Cooking Strategies

Appears in
Cooking One on One

By John Ash

Published 2004

  • About
There are basically two:
  1. Direct and Indirect Heat: Direct heat is what we’re used to: cooking the food directly over the fire or hot coals. Direct heat is best for smaller, tender foods, such as chicken breasts, burgers, vegetables, fish, and the like—foods that can be cooked through in less than 15 minutes. Indirect heat involves cooking the food away from the heat, that is, coals on one side of the grill and food on the other. With a gas grill you only turn on one side of the grill and leave the other side, where the food goes, off. In this case, we would cover the grill so that it functions more like a convection oven. Indirect heat grilling is best for larger pieces of meat, such as roasts, legs of lamb, or turkeys, that will take more than 30 minutes to cook through. You can use a combination of the methods by first searing the food directly over the coals to give color and caramelization, and then moving the food away from the coals to finish cooking slowly.
  2. One and Two Level Fires: When using the direct heat method, you have two options. If you’re cooking something like shrimp, which cooks in just a couple of minutes over a hot fire, a straightforward, one level fire is fine. For foods that take a little longer to cook, I recommend building a two level fire, where half the cooking area is at high heat (a couple of layers of hot charcoal) and the other half is lower (a single layer or less). You can move the food between the two as needed, either to sear and caramelize or to finish cooking slowly. If you’re using a gas grill, turn one half on high and the other on medium-low. For all my grilling, no matter what the food, I always use the two level method, because it gives me the most flexibility.