1. What’s the biggest mistake grillers make?
Overcrowding the grill. Also confusing indirect grilling with direct grilling and confusing cooked with burnt.
2. What grilling tools are essential for success?
Just three: A stiff wire grill brush, long-handled, spring-loaded tongs and an instant-read meat thermometer.
3. What’s the best tip you’d give grillers to ensure success?
Control the fire, don’t let it control you.
4. What foods are easiest to grill?
Steaks, chicken, planked fish, corn on the cob (husk off, please) and baby back ribs (if grilled using the indirect method).
5. What foods are best left to experienced, not novice, grillers?
Whole hog and delicate fish fillets.
6. What’s the most unusual food you saw barbecued on your world travels?
Kokoretsi, a Greek dish — lamb brains, spleen, lungs, testicles and other innards, skewered on a spit, wrapped in small intestines and spit-roasted. It’s better than it sounds.
7. What was the best barbecued item you tasted on your world travels, and have you been able to duplicate that taste at home?
There are so many. Lomo al trapo (beef tenderloin in a salt and cloth crust); Ginger, Garlic and Honey Grilled Baby Back Ribs from Cambodia; Peri Peri chicken wings from South Africa.
8. What’s your favorite grill?
(That’s) a little hard to answer, as I own 60 grills. Lately, I’m really enjoying my new Aztec wood-burning grill and rotisserie. It’s a military-strength machine. If I could take only one grill to a desert island, it would be my Weber Performer (charcoal grill with gas ignition).
9. What grilling trends did you see in other parts of the world that you expect to start seeing in the States?
Lots of wood grilling in South America. The Brazilian fire pit and rotisserie is pretty well established here. I think we’ll see Argentinean asado (gaucho-style, fire-pit cooking — as opposed to Brazilian steakhouses) before too long.
More saté bars. Maybe a braai (South African-style) barbecue joint. And definitely more peri peri (South African-style) barbecued chicken)
10. Why do you think that in the States, women do the majority of indoor cooking, but men the majority of outdoor cooking?
Because women are way too smart to stand downwind of a hot smoky grill drinking beer and burning meat when it’s 100 degrees out.
11. Is that also true in other parts of the world?
No, in Serbia, much of Mexico and through Southeast Asia (Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia, Indonesia, etc.), most of the grill masters are women.
12. What are some of your favorite recipes from the book?
Caveman T-bones or Spruce-grilled Steak; Garlic, Ginger and Honey Grilled Baby Back Ribs; Australian Lamb on a Shovel; The Real Bistecca alla Fiorentina; The Best Beef Satés in Singapore.
kharam@express-news.net
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