10 Tips that will Make Your Grilling Better This Summer

As a Culinary Adventurist, getting her hands into food before…

PRESENTED BY SABER GRILLS
Grilling season is here. Are you prepared? Here are 10 useful tips to armor yourself with before entering the ring of fire.

1. Pre-soak Skewers

Better Homes and Gardens

Before skewering those big chunks of meat, veggies, and fruit, make sure you pre-soak wooden skewers to prevent them from burning and charring off.

2. Oil the Grill

The Yummy Life

Getting the right temperature is key, but there is a detail that often goes unnoticed. Oiling the grill not only provides a nonstick surface, but also evens out the heat when setting the food on it. Get those grill marks bold and right!

3. Create Heat Zones

Country Living

There are typically two heat zones: one for direct heat/flame when cooking and another for allowing already cooked food to keep warm and toasted without overcooking.

4. Use Foil as a Grilling Brush

Better Homes and Gardens

Here’s a MacGyver tip: don’t have a brush? Rip off some foil and crumple into the size of an orange. Use tongs to dip the foil ball in your marinade or sauce of choice and baste away!

5. Add Smokiness

Kingsford

Here is a simple guideline to follow when adding a smokey flavor to your grilled food:
Applewood for sweetness
Mesquite for tang
Hickory for bacon-ish taste

6. Indent Center of Beef Patties for an Even-ness

Beef Loving Texans

It’s frustrating shaping the perfect patty, only to put it on the grill and it poofs up in the center! What is the answer to this? Take a spoon or just your good ol’ thumb and make a soft indent in the middle of the perfectly shaped patty.

7. Bone-in vs. Boneless

Kotaku.com

Bone-in fish, chicken, and steak will take longer to cook on the flame than boneless will. Give it several minutes longer on the grill should you decide you want your protein bone-in!

Ceviche with Serrano and Avocado

8. Doneness – The Finger Method

This is a neat trick. It’s just as the diagram looks! Depending on how you like your meat, gently tap on the muscle on the grill and compare it to the finger method. No more cutting into the center to check its done-ness!

9. Tame the Flame

Country Living

There will be flare ups, or will there? If your grill all of a sudden seems to catch on fire, don’t burn off your eyebrows trying to put out the flame. Simply put the lid over the grill. It’s the best way to tame the flame, because it reduces the amount of oxygen in the fire. Or – if you want to avoid flare ups altogether – check out the infra red grills from Saber Grills, and no matter how much fat you throw on them, they won’t flare up (one extra perk with that, is that you can actually throw a slab of BACON straight on the grill for breakfast)!

10. Use an Onion to Clean the Grill

glutensugardairyfree.com

For some magical reason, and based on common knowledge this works. Just like washing your hands with against stainless steel after chopping garlic, using an onion to clean the grill does wonders.

Reena Retuta

As a Culinary Adventurist, getting her hands into food before it gets onto the plate comes naturally to Reena. She spit-roasted her first whole pig at the age of eight, harvested hazelnuts in Italy, butchered a lamb at a ranch in Australia, spent a summer splitting open live lobsters at a traveling pop-up kitchen in Holland, and visits a small vineyard along the central California coast to make wine and olive oil each year. She’s determined to find the elusive white truffle in her lifetime. A graduate from the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Italy, Reena holds a deep appreciation for cultural traditions in food, and her favorite simple pleasure is sharing a meal al fresco.