Science Friday - Avoiding Grilling and Barbecue Pitfalls

Episode Date: July 4, 2024

In a conversation from 2014, Ira talks marinade myths, charcoal chemistry, and the elusive “smoke ring”—the science behind barbecue and grilling.Are marinades a myth? How does the elusive “smoke ring” form? And can the debate over gas versus charcoal be settled at last? In this episode of our “Food Failures” series, barbecue and grilling expert Meathead Goldwyn looks at the science behind the grill and offers tips for controlling smoke, temperature, and moisture. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

It's the 4th of July, and I don't know about you, but I can't wait for my barbecue. Hold it, can I actually call it that? The word barbecue covers, Korean barbecue, South African Brie, and yeah, it even covers hamburgers and hot dogs on the grill. We're talking semantics here, not culinary arts. It's Thursday, Independence Day, and it's also Science Friday. I'm John Dankowski. Happy holiday, however you're celebrating. Now, I know that many of you will be.

in the backyard or on the porch with a spatula light in hand. That's why for the fourth this year, we wanted to dip back into the archives for one of our all-time favorite summer science segments. Here's Grillmaster Ira Flato with the conversation from 2014. Cooking over an open flame was probably the first form of cooking, but practitioners of the low and slow method know that it's a combination of instinct and science. Gas versus charcoal, rubs, versus marinerades. Barbecue versus grilling. What's your favorite? Make for some great back-air debate for you spatula jockeys. Our next guest is here to chew the fat over great grilling tips and bust up a few barbecue myths, the chemistry of how you combine smoke, heat, and moisture to create

that perfect piece of meat. Craig Goldwyn is the editor and founder of AmazingRibs.com, but I can't call him Craig. He won't answer to that. He's known as Meathead, Goldwyn. Is that correct? You got him. Welcome. When did you get that name? Well, in the Archie Bunker days, my dad used to call me Meathead. And when I got in a barbecue, that kind of stuck. And that's what I'm known as.

Everybody knows me as Meathead. I bet you nobody out there knows who Craig is. All right, we'll stick with Meathead, if you're not insulted, of course. No, no. So tell us what the difference is between barbecuing and grilling. You know, we're talking semantics here, not culinary arts. Technically, there's a lot been said on this, and it's mostly wrong. Barbecue is a big word that covers a lot of different cooking styles around the world.

There's this generation of American barbecue cooks who follow the southern style of barbecue, which is big hunks of meat cooked low and slow with smoke, and they've tried to appropriate the name barbecue when what they're really talking about is Southern Barbecue because really the word barbecue covers Korean Barbecue, South African Brie. And yeah, it even covers hamburgers and hot dogs on the grill. And I know these Southern Barbecue snobs like to run around and say, oh, you're having hamburgers?

That's not barbecue, that's grilling. Technically, there's a difference between Southern Barbecue and grilling. It's a different style of cooking. It's a culinary art. But barbecue is a huge umbrella. word that existed long before we discovered it in the United States. So that's a bit of a goofy attempt to redefine a word. When you're starting up your grill, what is the most important factor to keep in mind? Is it the temperature, the fuel source, the grill type? What?

Well, when you're starting up, the very most important thing is keep your grill surface clean. You want all of that grease and carbon build up off your cooking surface. It does none enhance flavor. And you want to burn off all this grease and smoke that's built up on a gas grill in particular inside. Rancid fat is not tasty. And you wouldn't eat in a restaurant that cooked with rancid fat. Smoke is there are different kinds of smoke and hardwood smoke is delicious. Rancid fat is not. The other key important thing is temperature. Cooking's all about temperature. If you haven't got control over temperature, then you're not cooking. Induing, We have a thermostat on our oven.

Outdoors are oven, and that's what a grill is or a smoker is, it's just an outdoor oven. We have very poor temperature control. Those dial thermometers in the dome are next to worthless. It's the cheapest piece of equipment on there. They slap it on at the last minute. They could barely be called an indicator. And they're up in the dome. And your food is down on the cooking surface.

