The Art of Grilling Made Easy - Simple Steps to Improve your Skills

The excitement is building. All day you have been preparing, you have the steaks, you have the fish and the barbecue sauces. An hour before the boss and his family arrive, you have everything set out on your grill. You fire it up and head in to get a couple of things. You come back and the grill does not seem to be working. After twenty minutes of messing around you find the problem - you ran out of gas! Disaster!

So the first tip to would be gas grillers is to check the gas well in advance of your grilling party. An obvious, common sense thing to do but newbie grillers can often forget. Even better, have a reserve gas bottle so if you get caught out like that, you don't have to drive to the store. Yeah, and while you're at it, check the gas hoses regularly to make sure they are not cracked or holed. That is especially important when the grill has not been used for a while.

OK. Let’s move on. My second tip is to make sure that you clean the grill before and after every use of the grill. To do that get yourself a wire brush specially for that job. Make suire that you clean off the remains of any food because re-cooked, burnt food can impart off flavours to the food that you cook next. Don't neglect the burners either; make sure the holes are free of blockages by a visual inspection. If they need cleaning, gently poke out the blockage using a piece of wire of a suitable size.

My third tip is about food hygiene. Do not allow raw food to come into contact with cooked food, keep the two separate. All raw meat has bacteria and if that is transferred to cooked food it can grow rapidly and cause food poisoning. Any utensils that you use for handling raw food should NEVER be used for handling cooked food, until they have been thoroughly washed.

That brings me on to cooking food properly. One of the biggest mistakes a gas griller can make it to cook the food to fast. This happens when the heat is set too high. The outside is cooked to perfection but the inside is raw. Since the temperature inside the food has not raised to the level where is gets cooked, bacteria can multiply. Poultry and game is particularly bad so make sure that you cook on an appropriate temperature setting. And get a food thermometer - that way you can check for definite whether the inside of the food has gotten hot enough to cook fully. Pay attention to the recipe details for cooking times and temperatures.

The other way to poison your guests is to use the marinades as sauces. Believe it or not, there are people out there that just pour the marinade straight over the food! ALWAYS cook the marinade before serving as a grilling sauce - it is a perfect breeding ground for bacteria so these need to be killed off before serving.

My final tip for this article is to always buy the best food you can afford. If you have poor quality starting materials you will inevitably end up with a poor quality product. Buying cheap stuff is a false economy, guests at your grilling party will leave unimpressed by your skills. So by following these simple steps, you can make your grill parties the best in the neighborhood!