BBQs
Know your BBQ parts!
Apr
Are you one of those people who really doesn’t give a monkey’s what different BBQ parts do and what they’re called? If so, feel free to click away. Maybe you can’t relax and enjoy yourself until you’ve found and digested every scrap of tasty information. If you’re the latter, this one is for you. Welcome to our deep-dive into the guts of your barbie, illustrated with some of our best-seller BBQ models.
BBQ parts explained
Let’s kick off the fun with BBQ cooking grates, also called grill grates. These are simply the metal grids you put the food on to cook it. Usually made from either stainless steel or cast iron, now and again you’ll come across a steel grill coated with porcelain. Cast iron versions hang onto the heat, brilliant for searing like a pro, and stainless steel won’t rust.
The BBQ lid obviously protects the cooking area so your food isn’t coated with dust and muck from the wind or pooped on by passing birds. It also traps heat and smoke for tasty indirect cooking. Basically you can’t really smoke or roast properly on a BBQ without a lid, and it’s also pretty fuel-inefficient since you can’t keep a steady temperature without throwing in a forest’s worth of wood or charcoal.
Your BBQ heat source can be gas burners fuelled by portable gas cannisters like people use for camping. You might prefer charcoal, or wood. Gas Burners run on Propane or Natural Gas and like indoor gas cookers they’re instantly turn on-and-off-able for precise temperature control. Charcoal comes in briquettes: a compressed block, or in natural lumps. It generates famously high heat and also gives food a gorgeous smoky flavour. Wood or wood pellets fuel smokers and pellet grills, adding a rich smoky tang to low-and-slow cooked dishes.
A BBQ drip pan or grease tray is there to make life easier, catching greasy drips from the food so it won’t set the whole kit and caboodle on fire and ruin your fun. If you use a pellet grill or smoker you’ll usually find it below the grate. Then there are BBQ vents and BBQ dampers to control the airflow for maximum fuel efficiency and reliable heat. The vents and dampers in charcoal BBQs and smokers include an intake vent at the bottom, which controls the airflow to adjust heat. The more air flows through, the hotter your fire. The exhaust vent at the top or in the chimney sends smoke safely away and also regulates the temperature inside the BBQ.
A BBQ ash catcher is a common feature of charcoal grills, another little thing that makes outdoor life less cleaning-intensive. It collects the ash from burned charcoal so you don’t have to, easy to chuck away without causing an unholy mess or setting your world on fire. You’ll usually find it below the grill area.
Some BBQ parts are optional, including a BBQ warming rack, basically a second rack set above the main grate or grates, where you keep cooked food warm. A popular feature of bigger BBQs, it’s handy when you want to serve up food to everyone at once, not in dribs and drabs.
BBQ side tables and side shelves are all about the food prep, a workspace that’s also useful for stashing crockery, BBQ tools, cutlery, sauces and whatnot conveniently. So much better than prepping indoors when everyone else is outdoors having fun, or dragging a table out from indoors.
Ignition-wise, gas grills come with a BBQ ignition system, often a push-button Piezo igniter that sparks the flames off nicely. Electronic ignition is almost always battery-powered, not mains. As well as being safer than a naked flame they give you a more reliable way to light a BBQ. Many of our big barbies also come with a BBQ temperature gauge or built-in thermometer to measure the internal grill temperature. If you’re bbq-ing meat an external probe is a good idea for a belt-and-braces approach, making sure it’s safely cooked all the way through.
A smoker box is a feature of gas and pellet grills, holding fragrant wood chips to make the magical smoke that flavours food so beautifully. An optional BBQ rotisserie kit adds the potential of a motorised spit, great for slow-roasting entire chickens and roasts or creating epic kebabs.
And that’s the end of our BBQ parts story. Now you know exactly what does what, you can go forth and cook with confidence, tinkering to your heart’s content to achieve sheer foodie perfection, maximum fuel efficiency, and a clean, hygienic set-up. Now all that’s left to do is… actually go and light that barbie!
