Food Theory: Do NOT Grill A Burger Like This!

and that finalizes the sale and congratulations sir, you are now the proud owner of a backyard vegetable garden. Thank you, I hope what is happening to me, don't worry sir, he just achieved the final form of father from him. That happens all the time in these parts. I'm used to it, nice to meet you, I'm used to it, my name is dad, Pat, comes with dad jokes, nice, hello Internet, welcome to Food Theory, where we're whipping up hot takes sprinkled with a healthy dash of reasoning. Loyal theorists like many of You know I'm a relatively new dad, but what you may not know is that

this

summer I've taken major steps toward becoming my ultimate parent.

I bought some sunglasses with transition lenses and started backing my car into every parking lot. place I found and as for dad jokes, well, I've been practicing them for years, but one item remains on my dad's summer to-do list and that is buying the ultimate dad status symbol, a

grill

on the backyard, and if the king of the hill has taught me. For me anything is that choosing a

grill

means choosing equipment, you are either charcoal equipment or propane equipment, you brought charcoal into our house, there is soot under my son's nails, you don't get that with a combustion fuel clean, you don't get the rich. smoky flavor, shut your mouth Captain America vs.

Iron Man Edward vs. Jacob charcoal vs. propane, although it may not be as intense as Hank Hill believes, the whole coal vs. gas dispute dates back to the mid-20th century. a hit in suburban America after Webber introduced the barbecue lid in 1952, which allowed outdoor grillers to cook their meat evenly on a portable grill. A decade later, the gas company from Arkansas, Louisiana was looking for a way to increase their sales so they came up with a propane fueled version of that same grill and that was really surprising to me because I was under the impression that charcoal grills were much older than gas grills and that equipment charcoal had a lot of tradition on its side, but in reality charcoal grills and gas grills as we understand them today have more or less the same age, but somehow, after six decades of fighting for dominance, no type of grill has managed to corner the market today. 64 of us households have a gas grill. 44 percent of households have a charcoal grill. is the closest it gets to 50 50, which means the debate continues to

this

day.

What I love about this is that the charcoal flavor can't be beef. Okay, this one is easy gas because you can control it with gas. No, I cook with mesquite. The nice wood flavor I cook with propane gives the meat a nice meaty flavor, so the question I face is: am I legitimately in the market for grills right now? Do I want to be a charcoal grill dad or do I want to be one? a gas grill type of dad, well the simple truth about me is that I am a man who values ​​scientific reason and objective truth above all else, so if I choose to use the charcoal grill, I won't do it because I want to being with team of charcoal dads in my neighborhood, it will be because my own independent research led me to the conclusion that charcoal grills offer a verifiably superior product.

If I choose a gas grill, it won't be because some stranger on the Internet swears by it. It will be because the numbers swear so, so today, loyal theorists, I am going to determine once and for all which type of grill is objectively the best, pull up those socks, put on those sandals and let's get cooking theorists style because 2020 It's crazy dad's hot grill. In the summer and a quick note before we get too far, you may have noticed that I use the terms propane and gas interchangeably in this episode, when grillers talk about gas grills, they are usually referring to propane, since it They use about 80 percent of the gas grills in the US which is great news for me because now I have an excuse to insert a lot of King of the Hill references into this episode.

He wasn't flirting. I didn't even mention that I worked on propane. One last cleaning item. Grills can be used for cooking. wide variety of things from corn to barbecue to whole chickens, but in this episode I'm going to focus on thinly cut items like ham

burger

s and hot dogs, since let's face it, those are the things that are grilled most often, so today I'm going judging charcoal and gas grills in three key categories: first, cost, I want to know which grill will get

burger

s into my stomach for the least amount of money, second, ease of use, I want to know which grill will get burgers into my stomach get to my stomach the fastest and with the least amount of hassle and finally the taste category, I want to know which grill will get the burgers to my stomach that are the tastiest, so first we have the cost of course there are some Very nice and expensive grills that a steakhouse could drop. thousands of people on a charcoal or gas grill, if they choose;

