Laura Maio-Zimroth of Staten Island took home honorable mention for her Perfect Pulled Pork with White Sauce, and Brian Teller dominated the competition in the Bronx for his bacon-wrapped Shrimp, Scallop & Salmon Skewers.
For about 5,000 years, people have been making charcoal from wood for use in cooking and for smelting metals during the bronze and iron ages. Today’s commercial lump charcoal, still retaining the shapes of the wood chunks it came from, makes minimal amounts of smoke and ash. With an unlimited supply of air, it will burn much hotter than briquettes.
Each molecule of burned propane produces four molecules of water. In a typical 40,000-Btu-per-hour gas grill, that translates into a surprising 1 1/2 quarts of water being given off per hour. The bottom surface of the meat is thus being steamed, and its temperature cannot get as high as with dry-burning charcoal. Those flavor-producing Maillard browning reactions just don’t work well in moist environments. You can’t brown a steak by steaming it.
“I’ve made it a few times at home in Flatbush with my girls,” says Blatt, whose three daughters are big fans of her barbecue. “It’s a crowd pleaser, for sure. I had a feeling we could win this.”
Almost any kind of “barbecue grill” — a name that only compounds the confusion — can be adapted to either barbecuing or grilling, with mixed degrees of success, and their manufacturers generally remain mum on the distinction. Their motto seems to be “Sell ‘em any way you can.”
Today, you can buy a gas grill with any or all of the following bells and whistles: multiple burners, a rotisserie, an independently controlled side burner, a warming rack, a smoker box, shelves, a grease and juice drip pan, a closable hood, a work surface, lights, storage drawers and cabinets, a trash bin, a built-in sink or refrigerator and a four-figure price tag. You might as well have a contractor move your kitchen out into the back yard.