My first grilled steaks, some minor growing pains

[kmhfive]

That steak looks wonderful! I don't use gas, so I don't know what you should expect. But, I do know that when you try next time, just change one thing and look for the changes. Be patient and you will soon MASTER your grill!

[Thundercat710]

Thankyou all. I think I didn't give the indirect side enough time to evenly heat

[RonB]

I agree that you really need to do some dry runs on your gasser. You should be able to light your grill, set the dials and be very close to the temp you want. Once you can get the temp you want, your timing should get much better, so you will not have to turn your grill up to hurry the steaks. Then give the grill some time to allow the grates to stabilize. You are close - keep at it and you will be making some great steaks.

[ecowper]

Thundercat710 I've never used grill grates, so I can't definitively say .... but every grill I have ever had, I had hotter and colder spots on the indirect side. Over time that evens out and the whole indirect side gets pretty even. Not perfectly even, but pretty close. I assume it's due to convection in the grill.

[texastweeter]

have you bread tested with this method yet?

[Thundercat710]

Am I correct in thinking that the grillgrates on the indirect heat side would, eventually, achieve even temperature across the whole surface? Maybe I didn't wait long enough for the heat to migrate all the way across the grates?

[JCGrill]

I agree with ecowper. Dry runs, temp probes, mark your dials. Makes everything easier. IR should be OK on grill grates since they are solid, won't work very well on the grill itself.

Personally, I don't try to get my gasser to do both 225 and warp at the same time. I have multiple grills and I use them. I think you can do both with an SnS, but I don't have one (yet).

[Thundercat710]

Thanks for that. I had a hell of a time getting 225 on both gg's using indirect heat

[ecowper]

By the way, that steak looks pretty good to me :-)

[ecowper]

The best thing I ever did was to do dry run cooks on my Hasty-Bake. I did a bunch of testing to get the hang of how to get my indirect and direct zones to specific temps. The key ones, for me, were 225, 275, 350 on the indirect zone and 450 and 750 on the direct zone. Once I knew how to do that, it made it so much easier to follow various grill and BBQ techniques without having to fiddle and mess with the grill.

[Thundercat710]

Hello Pitmasters,

These were overall really delicious New Yorks, but unevenly cooked, which kinda bummed me out. Any guidance I can get from you all would be greatly appreciated.

Ran into some 2-zone setup difficulties using my Broil King Signet 320 and Grillgrates:

3 burner grill with 5 Grillgrates (gg's), center grate removed for this operation
left two gg's were grates-up, no burner on
right two gg's were grates-down, burner set to high
shut the lid and left a wired probe through a small potato to measure the air temp above the left gg's
dry-brined steaks (table salt only) for 12 hours prior to cook, and they were surface-dry on a rack in the fridge at cook time
steaks went right from the fridge to the indirect side

I was hoping this setup would get me to an even 225 on the indirect side, and it didn't really work:

With the right burner on high, the indirect-side probe got to 180ish. I failed to IR gun the indirect gg's at this time, so I don't know what they themselves were at. When using gg's, I'm guessing all I care about is the IR gun temps, and don't care about what my wired probe says? So I ended up turning the middle burner on to low, which rocketed up the grill temp. At this point I stopped messing with the probe, and used the gun. The inner-most gg on the indirect (now actually kind of direct) side shot up to 300ish, while the outer-most gg was around 200. I got impatient (and starving) and so I turned on the left burner to low, turned off the center, and set the right burner to low. Put the wired probe into one of the steaks and flipped them at 80 degrees, and took them off at 110. The had slight sear marks at this point, and I was getting worried. Turned up the right burner to warp, and the gun showed 850 on the gg's within 5 minutes! Brushed oil onto the steaks and applied ground pepper, and then set them on the hot, inverted gg's. Flipped them every minute until I got the centers to 135 with the thermapen. When I was done with the sear, those initial sear marks were nowhere to be found, which did please me. Feasting was done with great joy, but still, I kept thinking about how to get these more even next time.

Some things I'd like to improve next time:

- Getting the fat strip on the side to melt down more - normally this delicious, melty piece is my favorite but this time it wasn't definitely not cooked enough - was my inital cook too fast?? I am almost convinced that it was, but maybe I'm not considering something else

- Overall even cooking from the center to the tips. When I cut into the end of mine, it was a dark red, and I was immediately wondering if my brand new thermapen wasn't functioning correctly. As I worked toward the center of the meat, it became like you see below.


Anyways, thanks for taking the time for reading over my method! Hopefully the pictures do it justice. Again, these were delicious, but I want perfect, if possible.








Thanks,
Mike D.