In fact, there is even a grill that offers both options, but I'm more interested in what it takes for a new parent like me to just get a foot in the grill game, so I shopped around and found out that a minimum would be needed. $91 for charcoal grilling, $59 for this charcoal grill, $20 for briquettes, and $12 for a charcoal chimney starter, since for a propane grill setup, the cost to get started seems to be around $139 119 for this simple two-burner gas grill plus 20 for a pre-filled 15-pound propane tank, which means charcoal is the most cost-effective way to spend my first meal outdoors, but what I'm most interested in is the cost . of operating the grill over time, so I need to determine if charcoal or propane will cost more for outdoor dining.

Kingsford claims that he can get about 10 uses out of his 20.2 pack of charcoal, which means charcoal costs about two dollars per cookout and £15. The propane tank holds 3.53 gallons of propane and the u-haul closest to me currently charges 3.51 cents per gallon to refill the tank. According to Santa Energy, an average grill can cook about 8 meals per tank, which means I should expect to use about a dollar and 55 cents worth of propane every time I fire up that gas grill, so while a gas grill costs more up front, it might end up costing less in the long run if I use it enough, but would I use it enough to make a difference because I would have to cook 107 meals on my gas grill to break even, so let's think about this - There are basically 16 weekends in any given summer if we include Memorial Day weekend, Labor Day weekend and everything else, that means I would have to use my gas grill every weekend summer for six and a half years, but I don't think I can get that level of use out of my grill, for example, most Americans grill less than 16 times per summer, on the other hand, the average American does. taking their grill off and getting this after only three years, which seems crazy to me because I've never met anyone in my life who would get rid of a grill, but since I'm buying the cheapest grill available, I'm willing to take that six and A year and a half could be pushing its limits and that means coal wins in the cost category and takes the lead.

The next step is the usability category to test this. I enlisted the help of my neighbor who owns a gas grill and grill. charcoal grill and I'm not going to beat around the bush here I'm just going to come out and say it, the gas grill runs away with this category, the gas grill reached cooking temperature in just under eight minutes and when we were done there Basically no there was cleanliness to speak of the contrast with the charcoal grill which seemed to go back in time, the briquettes took almost 20 minutes to heat up and once the cooking was finished the ashes still had to be smothered and disposed of properly and this was mostly It's my fault but the charcoal and its ashes ended up getting on my hands and clothes and didn't build up, but the gas grill was also great because I could raise and lower the grill temperature with just the turn of a knob on the charcoal grill we had.

You have to spray the charcoal briquettes with a bottle of water to lower the temperature. Getting the temperature right on the charcoal grill took a lot of intuition, so it was harder for a novice like me to make the burgers exactly how I like them. Yes, these are half cooked. What if someone wants theirs to be well made? We politely but firmly ask him to leave, so as we approach the final third and probably most important category, the two grids are tied, one each. I'm not going to lie, I was hoping that one of the grills would sweep the first two categories, so I might as well call it now because the flavor category is by far the hardest to judge objectively.

There are millions of articles, interviews, books, and blog posts on this very topic. Many claim that coal. It gives grilled

food

a smoky flavor, others say propane gives

food

a bacon-like flavor, and others claim there is no difference in flavor because it is not the fuel source that adds flavor to grilled meat. It is actually the juices of the meat that fall into the heat. The fountain explodes into smoke and flames and then rises back into the meat to add the vast majority of the flavor. Of course, burning wood is known to affect the flavor of the meat that is grilled on it and many charcoal briquettes are made primarily from sawdust, this is why.

