New to gas grilling? Here are our tips on how to get the most out of your gas grill.
Grilling on a gas grill has many advantages over cooking with charcoal.
With a gas grill, you can quickly and precisely control temperature on your grill, you can easily create a two zone cooking setup and it’s still possible to add smoke to your cooking setup.
Here’s our recommendations on how you can use your gas grill to get the best possible results:
Tip 1: preheat and clean your grill
The first step before you’re going to cook is to preheat your grill.
You don’t want to put food on a cold grill and you don’t want to put food on a dirty grill. Preheating your grill will prevent both situations.
When you light the grill, turn all the burners to high and bring the temperature to about 500 degrees. Then take a grill scraper and clean off all the grates.
Once the grates are cleaned, lightly oil them to prevent the food from sticking to the grates. Now, you can change the heat to what your specific recipe calls for.
Tip 2: decide if you need to grill using direct or indirect heat
After preheating the grill, you need to consider what type of cooking setup your recipe requires – direct or indirect heat.
Direct heat works great for searing items like steaks, chops or burgers, while indirect heat works best for cooking thicker items. Direct heat means that your food is right over the heat source, whereas indirect heat works by having the food away from the heat source.
We always recommend buying a grill with at least three burners so you can make whichever setup you need.
To cook using direct heat, turn a burner on and put meat over it. To cook with indirect heat, turn one side of burners on and another side off. Put the meat over the unlit burners.
Indirect heating is also sometimes called a two zone setup. Two zone cooking means that you first sear your meat over high, hot heat and then remove it to the indirect heat side to finish cooking more slowly. This way thicker cuts of meat can have a crust on the outside but still cook evenly through. It’s the best of both worlds.
Tip 3: add smoky flavor using wood chips
One of the advantages of cooking with charcoal is the smoky flavor that is added to the food. However, you can still use wood chips with a gas grill to add smoke flavor to your food.
Our final tip is that you can wrap water soaked wood chips in aluminum foil to make a packet. Go ahead and poke holes in the packet and then put it directly over a heat source, either on the grates or on the vaporizer bars over the burners. There are also ready made metal boxes that can hold smoke chips if you’d like purchase a more durable solution.
Wrapping up
Grilling with gas is easy and can lead to great results. Just remember, clean your grill, set up for the type of cooking you need, and add smoke if you’d like. Have more questions? Stop by the store, or drop us a line. We’ll be happy to help! See you soon at Lake Geneva Country Meats.