I've been on a quest to grill perfect restaurant quality steaks for the past several years and enjoying the process immensely!
I thought I had the formula perfected:
HOT GrillGrates grill steaks fast and sear them hard for bumper to bumper rare with a nice charred crust. Now I'm hearing from competition teams winning with GrillGrate who are doing things a little differently and I'm getting questions about reverse searing? I have to admit I've never tried it until last night. A little research led me to
Chris Finney of Iron Pig BBQ who helped pioneer reverse searing in 2001. This 'method' was validated by Alton Brown and America's Test Kitchen a few years later. I contacted Chris and he ran me through his approach and we discussed how to do it on a gas grill.
I learned a lot about how to control and vary temps even better on my gas grill. I can't believe I had not disconnected GrillGrates before now to get 2 zone heating!
- First smoke and slow roast the steak at 200F or 190F - gentle indirect heat with a remote probe monitoring internal temps (I really enjoy the Maverick ET 732)
- Set up gas grill 1/2 on low, the other 1/2 OFF
- Separate GrillGrates on the low side so they are not attached to the heated side
- Bring up to hood temp of approx 250F. I noticed the heated side had GrillGrate temps of 400F while the non-heated side had GrillGrate temps of 200F- perfect!
- Remove steak when internal reaches a few degrees below your target temp and loosely tent
- Reset grill to HIGH all burners on- and get the GrillGrates as hot as you can get them
- Grill 1 minute a side- turning only once to get that perfect seared surface
I was pleasantly surprised and will be "practicing" again real soon. This may be the best of all worlds: low and slow followed by hot and fast. I'm talking about grilling great steaks here!
Please share your comments, secrets and ideas with us so we can keep practicing!
Don't forget to set your clocks forward!
P.S. My expertise took a big jump forward when Meathead Goldwyn of
amazingribs.com convinced me to stop poking my meat and get an instant read thermometer. I wonder why I was just guessing every time. Now its precision grilling baby!