The reason wood chips are sometimes used on gas grills is a way to get a wood-like flavor from the gas grill, so there are a lot of positions on this topic and it seems that at the end of the day the flavor is a good option. It's a matter of taste, I guess, but I've come this far and I'm not going back. I'm committed to determining what flavor of grill most people prefer and I'm committed to doing it in a scientific way, so what does that mean? means exactly right, on the one hand, it means ignoring all the opinions and anecdotes about coal versus gas floating around the internet; it means ignoring potentially biased blog posts made by propane or coal companies that have a vested interest in guiding public discourse;

It means overlooking sources that describe the results of a taste test without offering any insight into its methodology, provide direct quotes from the article, and have no links to the actual study. While researching this episode, for example, I found numerous articles and websites referencing a supposed blind taste test conducted by the Good Housekeeping Institute in 1988. Apparently this taste test compared charcoal-grilled foods to grilled foods. gas, which means it would have been perfect for this episode, but the thing is, I can't find this anywhere, there are a ton of websites that refer to its supposed existence even summarizing the results, but for me life I can't find the actual article or document posted by a good cleaning service after hours and hours of searching the internet and the library to no avail, well let's just say I'm not in a great place that is clean.

Hell burn, I'll tell you what, and it's not just this individual study. There are many charcoal versus gas blind taste tests, but many of them choose to compare slow-cooked barbecue samples rather than grilled foods which cook much faster and therefore. I don't have time to retain that much smoke flavor for my purposes today. Barbecue taste tests aren't going to cut it. I'm interested in the more common thin-cut cookout dishes, like hot dogs and hamburgers, plus a lot of taste tests I have. found online had only one or two test subjects to determine precisely which grill most people prefer.

I want to get more data points than that, so the perfect charcoal grill vs. gas grill taste test may not exist, but you know what, okay, I'm trying. to answer a very specific question, which means I need a very specific experiment and as any parent can tell you, if you need the job done right, sometimes you just have to do it yourself, so that's exactly what they did the theorists on the team: we carried out our own experiment. The neighbor and I cooked some ground beef burgers, veggie burgers, and also hot dogs on both types of grills.

We cut them into small portions and gave a charcoal-grilled sample, as well as a propane-grilled sample, to several volunteers who participated in the taste test. They were informed that one sample was from a charcoal grill and the other was from a gas grill, but they were not toldwhich of the two samples was which. Then, to get as much taste testing as possible, we freeze half the samples and reheat them a day or two later. Reheated coal samples were always compared to reheated propane samples. In the end, 45 taste tests were conducted fresh off the grill and another 45 were conducted in the following days for a total of 90 separate data points.

They were asked to indicate which sample they preferred, as well as describe what they were tasting and guess which grill they thought the sample was cooked on, so on the one hand, the experiment was surprisingly difficult to carry out, it was not easy to get So many tasters on board, especially on a budget, definitely walked away with a new appreciation for researchers and what they do, but I will say it was also a lot of fun when it came to the science experiments, I mean the weather was fantastic , the entire patio smelled amazing from the grill.

Plus, Stephanie and I had to do a fun little mini taste test before the madness started, so after an entire afternoon full of grilling, we're ready to present our feast to the masses in a very safe and socially-friendly way. distant. We're not throwing a youtuber party here, we're doing science, we'll ship some of this, we'll freeze some of it and ship team members, we'll do it as responsibly as possible, but first, Steph and I are going to do a little taste test. scale if you have a food channel but never try any food. What is the point?

Which is it? It doesn't make sense, so this is all a glorified excuse for us to just buy food and eat, which is why our The fourth secret channel will obviously be fitness

theory

, yeah, the consequences of food

theory

, okay, I'm going to enter.I'm blind here, although I cook them, it's not like I can recognize them, so Steph and I tried all the samples and recorded our results, oh yeah, okay, this one catches my attention the most, this one is giving me a little of that smoky grill flavor. getting a little more charcoal in this one yeah you went pink pink pink I did it and this one I think is giving me a taste that I hope is charcoal so I'll say propane charcoal charcoal you're right yeah really.

For me, the biggest flavor difference actually came in the form of a veggie burger right where, all of a sudden, you could say, oh, this one seems to have more flavor than this one, so I assumed hey, hey, dude, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. do you want to make one? taste test yeah so I admit our mini taste test was definitely derailed a little bit by cat pad which one do you like what do you like best do you like which one is which but I know you didn't come here to look? Cats eat hamburgers very quickly, although in case you're wondering, Skip prefers propane hamburgers, but now I know what they're really hungry for.

