Charcoal Grilling and Driving Stick

I now get why so many men are drawn to charcoal. There is something primal in taming fire, ashes and embers swirling about your face, flareups lurking around every corner.  There's a sense of power in throwing a piece of meat down on the grill and using only your intuition to determine whether the heat will do your bidding or destroy your catch.

Over the past few months I've been practicing grilling using charcoal on my new notebook grill. Anyone even informally acquainted with the world of grilling has run into the great schism between the schools of charcoal grilling and gas. Let me state my bias now. My father has been grilling using charcoal professionally for over twenty years , so I grew up in a house where the idea of gas grilling was sacrillege....right up there with liquid smoke and par boiling. He has only now, at the age of sixty, begun to express interest in the use of gas. That said, I've only tried gas grilling once at a friend's house. It was fast, easy, clean, efficient, reliable and predictable...all the wonderful things that gas grilling has to offer. At the end of the day though, it reminded me of cooking on a range. A range that was outside.

The whole experience reminded me very much of learning to drive. My first car was a four cylinder Isuzu Rodeo. It had a manual transmission and I hated it. The shifting. The jolts. The stalling. After a few embarassing moments slowing down traffic on the wretched roads of Orlando, I began to enjoy the control. I began to enjoy the fact that I had such precise command over such a large machine.

I found this same enjoyment in working with a large and lop-sided piece of coho salmon. The uneven heating worked to my advantage. The light charcoal flavor didn't overpower the delicate flavor of lobster like I thought it would. A few of the initial notes were drowned out, but the effect was a pleasant calming of flavors.

The car I drive now is an automatic, and while it's easier to change radio stations, I do miss the feel of control driving manual transmission. For that reason, I plan on sticking with charcoal, at least for a while.