After ranting about the horrible state of the pool hardware industry, I’m glad I have something positive to write about. My Pit Boss portable grill arrived today, and it’s a keeper.

I’ve been frying steaks in a cast iron skillet on the stove, and while they taste fantastic, it’s a bad method. Wife-designed kitchens like mine don’t stand up well to heavy doses of greasy smoke, and cooking a decent steak without making smoke is not possible. You have to burn the meat a little, or else you’ll ruin it.

I decided to get a gas grill, but when I started looking around, I remembered something: there are no good gas grills. It doesn’t matter what you pay. They all fall apart in a relatively short time. Spend $5000 on a grill if you want. It will have problems just like the ones from Home Depot.

I considered getting a grill from Home Depot or Lowe’s for maybe $200, figuring I would take it to the dump when it started to fail, but then I saw the Pit Boss grill on Amazon. For a hundred bucks, you get enough room to cook 6 big steaks at once, which is plenty, if you’re honest with yourself. The grill is about the size of an IBM Selectric typewriter, and it has a handle, so you can close it up and take it wherever you want. It’s all stainless, so it won’t rust enough to matter. How could you not want a grill like this?

I was so excited when the grill arrived, I drove to Tractor Supply and got a propane tank. Their propane system was not available, so I had to go to a hardware store for gas. I took the tank home, fired up the Pit Boss, and threw a cheap rib eye on it.

The grill has some kind of battery-free ignition system on it. It has two burners, and each burner has a knob. You turn the knobs to open up the gas and light the burners. Very easy.

The grill part of the grill is very nice. It’s 1/4″ stainless rod. If you buy a Home Depot grill, you get porcelain over something that rusts, at best. No comparison. The rack on the Pit Boss reminds me of the rack on the $2200 DCS I used to have.

The instructions say to run the grill for 30 minutes before putting food on it. I don’t quite understand that. I probably ran it for 5 minutes before adding the meat. It looked hot to me, and the built-in thermometer said it was hot, so I didn’t see any point in wasting time and gas.

Here’s how the grill works. It has two oval burners. Over each one there is a bent sheet of stainless. The burners heat the stainless, and the stainless radiates heat to the meat. I didn’t want to use the sheets. I like some charring on my steak, and I was afraid the metal wouldn’t radiate enough heat. I decided to try the sheets anyway, to see what would happen.

I have no doubt that the meat would have failed to char enough, but for the fact that fat dripped on the stainless sheets and caught fire. The fire charred the steak pretty well. Some people don’t like it when fire hits their beef. I don’t get that. If you don’t want a charred taste, why would you use fire to cook your meat? You can just bake it, have a grey steak, and save yourself the trouble.

The steak had a good charred flavor, and it was nice and hot under the charring. That’s how it should be. I hate a rested steak. Resting is a myth that won’t die. A steak should be very hot on the outside, and you lose that when you rest a steak. People claim a steak won’t be as juicy if you don’t rest it, but that’s ridiculous. First of all, it will only lose a teaspoon or so of fat, and second, you don’t really lose it. It stays on the plate where you can dip your steak in it.

You know what you’re really doing when you rest a steak? People claim there are secret channels inside the meat, and the juice runs around through them and redistributes itself. Laughable. Cut a steak open some day and look for the secret channels. What you’re really doing is letting the fat get cold so it’s thicker and less runny. Hot fat tastes much better than cool fat. This should be obvious.

The other day I saw something posted online by Ruth’s Chris. They claimed resting was great for steaks, but guess what? They don’t rest theirs. They come out fast, on super-hot plates, still sizzling from the salamander. They actually brag about their hot, sizzling plates.

A plate removed from a salamander will not be sizzling-hot after 5 minutes of resting. Physically impossible.

The nonsense they posted about resting was clearly written by an ad copywriter who had no idea what Ruth’s actually does. It’s a lie.

I’ll post a photo of the food. For some reason, I really like frozen broccoli with cheese sauce with steak, so that’s what you’re seeing. I wouldn’t eat it if it were a special occasion, but for a Monday night with no one else around, it’s fine, and it’s a lot easier on my stomach than a big potato. I’m convinced potatoes are poisonous. Not that I plan to quit eating them. But when I eat a big dose of potato, I feel like I swallowed a beach towel.

I plan to try two other methods of cooking. First, I’ll try it without the stainless sheets in the way. After that, I’ll try it with the sheets removed and a cast iron griddle on the rack. I love a steak fried on cast iron.

I found a very nice cast iron griddle at Walmart. The brand name is Ozark Trail. Lodge quit making the griddle I like, so I had to switch.

The grill is terrific. It makes me wonder if anyone needs a big grill. You could feed 10 people with this thing, no problem. If the size worried you, you could spend a grand total of $200 and use two grills. It sure beats spending a fortune on a large grill that’s a pain to use, doesn’t work any better, takes up more room, and doesn’t last any longer.

The grill doesn’t heat whatever it’s sitting on, so you could set it up on a plastic table or a cooler if you wanted. The legs fold up, and it has latches to keep it closed while you’re traveling.

I highly recommend this grill, but I can’t promise it will last. I’m assuming I can get at least two years out of any grill. When it finally dies, I fully intend to keep the rack. It’s way too nice to throw out.

It’s going to be so nice to be freed from the chore of cleaning beef fat off the stove and hood.

I should use this grill and my little butane stove as much as possible for messy cooking. They’ll be lifesavers until I get a glass-topped stove.