They want the human results from the large-scale taste test. More than 43 of those surveyed preferred food grilled over charcoal while just over 34 preferred propane, this means that charcoal just won the flavor category, it also means that charcoal won the overall contest and dad's first grill will be officially coal, or it will be, because this is what the overall results don't really tell the whole story, remember. We grilled three different items, beef burgers, hot dogs, and veggie burgers, and what we discovered is that there is no one-size-fits-all grilling solution. Different grills work better for different items when it comes to beef burgers, for example, taste testers were evenly split. and I mean equally splitting exactly forty percent preferred charcoal and exactly forty percent preferred propane;

It didn't matter whether the samples were fresh off the grill or reheated, participants split the beef patties exactly in half in each scenario we tested further. The commonly used descriptor for charcoal-grilled beef burgers was smoky, while the propane-grilled burger was often described as having the traditional or regular taste of a garden burger. 83 of those surveyed were able to correctly identify which burger came from each grill, indicating that there is a noticeable taste difference and simply human taste is divided on what they like in the taste of their grilled beef burger, but here is where things start to get really interesting.

Respondents found it even easier to identify the type of grill when it came to hot food. dogs, 93 of them correctly identified which sample was cooked with charcoal and which was cooked with gas; Additionally, respondents preferred gas-grilled hot dogs by a margin of 40 to 23 percent. Multiple participants reported that the gas grilled sausage had more flavor, but for me the veggie burgers. In fact, I got the most interesting results of all, first with crushed charcoal. When it comes to veggie burgers, 67 prefer charcoal and only 23 prefer propane, which means if you're grilling veggie burgers regularly, you'll definitely want to do that.

Charcoal seems to overwhelmingly offer a better taste experience, but even more interestingly, participants had difficulty identifying the heat source of the veggie burgers, unlike the other two meats, where it was very clear what was being grilled and what was not grilled with propane or charcoal. with the veggie burgers, the guesses were only correct 50 of the time, which is no better than flipping a coin and that's a really unexpected result because remember that the vast majority of respondents noticed a difference in taste, so what the two grills did affect the flavor and i. I would assume this is because the charcoal briquettes gave off a smoky, wood-like flavor; however, it does not explain why the gas-grilled samples were described as having a smokier flavor about half the time nor would it explain why the charcoal-grilled veggie burgers were described as having a smokier flavor. a gas taste about half the time so how do you explain this phenomenon?

My mind goes back to the meat fat argument we discussed earlier, the theory that suggested that it's not the heat source itself that affects flavor but the burning of meat. juices, these results seem to validate that theory because veggie burgers have no juices to speak of, they don't sweat the same way beef burgers and beef hot dogs do on the grill, so in the absence of juices of meat, they look like vegetarian burgers. I didn't follow the same flavor rules, so to speak, as the other two meat samples, ultimately, if I'm a dad by word and follow the general results, I have to get a charcoal grill.

I promised I would buy the grill. That won today's head-to-head showdown and I intend to do just that, but the thing is, my family loves their hot dogs and when it comes to hot dogs, the numbers suggest that a gas grill is the optimal way to do it, so it really comes down to what you're most likely to grill with this stuff: grilling beef burgers doesn't seem to matter? grill hot dogs? Gas is the way to go and if you are a vegetarian and grill a lot of meat substitutes then Charcoal is the only option, for me, well this year I will go for charcoal but if all goes well maybe next year Comes splurge on some propane and propane accessories to complete the collection, but hey, that's just a theory, a food.

Theory Bon appetit, do you enjoy food experiments like this? Subscribe to Food Theory today because we have so much more in the works. Oh, and to all the theorists who have been asking for more videos based on the story. I hear you, I see you, I made this episode. about the coffee dedicated to you, so watch it and prepare to be enlightened