The other day I had a steak cooked on The Big Green Egg and I can’t possibly exaggerate how good it was. It’s the best steak I’ve ever had in my life. Easily. I can’t stop thinking about that steak. I’m afraid I’ll never really enjoy a steak again because every time I have one I’ll think, “This is pretty good but, damn, that one time I had that steak cooked on The Big Green Egg…” Granted, it was a good cut of steak, but it came from a supermarket after all so I’m not talking restaurant grade or anything. As a result, I can only conclude that The Big Green Egg might be worth every freakin’ penny.
As I understand it, the thing is just a super charcoal grill. I don’t even really know what makes it so super, except that it cooks really hot. I’m just telling you, if it has anything to do with making a steak as good as the one I had the other day it has shot to the top of my list of things to irresponsibly buy.
I think that cooking on high heat is the key. Back on Graydon, when Dr. Pienkos was our roommate, we came across an article, from Maxim magazine, I think, that had some grilling tips. The technique was to get the grill crankin’ hot and cook your slab of meat for a relatively short amount of time. The trick was to then pull the meat off the grill and let it sit for a few more minutes, cooking the inside more by virtue of all the residual heat that is available for cooking on a super hot grill.
I got a nice grill for Christmas. It’s a charcoal model with an offset smoker section. Think of a barrel turned sideways, with a smaller sideways barrel attached. I have a smaller version of something that is very similar to this:
http://img.epinions.com/images/opti/12/57/New_Braunfels_Silver_Smoker1-resized200.jpg
To grill stuff, the meat and coals go in the main section. To do more complicated things like smoking and slow cooking, the coals go in the smaller firebox section and the meat goes into the bigger section. I haven’t gotten anywhere close to being adept enough to attempt the complicated stuff yet.
I also got this relatively inexpensive accessory called a charcoal chimney which makes the grilling much easier. This isn’t a picture of mine, but the design is near identical:
http://www.barbecue-store.com/images/stainlesssteelchimney.jpg
The idea is to lightly crumple up newspaper and place it underneath the grate which is just above the holes near the bottom of the chimney. The unlit charcoal goes in the top portion. Light the paper, wait about 15 minutes, dump coals in grill. That part is too easy.
The rest of grilling isn’t that easy for me yet. I did manage to season the inside of the grill today. Seasoning consisted of brushing the entire inside of the grill with vegetable oil, setting a fire, and closing it up with just enough oxygen to keep it burning for a few hours. If I understand the manufacturer’s recommendations, this was primarily a rust proofing step. I don’t know if I learned much about grilling, but I did get to build a nice fire in the firebox side and burn up a load of sticks and twigs from the yard. I think the burning the pine was helpful, as the seasoning process cures the resin and oil onto the metal.
With luck, I will be a master of some of the simple grill techniques by the end of this summer.
ps- I couldn’t figure out how to put images in the comments- I’ll look into it…
Yeah, I think the high heat is definitely the key. I have just your basic everyday $99 Target special charcoal grill, but I like cooking on it a lot more than the onld $200 gas grill I had. Part of it was probably the seasoning and stuff on the steak too, but I still contend that just the pure steak itself was unbelievable.
Of course back at my days at Red Dumpster I learned the value of high heat cooking as well. Pretty much everything that went into an over there went into that 600 degee mama and came out pretty damn good. It’s key with steak because the less cooking, the less tasty juice that escapes and when the outside gets seared fast very little can escape.
I know that places like Ruth’s Chris cook steaks at similar incredibly hot temperatures for very short periods of time. Seasoning them very, very lightly and serving them in a plate of boiling hot butter is not a bad idea either.