Where There's Smoke, There's Flavor: Real Backyard BBQ

By Jonathan Berohn

First off, let’s get one thing straight. You can’t make real barbecue in a gas grill. Barbecue is slow cooking over smoke. Fast cooking over flame is grilling. There’s a big difference. Some people think gas grills do a decent job if you add wood chips to a smoking box or some such ridiculousness.

They are wrong. If you want real barbecue flavor you need a real fire—a fire made from wood, not gas. There are perfectly fine uses for gas grill. They can, I don’t know…keep your deck from blowing away? Seriously, if you want convenience for every day grilling, gas is great—well acceptable, anyway. If you want flavor, roll that behemoth back into the garage and break out a charcoal grill.

What to Look for in a Grill

If you already have a charcoal grill, you can make it work for barbecue. It you don’t have a grill, look for one with a big cooking surface, good ventilation, and hinged grills for easy coal adding. The best grills I’ve ever found come from Weber. You can buy them just about everywhere (hardware, department, and grocery stores are good bets) and online at the Weber Web site. They have all kinds of fancy models with everything from attached work areas to gas lighters (ONLY for heating up the coals).

Personally all that seems like overkill. I have the bare bones 22 1/2 inch One Touch model and it does fine. It doesn’t have any fancy lighting mechanism, but that’s easy to get around, and actually a plus.

The Fire

The reason it’s a plus is because of the nature of barbecuing. To cook something slow over smoke, you have to add new coals to keep the fire going. To do that you need some way of lighting new coals so you can add them. To do that you will want to get a coal chimney. Coal chimneys are basically steel tubes with a handle and a grate at the bottom. You light some sort of flame underneath (newspaper works well—never, ever use lighter fluid—yuk) and sit back and watch physics do its thing. You can buy chimneys where you buy your grill. You can also find them online at Weber as well.

The Fuel

The final ingredient—OK there’s the food, but if you do all this right it almost cooks itself—is the fuel. To get good smoke you need wood. That’s all there is to it. Fortunately you can buy wood chunks at most grocery stores now. I prefer blending hickory and mesquite, but experiment. You’ll never know until you try it. You might want to add a couple actual pieces of charcoal to keep the fire going. If you do, buy something like Lazzari’s or Whole Foods wood charcoal. Briquettes are almost as bad as gas.