Grill Meets Boy

Two summers ago, my brother Bill bought the gas grill which now sits in the backyard here in Williamsville. He bought it and assembled it in what seemed like a matter of minutes. I have since become intimately familiar with his tendency to do things lickety-split; Bill doesn’t like to pause to think, whereas I sometimes tend to think too much.

We used the grill that first night. I was a little skeptical: gas? How tacky. But that was my Northern California mesquite-wood snobbery; I was thinking like a character from Cyra McFadden’s The Serial. The food—I don’t remember what we grilled—tasted just fine. And now I stand on the other side of a calendar year, having used the grill all last summer and well into the fall. The grill has since received a couple of solid dentings from branches falling in bad weather or high winds (there are so many trees on this property, that during a high wind last fall, the whole family moved down to the living room to sleep, afraid that one would come crashing down in the middle of the night; it didn’t, but everyone caught cold from sleeping in the draft). The grill sat outside under the snow all winter, waiting, waiting. Susie said that Bill sometimes used the grill in the winter, but he didn’t do so this season.

A week ago I bought some pork chops and decided to do them on the grill. I bought them with the bone in; I’ve decided that is the best and only way to get the flavor I’m looking for. I brushed them with olive oil and sprinkled them with salt and pepper; as I liberally salt the meat, I inevitably think of Diana Trilling, who taught me how to salt. When I started to work for her, I was coming off years of low-sodium and no-sodium cooking that started back home. It took a couple summers of cooking with and for her to learn that salt was indispensable for flavoring. Anyway, I seasoned those pork chops and put them on the grill and seared them at a high temperature, turned them, then lowered the temperature and the grill’s lid. They came out a little dry, but better than last year. So I decided to try some thick-cut ribs. I asked the man at the meat counter what he suggested, and he said to use the uppermost rack and grill them for 45 minutes to an hour.

The grill has two racks: the topmost one pivots—I guess you could use it for smoking—so I seasoned the ribs and put them on the top rack. I turned the meat when I could see a bit of pink, about fifteen minutes at 350 (the grill has a handy temperature gauge). After fifteen minutes on that side I turned and rotated the ribs, moving the ones on the inside to the outside, and so on, and basted them once with Asian barbeque sauce. Fifteen minutes later, I did the other side. At an hour, I took them off the grill; I probably could have done them a little less. Still, they were juicier than any ribs I did all last summer. I’m looking forward to a long season of ribs done exactly the same way.