I have tried versions of them all. I love the big brush and the instant-read thermometer. But it was a sad night at my house when the lights went out on my tongs.
While many backyard barbecuers are self-taught, products of the school of several trials and many errors, there are also opportunities for higher learning. The day I spoke by phone with Raichlen, for instance, he was wrapping up a session of Barbecue University. These are three-day, $2,400-per-person classes at Broadmoor Resort in Colorado Springs, Colo., for serious students of smoke.
Another big bubba of barbecue, Chris Schlesinger, who presides over The East Coast Grill restaurant in Cambridge, Mass., and along with John Willoughby has written Grill It!, the latest in a series of well-regarded grilling books, said that on the whole, American grillers are getting better. The grilled shrimp recipe I mastered, sorta, came from Schlesinger's new book.
"Nobody used to know what a multilevel fire was," he said, referring to the technique of layering coals in a grill to produce hot and cool zones. "Now that is a given."
A tradition
Schlesinger also talked about the link between fathers and fire. "The grilling at cookouts," Schlesinger wrote in the introduction to his new book, "has traditionally been performed by dads who at other times have tended to treat cooking as a foreign realm of endeavor." In other words, if you build a fire in a backyard cooker, men will come. And occasionally, as I did, they will learn.
Another of my slap-of-the-forehead moments came when I read Raichlen's instructions for the great American hamburger. Even though the hamburger is, the GrillWatch survey reports, still the nation's No. 1 grilled food, I feel that cooking it is not as challenging as grilling a rack of lamb or a fillet of grouper. I rarely read a cookbook recipe for grilling burgers.
But the other night I did and was glad of it. Coat the hamburger patties and accompanying slices of onion with a little butter, The Barbecue Bible said, and you will be delighted with the results. The burgers and the onions had delectable crusts.
"We like butter," Raichlen said when I reported my success to him. His daughter, a nutritionist, tells him he could substitute olive oil for the butter, he said.
