Studio711.com – Ben Martens

It’s no surprise that steak ended up on our grill as part of meat week. It’s a staple of grills around the country. One of our favorite steaks to grill is the boneless ribeye from Golden Steer. You may remember that this was the winning cut from our Meat Day.

Grilling these is pretty simple: I get the grill pretty warm (500-550), cook for 2 minutes, rotation 90 degrees and cook for another 2 minutes. Then I flip and after 2 minutes I rotate 90 degrees. That gives me those beautiful crosshatch grill marks on both sides. At that point, the steaks are pretty close to done but I’ll finish them off with a couple more minutes as needed to bring them up to ~130 internally.

The trick with steak (and most meat) is to let it sit out on your counter for 30-60 minutes before you grill it. You want to get it closer to room temperature so that you don’t have to raise the temperature as much when you are grilling. And then when you take the steak off the grill, let it rest for 5-10 minutes before you grill. This will result in a juicier steak (here’s why.)

Tyla and Elijah went to a birthday party one night so I was on my own for dinner. I had been to the butcher earlier that day and picked up a couple sausages: Italian and Hot. I wrote about grilling brats before and these are pretty much exactly the same, but that didn’t make them any less delicious.

Since this is kind of a repeat post, I’ll throw in a little trivia tidbit for you: Golden Steer butcher has a lot of different sausages to choose from. They make all of them on site except for the brats. Those come from Bavarian Meets because Golden Steer sells so many it’s not efficient for them to try and make them all. This explains why the brats are a dollar more per pound than the other sausages.

Mom has been telling me about this recipe for quite a while, and I finally got around to making it. It’s made with chicken thighs which we don’t usually have around the house so that was my excuse. The end result was really delicious though and this is very easy to throw together.

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup packed brown sugar
• 1/3 cup ketchup
• 1/3 soy sauce
• 3 Tblsp. red wine or chicken broth
• 1/4 tsp. ginger
• 3/4 tsp. minced garlic
• 12 boneless skinless chicken thighs

Directions

• In a small bowl, mix the first six ingredients. Place chicken thighs in a large resealable bag; pour the marinade on top of chicken. Seal the bag and turn to coat.
• Refrigerate for 8 hours or overnight.
• Drain and discard marinade from chicken. Moisten a paper towel with cooking oil; using long handled tongs lightly coat the grill rack.
• Grill chicken, covered, over medium heat for 6-8 minutes on each side or until no longer pink.

Ok, this isn’t just a chunk of meat, so maybe I should have called this “Grill Month” or something. The name needs work. Whatever you call it, we’re still going strong on our streak of only having dinner from the grill.

We like to get pizza from Papa Murphy’s. It’s a “take and bake” place meaning that they make the pizza for you and then you bake it at home. They have grilling instructions and I decided to give it a shot.

The pizza came out really well. I used an aluminum pizza pan with holes in it as the barrier between the grill and the paper tray on the bottom of the Papa Murphy’s pizza. The crust was nice and crispy and there weren’t any burned spots. It tasted pretty much the same as it would from the oven which makes sense because all I did was basically use the gas grill as an oven. We’ve made our own pizzas from scratch and cooked them on the grill before but this worked significantly better.

We aren’t able to cook two pizzas simultaneously in our oven very effectively so maybe this would be a good way to cook the second pizza if we’re trying to get two of them out around the same time.

Brats are a staple meal at our house. It’s one of our favorite things to grill. My method is pretty basic: 2 minutes on each of the four sides for a total of 8 minutes and then I add a minute or two extra to get them up to about 160 degrees.

If you really want to have a great, juicy brat, your goal is to get it up to 160 degrees without rupturing the casing. As with all meats, you should let your meat rest on the counter for 30-45 minutes ahead of time to bring it up to room temperature. That gives you less of a temperature difference on the grill. Next, make sure your grill isn’t too hot. I keep mine around 375 or 400 for brats. And finally, there is a big difference between different brands of brats. I find that the brats from the butcher generally have a thicker casing than the ones in the grocery store. Johnsonville brats are delicious, but I have a very hard time grilling them without splitting them open or having little grease geysers erupt out of the brat. With care, I can grill most of the butcher brats with them spouting grease. If one or two does break open a bit, that’s ok. Use that one when you stick your thermometer in to check the temp.

I’ll preface this by saying that in no way am I an expert, but I do produce better meat on the grill now than I did ten years ago. Here are some of the things I’ve learned along the way. All of these pertain to gas grilling because that’s all I do.

• Be a nerd. It’s ok to use a timer and a thermometer. I set the timer to count up and it’s an easy reminder of how long things have been on the grill as I wander around with Elijah or get distracted with something else. And the thermometer is handy because I’ve never developed a good eye* for telling when something is done just right. The thermometer is a handy way to know that we aren’t eating something too raw or that I haven’t left it on too long.
• Get a grill basket. It’s such an easy way to make a delicious side item for your meal. You can learn more in a previous post.
• Splurge on a good grill. I suffered with cheap gas grills for years because that’s all I knew existed. I thought all gas grills flared up all the time and needed tons of replacement parts every couple years. Then I finally bit the bullet and paid for a Weber Genesis. That was over 3 years ago, and even with year round grilling, it’s still in incredible shape. If you can’t afford one right now, at least stop spending money on cheap grills and save your pennies until can buy one. Grilling is so much more fun when you’re not hating your grill.
• Keep it clean. The joke is that all the leftover crusties “add flavor” but that’s just the lazy talking. I go over the grates before and after grilling just to keep things pretty clean. A couple times a year, I’ll take the grates out and give them a good cleaning along with the drip pan underneath.
• Don’t burn it off. I used to think that you should clean your grill by cranking up the heat and letting it burn off. I actually chatted about this with a representative from Weber after I got my new grill and was strongly advised against it. Those crazy high temperatures for long periods of time put a lot of stress on the various components of your grill and will lead to an early demise.
• Practice! Practice helps you get more consistent with your successes and besides, it’s delicious!
• Buy good meat. There’s only so much you can do with that 1/4″ thick slab of random animal in the discount bin. Visit your local butcher and experience the difference. Yes, you can spend lots of money, but there are plenty of good deals to be found too. For example, at Golden Steer in Bellevue, head to the left side of the display case and look at the various marinated options. They are some of our favorites and they’re also a really good deal for what you get.

* The exception to this was my time at Dairy Queen. After grilling thousands of the exact same meat patties, you figure it out.

I’ve had an idea for a while of doing something called “meat week.” I’d grill something different every day for a week and blog about each one. It seems like a delicious idea, but I could never find the right week to do it.

The time has come, but I’ve decided to slow it down a bit. We like to make leftovers when we cook so that we don’t have to cook every night. So I won’t be grilling every night, but every meal we eat for a while will be from the grill and I’ll blog about it here.

Sunday was the first day and we grilled “maui beef ribs” from the butcher along with some potatoes, carrots and zucchini. The meat is their tri-tip steak that is sliced thinly and marinated. Deeeelicious! It’s only the second time we’ve bought that item and both times I’ve left them on the grill too long. They’re really thin so you hardly need any time on the grill.