sprinkle the chips in with the charcoal and the [...]

If you recently purchased a new grill, a very important tip that isn’t stressed enough (or publicly enough) is that you need to “season” it. Seasoning refers to coating your grill grates with some sort of vegetable oil in order to protect them int he cooking process.
You can season before you cook or, if you [...]

The rule of thirds is something I read in an article by Les Brand, the author of The Barbecue Hut, and it refers to splitting up the space on your open charcoal grill into different temperature areas. He recommends that you only layer coals underneath two thirds of your grill, for the highest temperature cooking [...]

The Washington Post ran an article yesterday on how to pick the perfect steak and so I, of course being the novice, had to share this with the rest of you all.
The biggest thing I took away from the article was that the butcher behind that counter at the supermarket might not know more than [...]

Don’t want to go out and buy BBQ sauce at $5 a bottle? Make your own with a 20 cent can of coke, some ketchup, and any spices you like personally.
Here’s a recipe I think would work out nicely:
1 cup – Coca Cola
1 cup – Heinz Ketchup
1/2 tsp. pepper
1/2 tsp. garlic powder
1/2 tsp. paprika
1/2 tsp. [...]