Does you no good up there unless you plan to eat the dome? So you should invest in a good, Meat thermometer is what you're saying. You know, digital thermometers are fantastic. They're really accurate. They've come down in price. You can get a digital probe that has a wire that sticks outside the grill and sits on the side of the grill. And you can place it right next to the meat on the surface.

You don't want to get too close because there's a cold air bubble around the meat. And you can get exactly the temperature that the meat is feeling. And that's what you need to know. And some of them have two probes. One you can insert in the meat. Some of them even have radio frequency or Bluetooth where you can go in and watch the game or cut the lawn and be reading the thermometer on your grill. No, I got to stand there with a spatula. Oh, yeah, absolutely.

The smell. It's tactile. But, you know, for safety and financial reasons, you don't want to be relying on your senses for deciding how hot the oven is. Put your hand in there. Well, you may be able to hold your hand over the flame for a longer time than I. I can. You can't measure the temperature of the oven that way. You couldn't cook indoors without knowing what the temperature is. Get a good digital thermometer. Consumer reports told us that of the 300 plus samples of chicken that they taste, that they sampled more than 90% were contaminated

with pathogenic bacteria and half of them with antibiotic resistant pathogenic bacteria. Get a good instant read digital thermometer. Get the temperature up to the safe zone, which is what? What temperature? Well, it varies from meat to meat, but for poultry, 160 to 165 is considered safe. USDA says 165. If you pull it off at 160, it'll go up to about 165. And with these, you can get a really good instant read.

It takes five seconds, maybe. For 25 bucks, poke it in there, you know exactly what the temperature is. Steak, look at the price of beef nowadays. medium rare which is the temperature at which beef is the most tender and the most juicy is around 130 degrees why push it beyond why poke you they say you can poke it and you can feel the right how far done it is but sirloin feels different than filet mignon so you can't poke the meat to tell how how well done it is well let's talk about do you grill fish any differently than you then you grill meat well yeah um around 130 to 135 you

USDA wants you to take a little higher is when it's ideal. But fish has got a lot more moisture in it than steak or chicken or pork. And the biggest issue with fish is it just likes to stick to the grill. Oh, yeah. And here's another myth. People tell you to oil the grill. Oil the food, not the grill. A light layer of oil on the food will prevent sticking better than oiling the grill. If you oil the grill, that almost immediately the oil cracks and polymerizes and smokes and changes and it gives you less non-stick property. So oil the food, a thin layer of oil on the food, most of it will drip off. That'll help prevent it from sticking, but that is the real problem with fish. And of course, it's a delicate tasting food.

You don't want to give it too much seasoning. I think it likes herbs. And you want to get the temperature precise. You don't want to overcook fish. It can go from delicious and delusiness. delicate to cardboard in a hurry. You're talking to Meathead Goldwyn, editor and founder of AmazingRibs.com that's in Chicago. Is there, what is chemically, because it's going on inside the meat when you cook it or inside protein,

what is taking place there? Isn't that a good question? This is really interesting. First of all, people have to realize that cooking is, I mean, it's great that we're on Science Friday to talk about it because it is a giant outdoor chemistry and physics experiment. You have hot air, which is a very poor conductor of heat, circulating around a piece of water, essentially. A steak, for example, is 75% water.

So if you've got an 8-ounce filet mignon, six ounces of that is water. The remainder is mostly protein and fat. Depending on the cut of meat, it can be up to 10% fat, maybe more, and protein. When the hot air hits the outside of the meat, the outside of the meat, now, since it's water, not air, builds up that heat and holds it like a battery and starts transmitting that heat down towards the center. So the outside of the meat is cooking by convection, but the inside of the meat is cooking by conduction. And those are very different procedures. And so the meat cooks from the outside in. So if you open up the grill, a lot of people say if you're looking, you ain't cooking.

