For the past 17 years I’ve been grilling and smoking and bbq’ing over coals using twin 22" Weber kettles. One of them has a rotisserie attachment which is simply awesome (which the Food Channel has under exploited, imo).
Anywho… this weekend I caved and bought (and assembled) a Char-Griller 4100 simply because gas is quicker, and at times more convenient.
My question is, how is this thing going to work? How is it going to ‘grill’ food? I thought it would have a bed of lava rock that would heat up and act just like coals. However there are no lava rocks. What there are is four gas ‘burners’ with tiny holes along both sides from which hot flames will spew. But! There are also four plate-metal ‘shields’ that stretch across the burners which will entirely cover any open flame. I have not turned it on yet because when I do it cannot be returned. Did I just buy a big oven? How does it sear if there is no open flame? Using charcoal for my entire grilling career the heat source is obvious. What is the straight dope on these kind of non-lava-rock grills? I asked the guy at the hardware store and he called the heat shields flavor bars. Which sounds ludicrous to me. Shouldn’t something down in the belly of the grill be getting red hot?
Many thanks, in advance. Dear mods, if this is the right place I trust you will move my thread. I’ve googled and searched the forums with no luck. Someone who has a grill like mine will have the straight dope I hope.
If the cast iron grates are heavy enough they can hold a lot of heat. But the pre-heat time may disappoint you. The link has a specification of 12000 (BTUs?) for heat output. Not that much grill wise. Why did you give up on charcoal?
That looks like a bog-standard gas grill to me. I’ve never heard of “lava rock” grills.
Gas grills are different than coal grills. Sounds like you were expecting basically a coal grill with an easy way to light it? (a stream of gas instead of a match)
How do you think hamburger joints get their burgers cooked? Certainly not over coals or in an oven (mostly). They use gas grills.
There will be flames. There will even be smoke. You cook the food over the flame just like you might cook a bell pepper over the open flame of a gas stove.
You lose natural smoke flavor from the charcoal. You can supplement your gas grill with products, like soaked wood chips, that will return smoky flavor.
You will get smoke when pieces/juices of the food you are cooking get burned up, but that won’t supply any new flavor.
When I care enough and have time, I use wood chips marketed for gas grilling. When I am realistic and rushed, I use “Liquid Smoke”.
Gas grills, like charcoal grills, have three heat transfer mechanisms at play:
[ol][li]Radiation: Those metal plates are directly heated by the flames below, and then produce infra-red radiation (i.e., heat) which cooks the food[]Conduction: Assuming you’ve pre-heated your grill, the grilling surface is very hot when you put the food onto it. That conducts heat directly to the food, resulting in those nice grill marks[]Convection: Air surrounding those little flames is heated, creating a circulation of hot air through the grill. This works best, obviously, when the grill is closed.[/ol][/li]So, to the extent that the convection piece mirrors a fancy high-end oven, then, yes, it’s an oven. That ignores the conduction and radiation pieces of the equation, though.
Philster, I think you may be selling the “self smoking” angle a little short. When fat drips onto the hot surface below, the resulting smoke is not the same in terms of flavor compounds as the original fat. It may not add a lot of new flavors, but I think it can safely be said these substances produced in that reaction are “new flavor.” Just to pick a small nit.
The gas grill of my parents always had a bed of lava rocks, on a grate. The gas underneath the rocks heated them red hot, and then above the lava rocks was the cooking grill. Just to be clear my new grill has nothing but the burners (the tube with tiny holes) and then a peice of sheet metal kind of in a v-shape fits over the burners. For the life of me I cannot figure out how anything is going to get grilled. My friend’s grill has lava rocks, too.
ps- my twin Weber’s are not getting replaced… the gas grill is basically for fast grilling, ie when I don’t want to go to the trouble of starting a fire.
Our first gas grill (inherited from the previous owner of our house) had the lava rocks; basically they had the same function as the metal bars below the grate in newer ones. They caught drips and those burned, giving the food some extra flavor, and they diffused the heat a bit so that the grill grate was more evenly heated, I think. And they made it look like there was real charcoal in there, which may quite possibly have been their primary purpose :).
My grill has sheet metal between the flames and the grilling surface. The sheet metal is pressed into a zigzag (if looking from the edge, it looks like this: ^v^v^v^v^v^v^v^v). Those are, for some reason, called the flavorizer bars :rolleyes:. I don’t think they do much beyond diffusing the flame a bit.
The grate definitely gets hot enough to leave sear-marks on the food.
