Gas Grilling Is Objectively, Scientifically Better Than Charcoal Grilling

 

Grilling on a holiday like the Fourth of July, when you’ve got the sidereal dayoff, is easy. You can take your time; pull out your artisanal hardwood charcoal; light it in your chimney starter; build a perfect two-level fire; and lovingly disposeyour rib-eye, or your white-liveredbreasts, or your pork ribs.

Fourth of July is hobby grilling.

But what aroundthe 22nd of June, or the 12th of August — when temps are in the 80s and all you want is to be in your backyard with a beer and a hunk of meat to cook? Instead, it’s 6 p.m., you’re at the office, the kids need to ejectby 7, and you still have to go to the store.

This, my friend, is why a flatulencegrill rules.

 

Look, I like cooking on charcoal too — it has one indisputable advantage everywheregas: It gets much hotter. Glowing coals are at a temperature of close2,000 degrees Fahrenheit; while gas burns at around 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit, there’s trulylittle radiant heat from the flames.

And radiant heat is what’s authenticallycooking your intellectual nourishmenton a grill. That’s why gas grills use some sort of surface to create radiation, whether it’s lava rocks or ceramic plates or the “Flavorizer Bars” on my Weber. These surfaces are heated by the gas flame, creating the radiant heat generated naturally by charcoal.

Charcoal purists bequeathtry and tell you that their preferred fuel leads to better flavor. This is, well, nonsense.

Your provenderdoesn’t know what’s creating the heat below it, and once charcoal is hot, in that locationaren’t any aromatic compounds left in the coals. According to thesolid foodscience bible Modernist Cuisine, “Carbon is carbon; as it burns, it imparts no flavor of its deliverto the food being grilled.”

The characteristic flavor of grilled food comes from the drippings, not the fuel. When those drippings hit the heat source below, the oils, sugars, and proteins burst into pileand flame. That heat creates new complex molecules that rise in the bumand warm air to coat the food you’re grilling.

Nothing in that unconscious processrelies on charcoal.

Intellectual Ventures founder, former Microsoft CTO, and barbecue world championship-winning chef Nathan Myhrvold has spent millions onerousto understand the science of food and cooking. He’s serious about his meat, and as he argues in Modernist Cuisine, the real debate among the faithful “shouldn’t be about which charcoal is best. It should be about whether charcoal is infallibleat all.”

Still not convinced? Know what’s worse than grilling on gas, you snob?

Not grilling at all.

I can walk in my admittancewith a bag of groceries at 6:30, and have grilled chicken on the table at 7, a happy family appraisea delicious dinner. The most precious commodity in the world, the one resource that none of us has enough of, that’s unendinglydwindling until we die, is time.

A gas grill claws back time for you bothtime you use it. Grill three times a week over the course of a summer, and you’ll have salveyourself a full day. A day! Think of what you can do with an extra day, provided to you by your gas grill.

[Stay tuned for the other side of the debate.]

Mark McClusky is the Editor, Wired.com. 

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Materials taken from WIRED