Barbecue
An outdoor cooker whose parts are made of different things, where the only surface food touches is the one people clean most aggressively.
Precautions
- Do not apply to a hot surface
- Rinse thoroughly afterwards
- Check the manufacturer's instructions
In detail
A barbecue is a food-contact appliance that lives outdoors, and both halves matter. Outdoors means it takes rain, weather and rust in a way an indoor cooker does not, and that grease left over a season carbonises into a deposit far harder than the fat it started as. Food contact means the grate is subject to the same considerations as a chopping board: whatever cleans it must be rinsed off, and product residues have no business on a surface food is laid on. What decides the answer is what the grates are made of, and that is not obvious by looking. Bare cast iron, porcelain-enamelled cast iron and stainless steel look alike under a season of carbon and need different handling. Manufacturer guidance is unusually valuable here because the manufacturer knows which of the three it sold you, and most general barbecue advice is written as though there were only one kind of grate. Cleaning a barbecue is also one of the few domestic jobs with a real heat hazard in the cleaning rather than the cooking: the appliance holds heat long after it looks cold, accumulated grease is flammable, and the routine most manufacturers recommend involves brushing a grate that is deliberately hot.
Related
- Barbecue has the component Barbecue grate
Sources for this page
Sources
How to Care For Your Cast Iron Cooking Grates
Weber-Stephen Products LLC · Manufacturer documentation
Relied on for: That the manufacturer's routine is to preheat the grill and then brush the cooking grates, and that porcelain-enamelled cast iron is a coated surface whose coating can be damaged. (states this directly)
Verification: a person has read the passage relied on.
Read on — The preheat-and-brush routine, the brush guidance and the seasoning statement. Supports a narrower statement — our claim was reduced. Enough to open the family with the material distinction that matters — porcelain-enamelled cast iron is a COATED surface whose coating is the thing at risk, and it is not bare cast iron and must not inherit bare cast iron's seasoning routine, which the register already holds from a cookware manufacturer. Not enough to publish a stainless-steel-grate procedure or a washing-up method, and neither is published. The loose-bristle instruction is carried as a precaution wherever a wire brush appears.
Last reviewed by a person on .