An Entire Industry That Manufactures Nothing but Junk

I feel like it’s time to buy a grill and a propane burner.

My kitchen is very nice. It has a stove with 4 burners and a grill, and it also has a fume hood. Still, the sad truth is that heating meat until it smokes doesn’t work out well in any home kitchen. Amateur kitchens are not built for cooking. They’re built for women, and most women have very unrealistic cooking priorities. Women want kitchens that look cute and quaint, so there are always a lot of things that look great new yet end up nasty because they’re so hard to clean.

There is a reason why so many real kitchens have stainless or tile walls.

Long ago, I decided the best way to get a great steak, in a home kitchen, was to fry it in butter on cast iron. This sends a lot of smoke into the air, and much of that smoke is really grease droplets. Over time, they accumulate on things. If you fry meat in your kitchen regularly, you will end up with a brown film of grease on your cabinets, walls, ceiling, and vent hood.

My kitchen has painted walls, a painted ceiling, and some kind of paint or plastic coating on the cabinets. The ceiling is very high. I don’t want to have to clean all that over and over. The vent hood lets a lot of the smoke from frying blow right by it, so it’s not that helpful.

I need to get me a propane burner and put it on the patio for frying steaks. It will look bad, but I will never have to clean anything but the skillet. Actually, I should get a rectangular griddle. That’s what I used to use back in Miami, and it was wonderful.

A grill would also be helpful. Burgers also mess up the kitchen, and sometimes you want one that’s grilled, not fried. I like to mix salt and garlic into ground chuck and grill it.

I said my stove had a grill, but here I am saying I want a new grill. Why? Because the stove’s built-in grill is totally worthless. It doesn’t get hot enough to grill anything. Also, it makes a mess.

I’ve been looking around online, trying to decide what kind of grill to get. Part of me says I should blow a lot of money and get a top-notch “professional” stainless grill that will last forever. The problem with that plan is that I tried it once, and it didn’t work. I have some wisdom to share.

1. There is no such thing as a “professional” barbecue grill. Using the word “professional” in a grill ad is fraud. They are all sold to home cooks. You have never gone to a big restaurant and eaten a steak that came off a “professional” propane grill. Restaurants use things like electric salamanders.

2. “Professional” grills aren’t worth the money. I bought a $1200 DCS grill. It was only a 30″-wide built-in, and it was a long time ago, so don’t be deceived by the somewhat low price. DCS is one of the top “professional” grill makers. The same grill costs $2200 today. It worked fine for a while. Then the plastic on one of the knobs melted, and the manifold started leaking. Getting it fixed was impossible. I could probably have found parts had I searched long enough, but I gave up on it.

There were some nice things about the DCS. It had very heavy stainless racks, and there were few if any parts that could rust. Still, it gave up the ghost after very little use. Goodbye, $1200. And the food wasn’t any better than it would have been had I bought a gas grill from Home Depot.

I’m thinking I should get a $179 dollar Home Depot propane grill. If I take care of it, which is not hard, it should last several years.

Let’s say it lasts 4 years, which is a completely reasonable expectation. The DCS grill I bought costs $2200 now. That means I can get over 49 years of trouble-free grilling for the cost of a DCS, which might last 3 years before needing difficult repairs.

Another nice thing about a cheap grill is that if I move, I can leave it here instead of taking it with me.

I may get a small propane grill that sits on a table. Cuisinart makes one, and people love it. They work very well, but sometimes the knobs go bad. There are a million sources for knobs, so I don’t care about that issue. You don’t have to buy the Cuisinart version. There are lesser-known brands that sell for maybe a third less. For a little over $100, you can get a grill that does a great job and doesn’t break your heart if you have to take it to the dump in two years.

The main problem with a tabletop grill is the need for a table. And I suppose plastic is not the smartest material for that purpose, and plastic is what I have.

Anyway, it looks like a good move to consider.

To sum up, it appears that there is no such thing as a quality gas grill, so you might as well go cheap and save money.

To get back to cooking steaks outdoors, I have a pretty good Lodge griddle, which I left in Miami. Of course, they have discontinued it, so I can either drive to Miami (no) or look for something else. Walmart has an Ozark Trail griddle which looks good and costs very little.

I should run up there. I can get a griddle there, and I can pick up a new propane burner and a tank at Home Depot or Lowe’s.

Right now, there are two rib eyes in my fridge. The local Winn-Dixie turns them loose cheap once in a while. When I first noticed them in 2017, I didn’t think to look for the words “choice” or “prime” on the packages, because it didn’t occur to me that any mainstream grocer would go below choice. Once I decided to check, I found that the packaging didn’t say “choice” anywhere on it, so I guess the steaks are select or something worse. That’s not a big deal. The rib eye is such a superior cut, a sub-choice example will still probably be an excellent steak, and if you get it for five or six bucks per pound, you have nothing to complain about.

I prepared a standing rib roast from this stuff once, and it was excellent. Prime would have been better, but it was very good. If I had read the packaging more carefully, I would have passed it by.

A choice New York strip is not much better than leather, so I wouldn’t take a chance on going below choice. A rib eye is different. Also, you can look at the meat through the plastic and see if they let a cut with unusually good marbling slip by.

But Wait…There’s More

I just found out Coleman makes a 7200-BTU butane burner. It’s very small, it’s very cheap, and you can set it right down on a table. I think I’ll grab one and wait to make a final and more expensive decision.