My friend Hamid and I have a pie-in-the-sky idea that I like to think about when I'm not worried about the world falling apart. Hamid is Hamid Salimian, an Iranian-born Canadian chef who ran the kitchen at Vancouver's prestigious Diva at the Met restaurant. He’s also a founder of Popina Group (a sort of chef supergroup) and is a culinary instructor at Vancouver Community College. We met several years ago when I was working on a story and now, whenever I get to visit Vancouver, I'll meet him for beer and kabobs at a Persian restaurant. He's like a young éminence grise in the community, and I love picking his brain about the cuisine. Three or four times a year, we check in with each other, have a drink, eat like royalty, and daydream about opening a kabob shop.
As such, you will be unsurprised to learn where my mind went to when I had some exciting grill grates to review. As soon as they were on the way, I started peppering Hamid with questions about things like saffron's role in joojeh kabob marinade.
The grates in question are GrillGrates, a hard-anodized aluminum platform with "grates" that rise three-quarters of an inch above it and look like rails. You can either swap out your old grates entirely or set the new ones on top of what you have.
In the vein of Volvo's old "they're boxy but they're good" ad campaign, my grill is a trusty three-burner Weber Spirit gas grill with half-inch-wide cast iron grates. I'm a fair-weather griller who'll occasionally launch into a big project, and the Weber is great for that kind of use. If anything, I've often wished that it could sear a little better, a common problem among gas grills.
Since grills come with grates, you might wonder why you would want new ones, and the short answer is that better grates can improve your grilling. With GrillGrates, the idea is that heat coming from the burners is absorbed by that platform and transferred up to the top of the grates, concentrating the searing power, if you will. They are said to work particularly well with gas grills. I removed my old grates, dropped the new ones in, and got to work.
"Hamid, hit me!" I texted, asking for a recipe. He sent joojeh kabob, his take using spatchcocked Cornish game hen marinated in pureed onion, lemon juice, garlic, olive oil, and saffron.
I turned on the burners to create a two-zone system—a hot zone for searing on one side, and a cooler one on the other to allow it to cook through slowly, as the skin became nice and crispy. I got great grill marks, tender chicken, a beautiful yellow color from the saffron, and a lovely, deep flavor. The platform has few perforations in it, keeping flare-ups to a minimum, as very little rendered fat dripped down onto the flames.
One side perk I quickly came to enjoy was tossing a handful of wood chips on the GrillGrates to easily add a bit of smoky flavor to my food, something you can't do on regular grates. Years ago, I got a little cast-iron box that you can fill with chips and set above the elements inside a grill, but the thought of moving the grates to clean that box out after each use has kept it in its original packaging.
Next, I tried lamb chops torsh, where the meat marinated overnight in a purée of walnuts, pomegranate molasses, garlic, parsley, angelica powder, olive oil, and mint. Honestly, I'd eat that stuff on toast, but it was fantastic on the lamb, the sugars creating even darker grill marks.
I was having a lot of fun here, fantasizing how good these would be in our restaurant, but I also realized I needed to go basic for a bit to better inspect the way the food was being cooked. "You've gotta know your fire," as Hamid told me, and I needed to know mine better.
I started by giving myself a refresher course in how heat works inside a grill. (Meathead Goldwyn's cookbook, Meathead, is excellent here.) There are three primary ways heat is transferred: conduction, convection, and radiation. Conduction is direct transfer from one material into another—from the grill grates onto the skin of a chicken. Convection is a transfer by air, water, or oil, like hot air blowing around in a convection oven or fries in a Fryalator. Radiant heat is what you feel standing next to a hot stove.
With this in mind, I called Lilo Pozzo, a chemical engineer, soft materials researcher, and instructor of a course on kitchen engineering at the University of Washington. An Argentine-born home griller, she sounded intrigued by the idea of the GrillGrates.
"Aluminum has good thermal conductivity. Through conduction, it could be able to better sear your meat," she said, but she expressed reservations about the platform that makes up the base of the GrillGrates, which, she guessed, might help make good sear marks but could block both the radiant heat and any convection heat from coming up between the grates.
While grill marks sure look snazzy, you really want a nice, even sear across the whole surface of your food.
Hearing about my setup in particular, she was curious to see how it would do compared to my cast-iron grates.
"Cast iron has more mass. It heats nicely, and the temperature doesn't depress significantly or cool down much when you cook something on it," she said, making sure that I would measure how much the aluminum and cast-iron surfaces cooled when I took food off of it during my testing. Along with being inexpensive, this is part of the reason why we like to use cast-iron skillets in our kitchens: They sear well.
On a gas grill, she could see how this would be worth testing. "Over charcoal, radiation is dominant," hence many briquette lovers' preference for thin stainless steel. But it's different on a gas grill where a mix of radiant heat and convection help sear the exterior of your food between the grates. The aluminum will pick up heat from the gas elements below and radiate some of it up at the food between the grates, but, as she told me, aluminum is not very good at emitting radiation.
"If I had to guess, [the GrillGrates] will probably do better at grill marks but less well at browning the space between the grates," she said. With that, it was time to get back to the testing.
I switched to steak, cutting a New York strip from Bob's Quality Meats into two even pieces, coating them with oil and a sprinkle of salt and letting them rip, side by side on different grates. Over charcoal, you'd keep the lid up and cook over roaring heat, but on a gas stove, you keep the lid down. I vowed not to open it again for three minutes. When I popped the hood, there was a bit of a flare-up on the cast-iron side but nothing bad. I flipped both steaks and let out a "hunh!" Professor Pozzo's prediction proved to be prescient: While the GrillGrate steak had lovely dark grill marks, the surface between them was surprisingly gray. The cast-iron grate steak had a pleasant, almost even coloring across its surface, browning both on the parts that contacted the grates and on the space between them.
Guided by Professor Pozzo, I also made a testing decision here. I would cook to temperature, not to an amount of time. After all, a beautiful, crisp exterior on an overcooked steak does not make for good eating. In terms of the two pieces of meat in front of me, that meant that the cast-iron side was almost done and the GrillGrate side was just a few moments behind. When they came off the grill, the top and bottom of the GrillGrate steak were practically mirror images of each other. The cast-iron-side steak got a little less color on the B-side.