Grill Maestro

The concept of direct and indirect cooking is crucial whenever you’re talking about becoming a bona fide Grill Maestro (I am not one yet, but I’m working on it!). It sounds simple enough, direct cooking is when you cook directly on the fire or heat whereas indirect cooking is when you let the cooking occur in an area of the grill not exposed directly to flames but is simply hot. An oven is indirect cooking, a pan is direct cooking.

Okay, so what, why is that important? It’s important because you need to know how to use both if you are going to be effective on the grill. If you cook something thick entirely on direct heat, you’ll end up with something that’s burned on the outside and raw on the inside. Thicker steaks, if you want them medium done, will need some direct heat searing on each side follow by some indirect cooking afterwards to get the insides done. If you left it on the grill, the outside would burn before the inside would reach medium state.

With direct heat, think sear. Use it to sear the outside, get those nice grill marks on your burgers, hot dogs, and steaks. If you need to cook it for longer than a few minutes on each side, you’ll want to move it to indirect and let the heat cook it the rest of the way through.