Advantages vs. charcoal: Faster to get going. Easier to control temperature and let things cook for a long time (e.g. tomorrow I’m planning to smoke a chicken). Less messy. When it’s off, it’s OFF - no need to make sure those coals are out (a lesson a friend learned the heard way :().
Disadvantages: flavor isn’t as good.
I have never smoked food using a charcoal grill (I have done burgers etc. on them). Smoking is a breeze using a gas grill: you get soaked wood chips and put them on the bars (or lava rocks) in a foil pouch on one side, put the food to be smoked on the grate on the other side, start 'er up on the wood side, leave the other side off, close the lid, and go away (well, nearby obviously!). Periodically, sniff the air and enjoy that smoky aroma. Every couple of hours, get a fresh packet of chips, lift the lid, swap out the packet quickly, close the lid…
I got the best of both worlds quite by accident. I was given an Aussie Bonza 4 Deluxe as a gift. I never knew that dual fuel grills existed. With the throw of a lever it can be converted from a gas cooking configuration, to a bed configuration for cooking with charcoal.
However, I found that for me, putting 8 or 10 small chunks of charcoal off to the side when it is in the gas configuration has them ashing up nicely by the time the grill has warmed up and it is enough to give a pretty authentic charcoal smoke flavor. I get the temperature control and consistency of gas, and that wonderful charcoal flavor too.
I haven’t seen the “lava rock” style of grill in a long time. Those are way old-fashioned. What you’ve got is the standard type of gas grill that almost everyone has.
To be honest I don’t fully understand what your question is. The surface that you put the food on is the grilling part. Food gets “grilled” when you put it on a grill and add enough heat. It doesn’t really matter “how” it’s heated. Hell, there are even electric grills.
You seem to be stuck on the flavorizer bars. All they do is make the heat more evenly distributed and protect the burners from getting gunked up. I don’t believe metal gets any less hot than lava rocks. My understanding is the industry moved to the metal bars because they’re more uniform than the rocks.
P.S. You should’ve gotten a Weber. They really beat anyone else in quality.
Thanks for your reply. This is my first gas grill… I’ve used real charcoal my entire career… so I guess I’m accustomed to having some sort of flaming, burning, glowing embers to cook over. Such as the lava rocks of my parents gas grill. The grill I bought has only gas burners to create heat but no open flame which makes me :dubious:. Soon as I procure a butane tank I will find out how it all works.
My friend has a Weber (with lava rocks) … for the price I didn’t think his was worth a thousand dollars more.
When grease drips from meat onto the “flavor bars”, it will flare up and give you the yellow flame you’re looking for. It’s pretty easy to get a full char on your burgers that way. Pretty much what the lava rocks did - provide a really hot surface for fat to ignite on.
It just needs to get hot enough in there, there’s nothing magical about coals over a flame, just like a cast-iron skillet when hot enough will sear the heck out of a piece of critter, but there’s no direct flame contact.
You are really, really getting fa too hung up on an aesthetic component. Those lave rocks (really pieces of pumice) have the exact same function as the metal shields/flavorizer bars/whatever else the manufacturer wanted to call those little sheet metal thingies. They serve the same purpose. That purpose is to take up heat and re-radiate it. They don’t have to look all lumpy and knobbly to do that. They don’t have to visibly glow to do that.
You’re really over-thinking things here. Gas grills work fine.
Philster, I agree. I have a smoker box I put in mine for that purpose. We had to take down a crabapple tree a few years ago, and I’ve been using chunks from the stump for some nice applewood smoke taste on chicken and pork.
Back when I grilled a lot I had a gas grill for awhile. I didn’t just have one thin layer of lava rocks with gaps in between, I bought another bag or two so that I had it about 3 rocks deep. When I cooked I slopped plenty of BBQ sauce and marinade on stuff and most of it ran off and got absorbed by the rocks. Also, most of the fat and juices over time got into the rocks rather than missing them if you had a thinner layer of rocks.
Over the years, lot of residue that would smoke like the dickens when the grill was hot built up. I never cleaned anything in that grill. It got to looking pretty nasty inside but you could really smoke stuff, get flames to flare up, and give anything on the grill a nice visible searing.
Lots of rocks, lots of “juice”, never clean it IME.
Oh, a minor clarification. My nasty,smokey, lava rocks smoked enough to impart a slightly smokey flavor to the burgers, shrimp, chicken, whatever that were being cooked. It DID NOT smoke enough to actually “smoke” the meat. You still needed wood chips soaked in water some for that.
