What's up guys it's Susie from HeyGrillHey.com welcome
to my backyard this is a new series we're starting with our backyard bbq
test kitchen you're invited to hang out with us we'll
show you guys some behind the scenes of recipe development days
little snippets from our life but also recipes and tips and tricks that you can
use in your backyard to become better at barbecue today we're talking about
two zone cooking i'm going to show you what that
means you can master the flame make better barbecue in your backyard so
here's the low down two zone cooking is pretty much exactly how it sounds
one zone hot one zone not hot and that means when you're cooking you
can put food over the high temperature high heat direct flame hot grills get
that classic crispy char on the outside you can also
use the indirect heat side for slow cooking
that means you can bring steaks up in temperature slowly so they're not
rare on the inside and charred on the outside and perfectly cooked through
chicken breasts it is the way to go in terms of backyard
barbecue heat management and like i said it works
on any type of grill you have so we'll show you two different examples
let's start with charcoal yeah we start with charcoal my favorite way to start
charcoal is in a charcoal chimney this allows airflow from the
bottom to heat the coals get them all even and then it gives you
control when you're dumping out the coals so you can put them
exactly where you want them which is perfect for two zone cooking
we're gonna fill this
that looks good and then underneath we're using a charcoal starter it's
called a tumbleweed i like these tumbleweeds because they
will light an entire chimney of charcoal in about 15 minutes but if you don't
have the tumbleweeds you can use a lot of other different fire starters
that are on the market we forever just balled up a bunch of paper
towels or a bunch of newspaper stuck it on the bottom
lit that let that catch the coals on top today we're using lump charcoal instead
of briquettes either one work it's kind of based on
your preference i found that lump charcoal tends to burn hotter and faster
in a kettle style cooker like this briquettes seem to
hold their temperature for a little bit longer but
everybody sees mixed results based on the type of cooker they have and what
you're cooking so if you're cooking things for a really long
time those slow burn briquettes can be really nice because they'll hold
temperature for a really long time or if you're doing
lump charcoal and you look for really big pieces of lump those hold
temperature for a really long time also we're going to be doing more hot and
fast grilling today so i went with just classic b and b lump it's going to
be perfect for our two zone cooking like i said
these are going to take about 15 minutes to preheat
so we'll let those roll and we can talk to you guys about two zone cooking
on a gas grill
that's a bad angle this is a real bad angle todd while our charcoal is
heating up let's talk about two zone cooking on a gas grill
because most americans have a gas grill in their backyard and to be honest with
you the first time i ever smoked anything or cooked
anything with two zone cooking was in a gas grill in my backyard
not like this one mine was really crappy we got it for free on craigslist at
spiderwebs the whole dirty grill scenario but we still turned
out a really delicious smoked turkey breast so
utilizing gas grills should be a part of your backyard barbecue arsenal
so let's talk about how to do two zone cooking on a gas grill just like this
one so this is a three burner gas grill
two zone cooking works as long as you have at least two burners to work with
you can do this with four burners six burners eight burners it doesn't matter
how big your grill is the idea is that you can have
half of the grill generating really high hot heat
and half of the grill with little to no heat so i'm going to turn on one side of
the grill get that lit close the lid and then let it preheat
for a little while and the reason that i do this is because
what temperature this hits will indicate whether or not i pop on this middle
burner if i'm looking for about 275 degrees i
know on this grill i can have one burner on high
the other two off and it'll give me a nice low temperature of 275 is the
ambient temperature in the grill so when i have say a chicken breast or a
steak that's really thick on the indirect heat side
it's getting that nice low convection style temperature of 275
when it's on the high temperature grill side i can push about five to 600
degrees right over this side if you want the
overall temperature of your grill to be higher at 350
then i'll usually turn on the middle burner what's nice about this is it not
only gives you like a nice lower temperature for things like thick cuts
of steak or chicken but if you want to bake in your grill
outside you can pop a pie a cobbler a crisp
whatever you want on this indirect heat side where there's
no heat underneath and it'll give you that nice ambient
temperature of whatever you want it to be using
these other two as kind of like your temperature gauges
and your temperature dial so use the dome thermometer
make sure you have one side that's completely off
no heat one side that's all the way high and then you can fiddle with the middle
to kind of be your sweet spot where it's warm fiddle with the middle
that's that's the thing that i just said
let's let this guy get up to temperature i mean it's only been on for a couple
minutes and it's already at 250 so i know that's going to be a nice low
temperature i like to use this for smoking things
you can make smoke pouches or i have another video for
how to smoke on a gas grill and it utilizes this two zone cooking
what i really love about this is if you like that high hard high temperature
sear you can do that and if you like it to
cook low and slow you can do that too and especially with
gas sometimes you have to battle flare-ups because you have fat dripping
down onto those flavor bars and then they
especially if you're doing something fatty like ribeyes or burgers
to have the no heat zone where you can pull your steaks
off instead of just letting them sit and get that like
acrid overcharred flare-up burn flavor it's gonna change the game for
how everything tastes in your backyard i don't know how you guys grew up but my
dad grew up with a spray bottle and he would just spray underneath to
put the fire out and so having two zone cooking allows you to really mitigate
those flare-ups without having to stand there constantly
battling that fire
these are new i don't know what i'm doing i'm just talking so much you guys
take it take some leave some all the information i have about two zone
cooking i'm just word vomiting it out onto you
how are our charcoals they're not ready yet
that's real hot though you'll know your coals are ready
when you start to see like white ash on top of the coal see how they're all
still black like we're getting some flames up the
side we know that it's happening it's working we're just not there yet
soon they're still not ashed over on the
top we've got a vortex of heat coming out
so these are our gross um barbecue gloves and we use them for like
moving grill grates around and they get very dirty and i also use them for
dumping charcoal because they have a little bit of heat resistance
but not like i don't have to ruin my nice kitchen oven mitts
and also i just put these on and then i grabbed todd's butt and then he yelled
at me because now he has a greasy hand print on his butt
sorry todd
they're good let's go
are you filming okay great all right our coals have just started to
ash over on the top which means underneath they are
white hot and in my opinion ready to dump
so i'm going to lift these guys up i'm going to pour them on
one side of the grill and this is where the chimney
is really nice
because you can really direct where you want your coals to go
so as you can see i've got all my coals lined up on one side of the
grill and no coals on the other side of the
grill that means we're going to have a gradient of heat from
super high to lowest heat possible and in the middle is a nice
sweet spot where you can get some really great like roasty cooking
high temperature side is going to give you all that crispy crunchy exterior
sear and crust on the outside of your food
and the indirect side is going to give you that nice
slow rise in temperature which means like perfect coast to coast pinks on
your steak or really juicy chicken and these are ready to cook on so now
that our coals are in you can just pop our grate
on top
pop on the lid let the grates heat up for just a couple
of minutes and then these are ready to cook on i
hope you guys loved this quick little backyard tutorial for two zone cooking i
hope it helps elevate your backyard barbecue game
for a whole list of recipe ideas that you can use to zone cooking check out
heygrillhey.com or subscribe to the other videos on my
channel that's where all of our recipes live
so you can follow along and become a backyard barbecue hero we'll catch you
guys next time
are you sad you didn't get to eat something this time
sorry oh you're gonna cook almost like i can't have hot coals and not cook
anything because it already smells good just having the coals rolling
but the kids wanted lunch so i got some polish dogs
those are just gonna go right over the direct heat side you guys
high class technique for some high-class sausages as we do