Grilling is fun for the whole family, the whole friend group, and the whole party. No matter when you decide to break out the grill, everyone is bound to have a good time. At least, they will if the barbecue turns out delicious. If you have a tendency to dry out your barbecue when grilling, BBQ Pros are here to help! Here are the keys to prevent dry barbecue when grilling this summer.
Don’t Grill Too Hot
The first thing to know to prevent dry barbecue is not to grill too hot. This may seem obvious but, if your grill is too hot, you’re more likely to dry out your barbecue while grilling. Granted, in this case, it’s the outside you’re likely to dry out, rather than the whole piece of meat. In other words, if your temp is too high, you’re going to burn your meat.
Turn that grill down, crack open a beer, and get comfortable. Grilling isn’t a race, it’s an art.
Close the Grill
If you learned how to grill by watching your dad cook burgers on an open grill, you’re going to have sorry results if you try the same technique with barbecue chicken. Because burger patties are typically pretty thin, they cook through pretty quickly. A whole chicken breast won’t cook as fast. Therefore, if you try cooking it with the grill open, the outside will cook much faster than the inside, giving you chicken thats both burnt and raw.
If you try to compensate for this by lowering the temperature significantly, you may be able to cook the chicken through, but the outer layers will end up dry and it’s still likely to burn. Instead, put the temperature on lower medium, close the grill, and let the inside fill up with heat. The consistent, surrounding heat will allow your barbecue chicken to cook through faster. Therefore, the outside won’t be overdone and the inside won’t be raw.
Run Some Tests
Doing all of this already and still ending up with dry barbecue? In that case, it all comes down to timing. Before you invite all your friends over, run some tests by cooking yourself some barbecue on an off-day.
- Put a few pieces of barbecue chicken in the grill
- Close the grill
- Start a stopwatch (there’s one in a smartphone’s clock app)
- Use your nose to guess when you think they’re getting done, then pause your timer, open the grill, and check their internal temp
- If they’re not done, close the grill again and resume your stopwatch
- Repeat this until they’re done
- If you only had to resume their cooking a few times, knock a minute off the total cook-time since, each time you opened the grill, it had to fill with heat again
- Start a second batch and test out your new presumed cook time
Improve Results
Got the hang of barbecuing juicy, tender meat now? Improve your results even further by having your grill professionally cleaned. BBQ Pros are here to help. We offer in-home service all over Toronto and we can stop by your place next. Give us a call and let us know what help you need and we can schedule a service time.