Gas grill uncomplicates outdoor cooking
It’s grilling season. No more soups and stews to contemplate. Now it’s time to ruminate on pork chops, daydream about juicy steaks and long for crispy, fresh-air cooked chickens.
And if grilling season brings to mind a guy in his jeans with a well-marinated apron around his midsection – make room for the women in the household. Wives, mothers, daughters and grandmothers are increasingly taking on the tongs as they fear no more the rising flames and billowing smoke.
Ever since the first brontosaurus was charred in an open pit, it seems that the male of the species has been the undisputed master of outdoor cooking. For a long time, this has worked out fairly well. Women – welcoming a bit of mealtime help – have planned the menu, done the shopping and prepared the side dishes, while men have built the fire, torched a hulking slab of meat and graciously accepted the credit for making dinner.
As with any evolutionary process, this lopsided arrangement has slowly begun to change. One key has been the growing grilling trend. Another crucial factor is the tremendous popularity of the gas grill. Last year, more than 17 million grills were shipped from manufacturers to retailers, a 15 percent increase over 2005. Of those, 58 percent were gas, 40 percent charcoal and 2 percent electric, says the Hearth, Patio & Barbecue Association.
“It used to be such a big production getting a charcoal grill going, with the bricks, the chimney and the starter fluid,” says Donna Pilato, entertaining guide for About.com and a frequent weeknight griller. Pilato believes that gas grills have eliminated women’s greatest barrier to outdoor cooking: lack of time.
“I used to think, ‘I have enough to do; let him do it.’ Now, I don’t feel I have to wait until a man is ready to do the cooking. Plus, it gets you out of the hot kitchen,” she says.
Cookbook author and entrepreneur Elizabeth Karmel grew up on smoky Southern barbecue in North Carolina. As a publicist for the manufacturer of Weber grills back in the early ‘90s, she “fell head over heels in love” with outdoor cooking, and, largely self-taught, eventually began competing in Memphis each May at of one of the country’s top barbecue cook-offs. But she noticed something amiss at these events.
“More times than not, I was the only ‘girl at the grill’ … this didn’t make sense to me,” she says in her lively and informative book, “Taming the Flame, Secrets for Hot-and-Quick Grilling and Low-and-Slow BBQ” (Wiley, 2005). “We live in a country where 95 percent of the cooking is done by women. So why weren’t they using the grill?”
Like Pilato, Karmel realized that women were probably put off by the labor-intensive effort and, frankly, the swaggering associated with charcoal grilling. “It was more about building the fire than cooking,” she agrees.
But as gas grills began to dominate the American market, “I decided that I was going to lead the charge to get women to embrace the outdoor grill and to make grilling and barbecuing everyday cooking techniques,” she said.
What began with a grass-roots effort to convert female friends and relatives eventually grew into a full-time business that now includes teaching (co-ed) barbecue classes at New York’s Institute of Culinary Education, a best-selling cookbook and the launch in 2001 of her Web site, GirlsattheGrill.com, chockablock with expert tips. One of these, Karmel’s “holy trilogy of grilling” (salt, pepper and oil), is the foundation on which the flavor and carmelization of nearly every grilled food is based, she claims.
So, with more women earning their grilling chops these days, is it likely they’ll wrestle the tongs out of the hands of their male counterparts? Karmel hopes not.
“I’ve always enjoyed the company of men, and don’t want to exclude them from my take on outdoor cooking – even if it used to be their domain,” she says. “They might even learn a thing or two from someone who approaches grilling without all that macho testosterone-charged stuff.”