Dad Pro Tip #4: Grill Skills

Here comes another quick Pro Tip that is sure to change the way you grill.  There will be more posts like this to come, but I just sort of jot these down as they occur to me.  I can’t give you all the keys to the kingdom all at once!  If I did you wouldn’t need to read our posts! Plus, let’s take some baby steps… Rome wasn’t built in a day…

One thing I have realized that no matter how knowledgeable on cooking you are, there are just some things that you must have, and some tricks of the trade that you need to know to fully perfect your grilling skills.  This post is about a seemingly simple grilling method: the proper use of skewers. While a seemingly simple concept, I can make your life a lot easier with just 5 minutes of your time.

As Jack has stated before, grilling is something that all Dads need to know how to do.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s also important to know how to navigate around the kitchen to make other meals, as well, if for no other reason other than to give your wife a break from time to time if she does the majority of the cooking (it’s not just a chick’s job to cook every night).

I am not sure why, but grilling is just one of those primal instincts of the Alpha Male that seems to have faded into history now that there’s this stupid feminist movement about how dudes and chicks are exactly the same, blah blah blah, hippies and global warming and the North Dakota oil pipeline, and you know the rest.  Not going to get into that silliness.  

There’s just something satisfying about lighting a big ass fire, cracking open a cold beer or four, and being responsible for taking raw meat and cooking it to perfection.  It’s even more satisfying when you hunted that meat or shot it with a spear underwater, but we will delve more into those topics in a future post.

I already touched on utilizing charcoal, and the need for using a charcoal chimney, but you can also use propane, just the same.  My wife prefers propane due to how busy she is with the kids, and how she often has to make everything for dinner for days and weeks on end when I am gone for my job, out doing the Lord’s work somewhere.  She likes the charcoal taste better, but for some of you busier people out there, I get it, you just don’t have time.  No biggie.

On a side note, I recommend that you buy a grill basket for smaller items that would otherwise fall through the grates on the grill, and a fish basket for huge pieces of fish so you don’t tear them to pieces when trying to flip it on an open grill with a spatula.  (Both of those items make great Father’s Day gifts, by the way.)

This post isn’t about those other grilling accoutrements, however.  It’s about the most overlooked grilling implement in the inventory: the skewer. The skewer is like the red-headed stepchild of the spatula… (no offense, ginger readers).  The fact of the matter is that you are pigeon-holing yourself into a lack of grilling options without having this tool on hand. Skewers are critical for a few reasons:

1) Cooking chunked up veggies.  Mushrooms, pieces of onion, cherry tomatoes, and bell peppers taste great when cooked on the grill.  Sometimes a grill basket isn’t good enough for more than a few people, due mainly to the fact that you can’t properly utilize the full area of the cooking surface.  With skewers, however, you can sear the food over the hottest part of the grill, then rotate to those oft-forgotten side areas that rarely get used to ensure they are cooked all the way through.  Lots of people I know think that just because the veggies are a little charred on the outside, they are done.  Not true.  Keeping them in the heat, but not directly over the heat is the best way to make sure they are perfectly cooked.  

2) They help with portioning for parties.  Ever had that guy at a get-together that only picks out the chunks of chicken or steak from the platter, and leaves the mushrooms and cherry tomatoes?  This can help dictate to guests what you intended the portions to be, if you leave the food on the skewers, rather than dumping them onto a platter.  (If you do want to leave the food on the skewers, however, you probably want to use the wooden skewer method described below.  This can help to ensure that your guests don’t accidently throw away your good, metal skewers.) You would think that it’s common sense that no one buys an equal ratio of meat to each individual veggie, but obviously not.  That would cost a fortune.  Consider this the party equivalent of the Soviet Union bread rationing.

3) They save you time.  This is a critical aspect when you are cooking delicate things that go from undercooked to overcooked, in the blink of an eye, like shrimp.  Rather than torching off all the hair on your arm, while flipping 75 pieces of food, you may only have to flip 9 or so skewers.  Flip, flip, done.  Crack another beer. Repeat.

There are a couple options when it comes to choosing your weapon.  You can use either the disposable bamboo skewers, or purchase some reusable, metal ones.  Both work, and I will give you a couple Pro Tips on how to best use each, and what to look for in a good set of metal skewers.

I prefer to use the metal skewers.  There are a million out on the market, so make sure that you get some that are of a good quality.  The most important aspect of them needs to be that they clean up easily, and aren’t round.  Using round skewers of any kind makes grilling very difficult.   The ones I have are about 18″ long and are about 1/4″ wide.  The reason that you want a flat skewer is for when you go to flip them.  It is almost impossible to perfectly balance whatever it is that you are cooking, and as they soften from the heat they have a tendency to want to rotate to the heaviest part at the lowest point.  This will cause uneven cooking, and added frustration.  

When you punch the flat skewer through, it makes the food less likely to rotate on the skewer.  The truly Gucci skewers have insulated handles, but that can make them harder to wash, and cost way more.  Mine are bare-bones.  They’re stainless steel, have a little twist in them to keep them from being overly flexible due to their flat shape, and are only pointed on one end.  Invest in a sturdy set of tongs, and you won’t need an insulated handle.

Wooden skewers aren’t a terrible choice, and I advise that you keep some in the inventory, regardless if they are your first choice.  Some are made of bamboo, while others are like giant toothpicks.  If you have sons like me, you will find out really quickly that there are no less than 15 ways to weaponize a wooden skewer.  I have seen them repurposed into blow darts, cross bow projectiles, Matchbox car axles, improvised Transformer spears, you name it.  The only think I haven’t seen my sons do with them (yet) is to smear poop on them and use them like the Vietcong did as Punji sticks in the back yard…

They are also handy for when you have more people over than you accounted for when you bought your metal skewers.  I only have six metal skewers, so even I end up using a couple wooden ones when I grill a lot of food at one time.  The only thing that I don’t really like about them is that they have a tendency to char from the flames below, which can make your food taste kinda weird.  There is a big difference between the way burned wood tastes, versus a little charring on a vegetable.  The solution to this is to soak them in water for 15-20 minutes before you shank your tiger shrimp like a San Quentin inmate when the guards aren’t watching.  Some references will say to soak them longer… you don’t need to.  This is just enough to keep the food from sticking to them, and to keep them from charring.  I’ve also seen people recommend coating them in oil, but that’s not really necessary.

Now, as for the biggest problem with the wooden skewers that I talked about up above. This is an easy Pro Tip, that’s sure to make your friends raise an eyebrow until they see how much a genius you are.  Just double up on them.  Use two skewers running parallel through the food to be cooked, separated by an 1/4″ or so.  Any closer and the hole will just be larger and it can actually make the food rotate even more than from just using one.  Leave a little gap between them and all of your problems are solved.

Once I figured this out, my life got a lot easier… and tastier.  With a little practice, you’ll find that it is super easy to perfect your method of cooking with skewers.  The only thing I can’t do for you is make sure that whatever you are making tastes good, and that you didn’t space out in between beers too long, and forgot to flip it before Murphy took over…

Now, go forth and grill great things.

~Dad of Five