I got a Weber ‘Jumbo Joe’ grill last summer and so far it’s been a great grill. We had some unusually warm January weather last week and I decided to bust out the grill. I was surprised, however, to find that the grill already had a light layer of rust on it. I distinctly remember carefully cleaning the grill with a wire brush when I put it away for the season (early October) and also made sure to put a cover on the grill and have kept the grill the entire time inside our three-season porch. I don’t believe the grill was ever rained or snowed upon during that interval and wouldn’t expect it to oxidize that quickly.
Is this normal? Is there something one can treat a grill with to prevent rust from forming during the winter? How best to remove rust from a grill? Lastly, would ingesting a small/incidental amount of rust be harmful? (I tried to scrape off all the rust I could with a wire brush but may not have gotten it all)
After you clean the grill grate, put some vegetable oil on a paper towel and rub it all over, both sides. I usually go over mine twice to make sure I covered it. During the warm months, I grill fairly often and may not do this every time, but I always do it when I know I won’t be using it for a while.
If you clean the grill, you should put a coat of oil on the grill grates to prevent rust. Spray with cooking spray, and don’t be afraid to coat it well. Bare metal will rust over just from atmospheric moisture, even without getting “wet”.
And, no, a little bit of rust left on will be fine. It won’t hurt you, and anything else will get burned off when you preheat the grill.
Your grill doesn’t need to be in contact with rain or snow - in many places there’s enough moisture in the air to start oxidizing iron. The reason to have a grill cover is that repeated cycles of exposure to rain/snow and subsequent drying will speed this process up.
Any iron or steel will rust unless given a reason not to: either because of the makeup of the steel (stainless grades) or because of coatings.
If the rust bothers you, you can keep your grates oiled to retard rusting. Alternately, you can replace your grates with either ceramic coated grates, or stainless ones. The stainless ones can show tiny rust spots, in areas where the localized Cr content is below the 12% needed to have Cr2O3 layer formed to protect the steel, or if they’ve been exposed to very high heat (higher than normal grill temps).
You can remove rust by sanding or brushing, or by exposing it to acid. Vinegar is easy and fairly safe, phosphoric or hydrochloric acids are faster, but are dangerous depending on concentration and frankly a bad idea for dyi. Also, I wouldn’t want to cook on grates cleaned with harsh acids.
While excess iron ingestion can be harmful, odds are that normal use of even a rusty grill won’t ever get you to that point.
There’s plenty of moisture in air to rust your grill; it doesn’t need to “get wet.”
Cleaning the rust off with a wire brush like you did is fine. Rust is iron oxide and it’s used as a food colorant - it’s not harmful to eat.
You can wipe the grill with vegetable oil before you put it away to help protect it.
My grill never rusts because I never clean it. Just before the food goes on and the grill is smoking hot, I brush the place where the food is going with the wire brush to get rid of char ash and that’s that. The edges are covered in baked on char but I don’t care - all it does is protect the grill.
Food squeamishness is a recurring theme here, and I have a friend that cleans his grill with oven cleaner after every use, but I don’t see any reason to get crazy about cleaning something that gets sterilized every time just before you use it.
Same here. However, if I go too long between grills, the moisture finds its way in and I get some weird rust spalling. The grill in places almost looks like the remains of the Titanic.
Same for a pizza stone. After baking a pizza in the oven, enjoying the meal and allowing the stone to cool a bit (but not cold), I wipe with a dry paper towel to remove anything sticking and leave it at that. As long as the stone remains seasoned, it’s always nonstick and clean. It just looks like it’s been on the garage floor under a car with a perpetual oil leak.
At this point I think I will coat it with cooking oil for seasonal storage and henceforth never clean the grill again. I would have thought the salts and acids from various marinades and foods would have corroded the grill but the consensus sounds like that’s evidently not the case. In any event I now know that cleaning the grill after use WILL promote rust.
And why WAS that, exactly? So much time, materials, and labor wasted every day bringing the grill back to a shine. For what? I assumed the buildup could cause uneven temperatures on the surface, but I would think it would take a while for that to happen. Why not just use a grinder with a brush attachment once per week?
The GM at this new store i opened was fanatical that it look EXACTLY like the day the wrap came off (I’m talking surface, sides, vents, bottom, etc.), and it was killing our labor budget having a cook clean it. I would get the cook to do the rough stuff, then I would let him go and finish cleaning it on manager salary. I got so fed up with it one time, that I stayed until 5:30 am once to get the damned thing PERFECT. The district manager was so upset they nearly fired the GM. Lots of discussion were had with him about “Quality of life”, and whatnot.
There are probably stainless grates available for your grill. I have the Weber Smokey Joe Platinum which at 18.5" seems to be about the same as the Jumbo but I’ve never worried about rust. I think the stock ones are nickle plated. I can’t say my food grate shines like new but it seems to have help up quite well over the years.
