Burning with gas is objectively, scientifically better than burning with coal

At the grill holidays, when you have a day off, are easy. You can take your time, take out your handcrafted charcoal, light it at the beginning of the fireplace, build the perfect double-sided fireplace and then lovingly take care of your ribs, chicken breasts or pork ribs. The holiday grill is a hobby grill.

But what about June 22 or August 12, when the times are in the 80s and you want everything to be in your yard to prepare with a beer and a piece of meat? Instead, it’s 6pm, you’re in the office, the kids have to eat 7am and you have to go to the store.

That’s why, buddy, that’s why gas grills are regulated.

Look, I like to cook with charcoal too. It has an indisputable advantage over gas: it makes it much hotter. Shining coals are at a temperature of about 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit; while the gas burns about 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit, there is very little bright heat from the flames.

And it’s the bright heat that is cooking your food on the grill. that’s why gas grills use a kind of surface to generate radiation, lava rocks or ceramic plates or my “Flavorizer Bars” on my Web. These surfaces are heated by flammable gases, creating the bright heat that coal naturally produces.

Coal purists will try to tell you that the fuel you prefer gets a better taste. This is, well, nonsense.

Your food doesn’t know what creates the heat underneath and once the coal is hot, no aromatic compounds remain in the coals. According to the bible of food science Modernist cuisine, “carbon is carbon; when smoked, it does not give flavor to grilled foods.”

Unique taste of grilled food tantaka, not fuel. When these droplets hit the ground heat source, the oils, sugars, and proteins turn into smoke and flames. This heat creates new complex molecules that produce smoke and warm air to cover the food you are grilling.

There is nothing wrong with coal in this process.

Founder of Intellectual Ventures, former Microsoft CTO and Nathan Myhrvold barbecue world championship chef trying to understand spending millions the science of food and cooking. He’s serious about meat, and as he argues Modernist cuisine, the actual debate among believers “should not be to know which is the best coal. It should be whether coal is needed.”

Still not convinced? Do you know what’s worse than grilling with gas, snob? Not on the grill at all.

I can enter my door with a bag of food at 6:30 and grill the chicken at the table at 7, and the happy family praises the delicious dinner. The most precious commodity in the world, the only resource that none of us have enough of, which is constantly dwindling to death, is time.

The gas grill leaves it back on all the time. Grill three times a week during the summer and you will save all day. One day! Think about what you can do with an extra day that the gas grill offers you.

Look the other side of the discussion: why coal is better than gas (the answers may surprise you).

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