Summer Grilling - Part Four - Tools and Gadgets

June 24, 2011

The is the fourth in the series of summer outdoor cooking commonly called (here in the United States at least) grilling.

Part one covered Choosing the Grill(s) themselves, part two Grilling with Propane or Natural Gas, part three Grilling with Charcoal, and finally this article which covers many if not most of the gadgets you can acquire for better grilling.

The most important consideration to make when selecting grilling tools is safety; you want to keep your hands a respectable distance from the heat source. After all, you are attempting to cook a meal not your hands.

For that reason grilling tools look very similar to kitchen tools except that the handles are roughly twice as long as those you'd find in the kitchen.

The Bare Minimum
There are four tools that should be considered the "bare minimum" for grilling. These are tongs, spatula, wire brush, and fork.

Tongs
Tongs are an excellent tool for picking up and moving almost any grilled item, from steak to whole bell pepper. The best tongs will be long handled, spring loaded and designed for easy cleaning.

Spatula
Though you can pick up ground meat items with tongs, it's a risky proposition. For items that are flat and composed of minced material, spatula is the tool of choice. As with the tongs, the spatula should have a long handle, have a angled edge (at the front or front and side), and be easy to clean.

Fork
Some items you'll grill will simply be too large to handle with tongs or spatula. A roast is a good example. For items this large and bulky a fork is the way to go. As with the tong and spatula above the fork should have a long handle, have at least two tines, and be easy to clean.

Wire Brush
A long handled wire brush is essential for preparing the grill just prior to cooking on it.

Though stainless steel wire brushes are the most common, I heartily recommend a brass brush. The reason is simple. When the grill surface is prepared by first brushing and then oiling the grating, you do not want to remove the "seasoning" created by the baked on oil from prior cooking sessions.

A stainless brush, though long lasting and efficient, is much more likely to remove this coating. Brass is a softer material and is less likely to remove the essential seasoning. Granted, any brush will remove that coating if too much pressure is applied or if the grill grating is brushed for an extended period of time, but your aim should be to knock off the baked on food particles and no more.

Cleaning
Good food safety habits demand that food be placed on the grill with a long handled tool. At least until you are experienced enough to do this bare handed. For that reason the tool used to place the food is often the very same tool used to remove the cooked food.

This means the tool should be completely washed and dried before using it to remove food, otherwise, your chances of contaminating the cooked food with bloody bacteria are high.

Though the above are the bare essentials you may also want to expand your tool chest to include some tools for additional safety, variety, or specialized cooking situations.

For example one or more grill mitts are good items to have. Pot holders, those thickened cloth squares so common in the kitchen, are just too easy to drop or lose control of around a grill.

If you are cooking steaks or other slabs of meat you don't have to use tongs or a fork; you can also use a meat turning hook.

If you are cooking fish fillets you may want to mitigate the risk of the fish falling through the grating as you try to turn it. A good tool for cooking fish over and open fire is the grilling basket.

All of these individual items are under twenty dollars apiece and some, once you start using them, will seem indispensable.

Grill Mitts
To be honest, you can probably use the oven mitt from your kitchen. It has the same basic design requirement as a grill mitt; it covers your hand and part of your forearm and provides some insulation between your bare hand and the fire.

I've known welders who use their welding gloves and I know of a competitive bar-b-que chef who uses nothing more than leather work gloves. In short, specialized mitts are not required, as long as you can put something between your valuable hands and the cooking surface that allow you to use your thumb and (at least) your forefinger.

Turning Hook
A turning hook is basically a specialized one-tine fork. I have one and use it often when cooking steaks of almost any size. As simple a tool as this is there are a number of reasons I prefer this over a fork:

• It leaves one hole instead of two or more
• A flip of the wrist turns the steak; a more complex maneuver is required of a fork
• It is very easy to clean

Grill Basket
Originally designed to "corral" fish this item is a "must have" if you are cooking small vegetables or other items that could possibly fall through the grate into the fire.

As a grill master your aim is to be able to cook anything over an open fire.

When choosing a basket, you want to choose carefully. If it has too much space inside your fish will flop around and potentially fall part in the basket. If it is too "tight" then you won't be able to grill jalapeño peppers, cherry tomatoes (why not?) or other small items.

Steve Raichlen, acclaimed author and grill chef, has come up with a clever solution (third item right); a grill basket that self adjusts.

The main problem with grill baskets is cleaning it. A solution is to run it through your dishwasher or clean it over the fire and lightly wire brush it.

I talked about this item in the Summer Grilling - Part Three - Cooking with Charcoal article, but since this is a tool and a very good one I'll cover it here as well.

Most people I know still use charcoal lighter fluid to start their fires. I'm not sure why; I know I was one of them for a very long time.

