If you’ve only just entered the community of barbecue enthusiasts and lovers, there’s a high chance that you experienced a massive number of tips and tricks that everyone believes are the truth. Some of them have a grain of truth in them and are worth using since they more often than not provide a great amount of help to everyone. Other tips are more misunderstood than anything else, while others still can be entirely false.
It’s hard to tell what tips and tricks are true and which aren’t. Even doing something as simple and testing them out can use up your precious food and money that you could have used somewhere else for something far more important. And, depending on what the tips and tricks suggest, using some of them can actually lead to you damaging your health.
This article covers some of the most common myths that are floating around in the barbecue enthusiasts’ communities and narrows down what is fact about each one. If you’ve decided to try your own hand at barbecuing or even just want to get a new grill to add to your outdoor kitchen, visit Dickson BBQ today.
Smoking your meat adds flavour to it
One of the more common ideas that many people believe when it comes to barbecuing is that smoking your meat is what actually adds flavour to it. Most of the time, this is true, but not all of the time. While the smoke does add flavour to the meat you cook on the barbecue, it’s only really effective for cooking sessions that are at least twenty minutes. At that point, the smoke the meat gets builds up its flavours. So don’t barbecue a steak for a few minutes hoping to get a smokiness to it.
The meat be at room temp before it gets cooked
This is one of the deadlier myths that can be spread from person to person and only becomes worse because of how it’s spread so often. When it comes to meat, never let it sit outside to come to room temp first. At specific temperatures, meat can grow bacteria and even gain viruses. The closer to room temperature the meat gets, the more bacteria it develops. These are the bacteria that lead to food-borne illnesses, some of which are highly contagious. In more severe cases, even something as simple as E Coli can kill you. Leaving it in the freezer or fridge until you’re ready to cook doesn’t make the meat taste any worse either.
You should only flip steaks once
You might have heard that, in order to get the perfect crust on both sides of your steaks, you should only flip them once. But if you’ve ever cooked meat, even off of the grill, you know this isn’t true at all. Flipping your steak more often - or burgers for that matter - ensures that the meat cooks properly and evenly. The frequent flipping also makes sure that your steaks and other flatter cuts of meat don’t end up curling around the edges, leaving you with a well of ketchup right in the middle of a burger. It also lets you know what side needs more cooking!
Wet wood chips are better for smoking
One of the tips that you might find is that you should soak your wood chips for at least an hour before you start grilling to get better smoke out of them. This, of course, isn’t true. If you grill using soaked wood chips, the smoke that comes out of them isn’t so much actual smoke as it’s just the water evaporating. If any smoke does come out of it, it’ll only do so after the chips are completely dry first, at which you’ve probably already taken the meat off of the grill. At worst, the chips will burn, but end up leaving a weird sap or mush behind that will more than likely grow mold that needs to be cleaned up.
If you’re using the chips to get smoke, toss them in dry. The ideal smoke that you want for smoking meat is called blue smoke since it’s tinted or coloured blue. It’s typically thin and wispy, but still perfect for getting the smokiness into your barbecued burgers. For this level of smoke, all you need to do is use dry wood chips - sometimes even dry hardwood chips - and a high level of heat.
Always use high heat for barbecuing
When it comes to grilling, though, high heat isn’t always needed, at least not constantly throughout a grilling session. While the high heat would cook faster and better thoroughly, it also makes the meat and veggies you cook on them incredibly dry. Many barbecue experts highly recommend that you instead lower the heat as it finishes cooking, letting it retain some of its moisture.
The red liquid that comes out of a steak is blood
If you’ve ever seen a medium or medium rare steak, you might find that there are red juices coming out of it when you cut through it. While your first instinct is to think that it’s blood and toss it onto a pan to cook more, do be aware that it usually isn’t. Often, the same liquid can seep out of a properly cooked steak as well, so it isn’t a matter of whether or not the steak’s undercooked. If you made sure to cook it to 165 Fahrenheit and the juices are still there, it’s a protein called myoglobin. It’s perfectly fine to eat!
Poking or cutting the meat leaks out juices
If your main goal is to get nice, juicy steaks, chances are that you’ve heard someone say to avoid poking holes into them or your steaks will end up losing some of that moisture. While this may be true, not all that much juice ends up leaking out of the meat from just one poke. While it is a risk, making sure that you stick the meat thermometer close to where you’ve done it before won’t leak too much of that delicious juice.