Well, if you open up the grill, yeah, a little bit of hot air comes out, but you know what? The meat barely notices it because the inside of the meat is being touched by the outside of the meat, so it just keeps on jugging along. Close the lid, the heat builds up right away. You barely lose any time. That's another one of the great myths of cooking. What is this delicious red smoke ring that people want all the time? They say that's the sign of good barbecue. The southern barbecue technique, the low and slow method, usually it's involving smoke.

If you cook with that method, you're cooking a very tough piece of meat, usually ribs, pork shoulder, beef brisket, and you're going to take that well past the normal done stage. A beef brisket, for example. Medium rare is ideal tenderness for a steak, but brisket's a really tough piece of meat because it's got a lot of connective tissue in it. And you'll cook that up to 190, 200. I take it to 203, almost a boiling point, to break down the connective tissues and make it tender.

And anything lower than that, it's almost impossible to eat. And when you cook meat slowly and low like that, it turns gray. Now, it started out red or pink, but it turns gray. And the reason it's pink is there's a compound in the meat called myoglobin. And it's a protein. and when you cut into a steak, all that liquid that's on the plate, that's not blood. If you call it blood, somewhere a teenager is becoming a vegan. It's myoglobin.

If it was blood, it would be dark, black, just like blood when you cut and bleed, and it would coagulate. Now, this myaglobin is in the meat, and it's pink. And what happens is that the gases from combustion, either propane gas from a gas grill or charcoal gas, the combustion gases from charcoal, they fix the color of the myoglobin and prevent it from turning gray like the rest of the meat. And since meat is not very permeable, it doesn't go very deep into the meat. Usually it's only about an eighth of an inch. So you get this thin eighth-inch band of pink on the outside of myoglobin that remains pink. And it's called the smoke ring. And people who are not used to seeing it, like they go in a barbecue restaurant, they order chicken,

and there's this pink layer, they go, ew, it's not cooked. Well, it is cooked, believe me. It's just the effect of the gases. And it's really the gases more than the smoke, which is mostly tiny little fine particles. Wow, that's interesting. Let's talk about marines. Do they really soak into the meat and give it more flavor? Do they tenderize the meat?

Do you believe in marinade? Let's think of meat as a sponge. I work with a physicist, a man named Dr. Greg Blonder, and he advises me, and he uses the example of a sponge, and it's a great analogy. Think of a sponge saturated with water. Well, remember, a piece of meat is 75% water. If you marinate it, you're normally soaking it in a mixture of,

Salt, oil, flavor, and aromatic compounds, SOFA, SOFA, soil, all flavoring compounds and aromatics. Most of those compounds cannot penetrate into this saturated sponge. Oil certainly is not getting in because oil and water don't mix. Sugar is this big huge molecule. Garlic is this big huge molecule. They just really don't get in. The one that does is salt. Salt is magic.

Salt is different than anything else in the cooking process. Little tiny sodium and chloride atoms, little tiny molecule, two atoms. And when they get wet, they get electrical. They get charged. And they can migrate and they can work their way down into the center. But none of the other stuff in a marinade does. So most of a marinade is a surface treatment, just like sprinkling on a spice rub or an herb mix. It's a surface treatment, and it doesn't get down in, not more than an eighth of an inch at the most.

Some of it will slip in through the pores, but it won't get actually into the meat deep. And the proof is, is marinate a pork chopper turkey breast overnight and cook it and then slice it in half and take a core sample. You won't taste any marinate. You might taste salt, but it just doesn't get in there. Well, Meathead, I want to thank you for taking time to join us today for our summer science. It's a barbecue segment. It's really been mouth watering, so this has been a lot. This was fun, and I'm a big fan of the show, so it was a real thrill to be on with you, Ira.

All right. Thank you. That's Craig Meathead, Goldman, with some science of barbecue tips for your Fourth of July cookout. He spoke with Ira back in 2014. Coming up on tomorrow's episode, What's Better After a Barbecue than sitting down with a cold drink and a good book? Our Science Friday Book Club convenes to give you. all sorts of suggestions for summer science reads. I hope you can join us. Please have a safe holiday and make sure to cook your meats to the right temperature. I'm John Dankowski.