Looking for BBQ tips, tricks, and general good times

Cafe Society
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DiosaBellissima, hope you dont see this as a hijack - but in the interests of minimising ignorance and all that - and it’s not worth starting another thread - especially considering the last line of your OP.

Some translations:

Beetroot (US beet) - an ingredient found on hamburgers in Australia. Obtained sliced in a can. The beet is pickled in a sweet, vinegery solution, which is discarded. It is included in ‘hamburger with the lot’ in most Australian take-away shops and on the ever-popular ‘salad sandwiches’ obtained from sandwich shops. I mentioned this thread to my wife - she said that Mcdonalds now have a McOz burger with beetroot.

BBQ - I thought a BBQ was the same over here as everywhere else. It is plate or grill with a heat source underneath (usually gas these days) that you cook meat on outdoors. Prior to the 1990s, these used to be wood fired, brick or besa-block shrines to carnivouresness, which also served as rubbish incinerators or spider sanctories in the off-season. Now we have meals-on-wheels: a trolleys with hot-plate and gas cylinder attached.

Grill - to cook with infrared radiation. The food usually kept off the heat source by a series of parallel metal bars (a grill). Heat souce can be coals from wood or charcoal, but most commonly now is volcanic rock heated by gas. One can also grill underneath a heat source - such as metal mesh heated by gas. By gas I mean LPG, not petrol you put in cars.

In a BBQ, meat is cooked on both the hot-plate and grill. Most BBQs have a hot-plate and grill section. The grill is good for giving the rich, distinctive, polyaromatic hydrocarbon flavour. However the flat hot-plate is most commonly used. Reason you tilt the BBQ is to allow the fat that comes off the meat to drain away - usually to start a fire inside the BBQ, which is a good thing because it heats up the plate more than the pissweak gas does. Another reason to put the snags on first. These act a a fuel source for the steak and chops.

Sausages, onions, lamb chops and steak are the most commonly cooked things on a BBQ. Baby octopus, fish, shish kebabs and vegetables can also be found being cooked on BBQs across the coutry. Making hamburgers at a BBQ sounds like a lot of effort - not something I have ever seen done. Here all the meat and cooked onion is collected and served on a large plate together with a selection of large bowls of salads and bread rolls. The guests help them selves to the meat, salad, rolls and beer.

Steak is expensive here too now - I bought some for a BBQ at a mates place tomorrow at $22/kilo which is probably about US$16/kilo or one hours average wages.

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Thanks for the translations, Antechinus. Perhaps I should tell you, though, that “beeting your meat” has rather a different meaning here. :wink:

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Whatever you do, don’t do what my husband did. Don’t press down on the burgers with the spatula like you would if they were in a frying pan. It simply DOESN’T WORK on a grill.

That’s all I got.

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Diosa you might want to take a look over here For more tips on grilling.
When bying ground beef for grilling, do not go below 20% fat. Fat = flavor. <20% = no flavor.
If you are cooking for a few, then buy ground chuck. If you are cooking for a mob, consider going to Smart and Final and buying a 10 lb box of premade patties.
The advantage here is no labor, and they are all exactly the same size which means they will all cook exactly the same way. for an inexperienced chef this is a big plus.

If you want to go for the advanced course, give me a holler, my backyard is only about an hour or so down the road. :smiley:

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Hubby says the best way to test doneness of food on a grill is with a thermometer. Burgers need to be cooked to 165F to kill all the nasties that could be lurking there (although, IMHO, they end up like shoe leather if you cook them that long :frowning: ) He also says, use the best quality meat you can afford (he regularly does ground tenderloin burgers where he works, but then again, people are paying $14 for one), handle it as little as possible, and just a little salt and pepper while cooking. He says “Do you want to taste the meat or the spices?”

Olive

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Although I’m not in the same boat I do fall into the category of only cooking things that are easy to prepare. I just tried Teriyaki Shish Kabobs for the first time and damn was it gooood. One of the tricks I’ve learned is to go to a site like cooks.com and surf for a dozen of the same type of recipe. That way I can get an idea of what the key ingredients are and can then add or subtract what doesn’t sound good. I wanted to try a Teriyaki recipe that used fresh ginger so I surfed “Teriyaki Shish Kabobs”,“ginger” and gotthis.

Your guests will love this and you can add whatever you want. I used steak, mushrooms, Vadalia onion, cherry tomatoes, shrimp, zucchini, green pepper, yellow pepper, fresh pineapple, and peaches. (the peaches were great).

You can marinade the meat for 2-8 hrs. It’s not that critical because you are going to baste everything with the leftover juice while grilling. The marinade is supposed to tenderize the meat. When using fresh pineapple you can’t let it touch the meat because it will tenderize it into mush. You can also pre-cook your onion, mushrooms and zucchini. I like to cook the mushrooms a little in a butter/sherry sauce. Don’t cut the zucchini more than a 1/4" thick.

If you use wood skewers you should soak them in water so they won’t burn on the grill.

Side note: When I find a recipe that I like I put it in a sheet protector and then in a 3 ring binder. That way I can lay the book flat on a table while I’m cooking and not worry about spilling stuff on it. Great way to build a cookbook of things you really like instead of paying for books full of stuff you don’t.