Maybe it's the fact that you see flames shooting off or your coals and that provides some assurance that you are going to get those coals started. Maybe it's just the presence of fire that makes lighting coals this way attractive in some primal way.

It is a very inefficient way to start a fire. Worse it pumps all sorts of unburned hydrocarbons into the air and you can't help but notice the unmistakable fumes of lighter fuel lingering in the air. None of that is attractive to me.

Still, it took years of listening to my brother expound on the benefits of a charcoal chimney before I actually bought one and tried it. I'll never go back to lighter fluid; never!

The benefits of a charcoal chimney are:

1. No charcoal lighting fluid is required; only a section of newspaper
2. The briquettes or lump charcoal start faster in a chimney
3. There are no fuel fumes
4. The chimney pays for itself after the tenth or fifteenth use

The main reasons I like a chimney are the lack of fumes and the fast (very fast) lighting times. But there are other reasons I like them. Charcoal lighter fluid runs about five bucks a bottle (highway robbery if you ask me) and a chimney costs about fifteen. The chimney becomes the cheaper alternative pretty quickly. With a long handle and a heat shield it is as safe to handle (if not safer) than trying to light a pile of fuel soaked coals without burning yourself. Modern newspaper is made from recycled and/or specifically grown wood so its a good for the environment. Also the ink now used for printing is soy based which means no volatile organic compound fumes. Very little paper is used to start a fire; one full sheet is all it takes. Finally, the lack of liquid fuel and the new low VOC inks mean you are pumping a lot less pollution into the air when you grill cook.

Grilling is such a popular pass-time that some manufacturers have brought items to market, specifically for grilling, that can really be passed up.

Most of these items are designed mainly to impress guests. But lets be honest here, these things have an impression factor of about two seconds. Kind of like that cool looking toy you got for Christmas as a kid; as soon as you figured out that it was lame you never touched it again.

Skewers
Specialized kabob skewers are a prime example. Why pay, on average, two and a half dollars per skewer on stainless steel when you can buy a package of one hundred bamboo skewers for a cent and a half each? Bamboo skewers can be cleaned and reused, but at a cent each they can be tossed out too. Bamboo is biodegradable as well; stainless steel not so much.

Boxed Anything
The boxed tool set is also one of those items you see marketed pretty often, but do you really need to make a presentation of your tool kit to visiting guests? Let me put this another way, if the tools are so nice that they need their own special box are you really going to want to mess them up using them? I think you get my point.

Woks, Perforated Pans, Etc.
Grill woks are also showing up. This is really a silly idea if you ask me. What is the point of a perforated wok? If you want to use a wok on your grill go right ahead, you certainly don't want to use one with holes in the bottom; what's the point? Wok cooking requires oils and sauces; those things are not going to stay in a wok with holes in it.

Weights, Planks and Baskets
Grill weights, corn baskets, and grilling planks. These are all really cute ideas, but you don't need specialized "just for the grill" tools. Any weighted item will hold food down as long as it is fire safe and flat. Imagine the "cool factor" of finding an old solid cast iron clothes iron.

What is the point of grilling corn if you need to put it in a basket to do it? Seems to me the corn basket defeats the purpose of grilling corn in the first place by depriving you of those lovely grill marks.

Any hardware store worth a visit will have cedar or hardwood planking. A cedar shingle will do just as good a job as a "store bought" plank marketed just for the grill.

Long Handled Basting Brushes
This really isn't that silly an item, but I never use one. If I need to brush my grilled items I buy a cheap bristle brush purposely to use it once and throw it away. I use the brush while wearing a grill mitt.

The reason is a brush is a perfect repository for bacteria and they are very hard to clean. In fact the best way to clean a basting brush is in the dishwasher and if you do that it might last five cycles at most.

So why buy a very hard to clean little used grill brush that could potentially poison your guests?

Some of the tools you need for good grilling really are essential, but there really aren't that many. Basically tongs, spatula, fork and a wire brush are all you really need.

A basket or perforated tray is nice if you are grilling small items or fish, but consider using heavy aluminum foil instead. Foil will keep the food from going through the grate and it's much easier to clean (toss it or recycle it) than a specialized tool.

When purchasing items for grill cooking or just browsing the aisles of your hardware or grill store try to imagine what you already own that can be used instead. Re-purposing kitchen tools is allowed.

Master grilling does not require as many tools as you'd find in your kitchen. Better still some of the items you already own can be taken outdoors and used there.

The author was not compensated in any way, either monetarily, with discounts, or freebies by any of the companies mentioned.

Though the author does make a small profit for the word count of this article none of that comes directly from the manufacturers mentioned. The author also stands to make a small profit from advertising attached to this article.

The author has no control over either the advertising or the contents of those ads.