Modern Grills Better at Preventing Lawsuits Than Cooking Food?

I am trying to develop skills with my new propane grill. Today I tried something easy: burgers.

There are a lot of fancy burger recipes. I’ll tell you what I like. Mix salt, fresh garlic, and a little pepper into ground chuck. If you’re not afraid to eat nipples and tonsils, go with ground beef. You want beef with some fat in it. Ground sirloin makes terrible burgers.

My grill is a Pit Boss portable. I removed the wimpy gas regulator and replaced it with an adjustable model made by Loco. I adjusted the air shutters on the gas valves to give me much higher flames.

I decided to grill my 1/3-pound burgers on [what is now] medium heat. I didn’t think I wanted a raging inferno on the first trial, so I used the Loco regulator to keep the flames from getting really high. I would say they were higher than they would have been without my modifications, but I didn’t go for the gusto. The burgers came out pretty good, but they were well done. I wanted medium. It appears the Pit Boss will not give you medium burgers unless you modify it and crank the flames way up. Next time I’ll know better.

Here is how gas-cooked burgers should be: pink in the middle, with a dark brown crust which is caramelized but not crunchy. Dissenters will be ignored. It appears that the Pit Boss ships set up to cook burgers very poorly. If you took a Pit Boss out of the box, hooked it up, and cooked 1/3-pound burgers on the highest setting, you would get light brown burgers with grey insides. You really need to change the regulator and let it rip.

You can’t make a factory-adjusted Pit Boss cook decent burgers. Simply not possible.

My burgers were about 3/4″ thick, which means they cooked more slowly on the inside than all-too-typical skinny burgers. It should be easy to get a nice, charred exterior on a thick burger. The Pit Boss, as delivered, will not even come close, and if you grill tiny, disgraceful, thin burgers on it, you can pretty much count on eating well-done (ruined) meat.

I plan to burger again tomorrow. I’ll increase the heat and see what happens.

I don’t understand the modern phobia of properly cooked beef. Restaurants all over the US serve steaks with pink and red insides, and everyone is fine with it, but burger chains generally fry the life out of meat, and the grills most of us buy generate very little heat, assuring that all beef cooked on them will be unfit to eat.

You can get better performance with lump charcoal, but who needs the aggravation? I have acres of land, but I am not willing to dedicate any of it to a giant pile of charcoal ashes. Propane has been with us for decades. Grill manufacturers should have figured out how to make their products work correctly by now.

Maybe lawyers have advised grill makers to detune their products. When drunken idiots burn themselves and sue, the lawyers can say, “Your honor! Lab tests show our products won’t burn ANYTHING!”

It doesn’t matter for me. By replacing parts and adjusting my grill, I have created a machine that will do what it’s supposed to. But what percentage of consumers will do what I did? Less than 1%, I would think. The rest are stuck with grey beef or the horrors of charcoal.

I’m very happy with the grill. I love not having the clean the stove. I love the added flavor grilling gives meat and vegetables. I don’t have to worry about the smoke alarms. Maybe this is how cooking should be: an outdoor pursuit. Maybe kitchens should be set up so we can prepare food for cooking indoors and then whisk it outside to be subjected to heat.

Women have messed up the American kitchen. It’s all about quaintness and homeyness. A kitchen is really just a workshop for making food, and it should be set up accordingly. It should be easy to clean and hard to damage. Like a real kitchen in a restaurant.

I figured out how to grill chicken without toughness or a 1-hour wait. Yesterday I marinated chicken in orange juice, garlic, salt, and tarragon. I baked it in a Pyrex dish at 300 for two hours. When it was finished, I put it on the grill with vegetables. It was very tender. It worked, and I didn’t have to sit by the grill for an hour.

Next time, I’m going to bake it for an hour and 45 minutes. The chicken I cooked yesterday was good, but it was so tender when it got to the grill, it started to fall apart. It will work better if I bake it less.

I could save myself work by baking it in the oven and omitting the grill, but finishing it on the grill adds a lot of flavor.

I will continue reporting on my propane adventures until I feel I know how to use the grill correctly. I’m very glad I got the grill. It’s liberating to know I don’t have to clean a stove.