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Grilling is an interesting cooking technique that all home cooks should know about. It provides a nice change from supermarket and regular food and has its own charms. Unfortunately, most of what we produce on our home grills bears only passing or coincidental resemblance to what we eat in grill bars and good restaurants. While grilling is such an art that people have written books and guides that will tell you how to do it right, a few simple grilling tips and tricks will help you get the hang of it more quickly:

 

Always Preheat The Grill: Most of us using gas or electric grills wait till the last moment to fire up our grills. This results in the food getting charred on the outside while being raw on the inside. If you want food that is evenly grilled to perfection, always preheat your oven for at least 15 minutes before you start putting the food on it.

 

Prep Your Food: The taste of your grilled food is eventually going to be as good or bad as the taste of your marinade. Even a good marinade can fail to make an impression if you do not give it the proper time to seep into the food to be grilled. Marinate fish for at least half an hour and meat for at least four hours before cooking. However, let all the marinade drip off the food before you place it on the grill to avoid flare-ups.

 

Temp Your Food: Grilling is a temperature game, and the temperature of the grill and the food that you put on it is going to make a huge difference to the end product. Never keep chilled meat or fish on your grill, because this will result in uneven cooking. Always ensure that the food that goes on your grill has already attained room temperature if you want perfect results.

 

Keep Your Grill Clean: Having the remnants of last time’s grilling party on your grill will not make for good results. No. It will make for food that tastes of things it shouldn’t be tasting of. The best time to clean your grill is right after you have used it and when it is still warm. Take off the residue using a fine wire brush and wash it before you keep it for next time.

 

Keep Practicing: There are a number of skills involved in cooking that are more of an art than others. Grilling and baking are just some of them. When it comes to grilling, remember that practice makes perfect. The more you grill, the better your grilled food will taste because you will understand the idiosyncrasies of your grill, its hot and cold areas, the marinades that work the best, the time taken for food to attain perfect taste and all the little nuances that distinguish a gourmet griller from an amateur one. Till then, happy grilling and all the best!

 

Different people will tell you about different temperatures and times for the roasting of meat. And you might find that there are huge differences in the information people give you, leaving you not just confused, but thoroughly flummoxed if you actually want to know how to cook that perfect roast you had at your favorite restaurant last week yet have no clue how to go about it. First things first, you can make roast meat at about every temperature possible, it is just that every temperature and time possible will not give you perfect results. Secondly, cooking is more of an art than a science and people also appreciate the results as an art rather than a science most of the time. So what could be perfect roast for you could be slightly rare for my taste and what would be perfect roast for me could be overcooked for you. That said, however, the temperatures and times for perfect roasting of meat given here should let you roast meat the way it is done in good restaurants, but if even this is not good enough for you, then you might have to go back to asking some more.

Let us discuss cooking times first and foremost. In order to cook chicken or other poultry so that it is thoroughly and nicely cooked, you should roast it at a constant temperature of 160C or 325F. In case your oven marks by numbers, then this would be 3 in a gas oven. If you want to roast beef so that it is well done on the outside and rare on the inside, then a temperature of 180C or 350F should do it. This is around gas mark 4 in a gas oven. If you are roasting pork using these temperatures, while it will be cooked, it will look slightly pink. The same might happen in the case of lamb, but if you keep your meat in the oven long enough, that is at least thirty minutes per pound, you will be able to eat it without any danger since by this time, all the harmful bacteria would have been killed.

Coming to cooking times, while I have mentioned earlier that you should at least roast your meat for thirty minutes per pound, meaning you should keep it in for an hour if you are roasting two pounds, let me tell you at the outset that this cannot be sacrosanct. The reason behind this is that cooking times vary a lot based on the kind of oven that you use and its size. So while a gas oven would generally take a shorter time than an electric one, a larger oven would take a longer time than an oven with a smaller cavity. However, the time provided should give you a general idea of when your roast is about to be done. In order to make sure with your own oven, you can keep checking the results at approximately the same time and after one or two attempts, you will easily be able to determine the time period for roasting meat perfectly in your oven.