There is only a few minutes of super hot starter chimney time before you need to be rotating in new charcoal though imo.
ETA: I always buy the biggest chimney I can find and use them until they rustout. I guess the optimal plan is to load as many as you can in a grill and put a grate over all of them. I assume this has probably been done on reddit already but if so I’ve never seen it.
Sous vide counts as “kitchen” for purposes of this discussion, imo.
Like, 7 chimney starters welded together and then put a grill grate over them. That would be awesome. You would need more than a bag of charcoal but that would work great. I need that Craigslist welder.
yeah but your ribeye is cooking in the kitchen for an hour while it’s sous vide-ing, and one the grill for 5 mins tops.
OK? If it’s hot enough it’s half that tbh.
Anyway, to get back to this, I think where outdoor cooking clearly beats or at least cannot be easily replicated indoors:
Smoking. I like roasted chicken, but smoking it on my Weber kettle cannot easily be done indoors, and there’s no equating their flavor.
Marinated meats, especially if there’s some sort of sugar in the marinade and you want a char/sear on the meat. You can kinda achieve this with a broiler, but in my hands it’s never been as good, and you often smoke up your whole kitchen and make a huge mess of pans attempting it. I’m not sure why drippings onto coals are labeled a huge negative when drippings onto a pan under the broiler smell just as smoky as they start to burn. Sure, you can put foil on the pan, but that doesn’t prevent your smoke detector from going off. Attempting something like this indoors is going to make you regret it:
I’ll give you smoking. I don’t do it, but I considered it and that’s why I added the “especially if we’re talking about a gas grill.”
I haven’t really tried #2. But I can see that making sense. I would definitely disable the smoke detector prior to trying it if I did it indoors.
now that i think about it, i can SV a steak, infuse with smoke, then blow-torch some grill marks on it while inside next to a window. i get grilling, but firing up a grill isn’t in any sense easier than a kitchen.
i’ll have to think about smoked chicken. i’ve marinated with liquid smoke before. after which roasting might be relatively close in taste.
I am a big fan of the Chef Steps smokerless smoked brisket for a lot of reasons, but having done it many times, the difference between finishing it in the oven and finishing it on the Weber is stark, despite the abundance of liquid smoke in the recipe.
Kenji’s food lab book has a pan only steak method. Liquid Smoke is nasty.
liquid smoke just needs to be used very sparingly.
when i say infused with smoke, i mean these weed vaporizer looking thingies.
i don’t doubt the different is yuge. few things beat a great brisket.
The recipe actually uses it in abundance quite well. It doesn’t really taste off when finished in the oven. It just tastes so much more right with the real thing.
95% of my steak cooking is pan only, I’m in the cast iron > grill camp for sure.
Actually doesn’t need to be cast iron, for a while I was cooking my steaks in my stock pot and was getting a killer crust plus the pot contained all the oil splatter.
I would have thought that a stock pot would “trap moisture” around the steak, maybe it doesn’t. Or maybe it does and it doesn’t matter.
This article is a solution in search of a problem. Grilling is awesome. Broiling is awesome. Not everything is a controversy.
Hot takes that annoy everyone on Twitter are the future of journalism. Just tweet that ketchup is the ideal condiment for steak and wait for the attention to roll in.
Its kind of the present of journalism.
Why can’t Joe Biden get ketchup and steak to work together, that’s what I want to know!
