You may or may not be familiar with the expression “When all you’ve got is a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail.”
Well, this evening I cooked a strip of bacon on my new grill.
It drained onto the “flavor bar” (that’s what Weber calls folded strips of metal — elongated, upside-down ‘V’ bars) and produced a minimum of flare-up considering the amount of grease involved. It also smoked up the inside of the grill quite nicely. Oh, and when it came off, it was crispy and perfect.
The cost of the fuel I used was probably 20 times what it costs to cook the same strip of bacon over natural gas in a small fry-pan indoors, but who’s counting cost? I cooked bacon on a barbecue grill!
Oh, and the house did NOT smell like bacon when I finished, so I would have been able to eat it without the kids begging for some had I not pranced about the kitchen announcing that I’d cooked bacon on the barbecue grill. As it is, I had to commit to making pancakes and bacon for a night-time snack for everybody.
Pancakes are going to be tougher, seeing as there’s no griddle. Hmmm…
–Howard
Dammit, Howard!
Stop entertaining me so much with your whimsical wacky bacon-related adventures!
What he said. I want grilled bacon now.
Vorn
Heh. Someone call Alton Brown, see if we can do it!
Great.
Now, I have an urge to run around the house shouting
“Where’s the bacon?!?”
I think I’ll have a chocolate chip cookie instead. 🙂
Pancakes are going to be tougher, seeing as there’s no griddle. Hmmm…
Are the rules for this test that you can only use the grill itself, and not anything outside of the grill itself?
If not, bring a nice cast-iron griddle (for even heating over the flames) and make the pancakes on that.
If it’s grill only…hrm…perhaps if we had some idea of this grill’s capabilities…
/imagining Kevyn toying with this task…
You beat me to it. I’ve made wonderful pancakes in a cast iron skillet several times.
The grill has a side-burner
There’s a side burner that will work just fine as a burner under a cast-iron skillet. I don’t HAVE a cast-iron skillet, mind you — we’re an all-teflon household, and I lack the patience to properly care for cast-iron cookware.
(Okay, okay, I’ve got a dutch oven. And I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve used it.)
–Howard
Re: The grill has a side-burner
Never fear. He found the camping griddle.
Re: The grill has a side-burner
Tsk. Cast ironware isn’t that hard to care for.
The initial seasoning is a little inconvenient.
1) A bit of scrubbing when you first buy it, of course, like any other.
2) Put some oil or grease into it. About a quarter inch of vegetable oil, swish it around to coat the sides.
3) Turn your oven on to about 125 degrees. Um, Fahrenheit.
4) Put the pan inside the oven. (Important step, don’t skip it.)
5) Leave it there for a while. In fact, wander off and forget about it for a while. A few hours. Say, until another family member wanders up with a puzzled look and a desire to use the oven to make the evening meal, fer cryin’ out loud.
Maintenance is even easier.
1) Once every few months, scrape the crap out until you reach metal.
…
OK, maybe not quite that easy. Mine sees soap maybe every month or so, usually after somebody has used it for something with a high water content. Mostly I use it for frying breakfast. Or toasting cheese sandwiches.
Mmmmm. Bacon.
But I can use mine without worrying about the surface. Metal spatulas, forks, knives… I can dice my onions inside the pan if I want, except I don’t want to dull the knife. Teflon is cool, but I personally prefer the more relaxed atmosphere of using a pan whose surface, in a different configuration, can be used for tank armour or shuttle heat shields. 🙂
Never mind the pancakes. Can you make a chupaqueso on it?
Probably, but it’ll be touchy.
Probably, but it’ll be touchy. The side burner lacks the finesse of the burners inside the house, and although I could PROBABLY do one on the griddle I found, I’m not sure I want to try. It’s not teflon, after all…
–Howard