Grilling Bible
The TWO Commandments
Thou shalt BLOOM thy meat
Thou shalt REST thy meat
There are plenty of other little tips and suggestion I will make, but the two cardinal rules above are the ones you should never, ever skip if you want great results in grilled meats.
So what do they mean?
“Blooming” essentially means bringing the meat to room temperature before you attempt to cook it. This is crucial if you want even cooking. Here’s the reasoning: meat cooks from the outside-in. If the steak came straight from the refrigerator, the outside parts start cooking sooner and reach the desired state of done-ness much faster. By the time the heat has reached the center to START cooking, the outer parts are already medium to well done. So by the time the center reaches medium, the outer half of the meat is completely overcooked, dry and flavorless. Some people worry about safety of meat just sitting on the counter, and I can assure you it’s FINE. Bacteria takes a minimum of 4 hours to grow to a level where there’s even a 1% chance of making someone sick. Blooming takes about an hour. No risk there. Plus, any bacteria that DOES grow is killed instantly by the heat of the grill.
“Resting” means allow the meat to sit – OFF of the heat – for a several minutes before serving it. For grilled steaks – 5-10 minutes. To know the importance of this, you have to understand how meat cooks. All muscle-meats contain water. As you cook it, the water heats up and moves through the meat transforming proteins along the way into a“cooked” state. As you flip a steak back and forth, the water is rising up – moving away from the heat source and it will tend to concentrate it self in the middle of the cut. Since meat is muscle, it will slightly contract in reaction to heat, and tighten up, pushing water through itself. Think of a sponge when you squeeze it tight – pushing water out of it’s cells. That’s what meat is doing in reaction to heat. By setting it off the heat, the muscle relaxes, the water absorbs itself back into the cells and you wind up with a tender piece of meat with the fats and juices (where all of the flavor is) still inside the meat itself.
Have you ever cut into a steak, and within a minute or so you find it swimming in a puddle of reddish liquid on the plate? We call that “bleeding out” and it’s caused by cutting into meat before it’s fully rested. All the liquids that concentrated in the center has not been reabsorbed into the meat. When it all rushes out onto the plate, you now lost almost every bit of flavor and moisture that was SUPPOSED to be in the expensive steak you just destroyed.
So those are the basic rules. Do those two things every single time you grill and I promise you will notice a big difference.
Now, a few other suggestions for good grilling. These are my personal preferences, so take them as such.
Brush your meat with a little olive oil on both sides. Then season with kosher salt and black pepper. The oil help hold the seasoning on the meat and help distribute heat more evenly along the surface. Plus it tastes good.
Turn often. Some grilling folks say the opposite, they will say cook halfway on one side, flip over and cook on the other until done. I disagree, simply because of the “moving water” I mentioned before. I find much more effective cooking if I am flipping the steaks about once a minute – moving the juices back and forth through the steak.
Undercook your steak a little. Since you now know about resting, you should also know that the hot liquid moving back into the muscle tissue are still cooking the meat – even though you’ve taken it off the grill. Everything hot continues to cook even when you remove the heat source. This is called “carryover” cooking. If you want you steak medium when you eat it, you should take it off the grill when it’s medium rare. Rest for 5-7 minutes and when you cut into it, it will be a perfect medium with all juices intact.
If you marinade something, be sure it doesn’t have a lot of sugar in the marinade. Sugars burn very quickly at high grill temps, and more than likely you will get a burned flavor on the outside of the meat before it’s cooked. This is why you often hear NOT to brush BBQ sauce onto something until right before you take it off the grill. Black, burned sugary sauce is not very tasty, at least to me.
Here's one for ya...do you have a good stir fry sauce recipe that isn't extremely ginger-heavy??? I can deal w/ a little ginger but too much and I'm turned off. I'm on the SouthBeach Diet and would have to substitute low sodium soy sauce, but any spices are good as long as they don't have added sugar.
