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Infrared Grilling 101
Grilling with 100% infrared energy is quite simple. You’ll succeed with burgers, dogs
or steaks usually on your first try. With experience, you will learn how to work with
your grill, creating more imaginative meals all the time. This knowledge makes up
the art of grilling.
This is Infrared
Infrared energy is comprised of those frequencies just beyond the visible
light spectrum. Simply put, it is light that we cannot see, but our bodies
(and food) detect as heat. Most electromagnetic energy can cause heating but infrared is the perfect choice for cooking. Traditional convection
grills heat with hot air, and can dry out your food. With infrared grills,
infrared frequencies strike the food and cause the molecules to vibrate,
thereby creating the heat that cooks your food.
Cooking with Infrared Energy
• Sear marks are best made on fresh sections of the grill.
• Think about your meal and organize your food according to cooking
techniques and required times as well as best use of the grilling area.
• Coat each piece of meat, sh or fowl with a light spray of high heat oil
like canola.
• When using a sauce or glaze with excess sugars, brush on food during the nal 10 minutes of cooking. Excess sugars will burn and turn to
carbon and that’s not the smoke avor you want! Keep in mind, use of
excessive marinades will also require extra cleaning afterwards.
Until you get used to cooking on the Char-Broil® RED®, you may want
to adjust your regular cooking times. If you are familiar with cooking on
a well-prepared charcoal re, your sense of timing will be more easily
adaptable to the RED® Infrared cooking system. If you are use to cook-
ing on open-ame gas burners, reduce the heat settings you normally
use by at least 30% and the cooking time by about half. After some
experience you’ll have a sense of what temperature setting and cooking
times best work for you and deliver the results you want.
Cooking with Wood Chips
For added smoke avor when grilling or barbequing – wood chips can be placed directly into
the “U” through the opening in the grates. No
need to pre-soak, you can drop wood chips right
out of the bag. NOTE: Do NOT place wood chips
directly under greasy foods as this can increase the risk of are up.
Here are some hardwood varieties that work particularly well with foods: Alder, Apple,
Cherry, Grapevines, Hickory, Mesquite, Oak, Rosemary and Sassafras.