What’s the rush?
Lessons from the charcoal grill
There’s something altogether charming about cooking on a charcoal grill. Tongs in hand, perched above a pile of angry coals listening to the wisps and pops of the flames as they leave their mark on whatever sits atop the charred grill grate.
The smells, the smoke, the vents, the heat; heck, even the soot adds to the experience in some kinda way.
And that’s not taking into account the depth of flavor that seeps into the meat. Such flavors can’t be matched by ovens or gas burner barbecues.
I didn’t always cook with a charcoal grill. Living in New York for six years will do that. In a city where almost everything is at your fingertips, grilling with charcoal always felt like too much work, too slow, and inconvenient.
But here in the islands, surrounded by hammocked beaches and a sun that sits too close, grilling is as frequent as the sighs of relaxation.
What I like most about charcoal grilling is the process of it all. First, you need to clean the grill and remove the sad remains from the previous cook. It’s a dirty, dusty, but inherently important step.
Once clean, you cover your hands in black soot again to stack the new coals in the shape of a pyramid, making sure you have enough to last you the length of the cook. After administering a healthy serving of lighter fluid, you light them, then you wait.
And wait.
And wait some more.
About 23 minutes and 47 seconds later they’ll be throbbing with heat and ready for cooking. But you can’t cook food on a stacked set of coals so you need to disperse them throughout the cauldron in a healthy layer, being careful not to burn yourself or leave any coals stranded at the edges. Coals are like schools of fish in that way, they thrive when they’re grouped together.
The grill grate comes next. Then the lid to bring it up to a suitable temperature for cooking.
That’s phase one.
Phase two is cooking, which is another process in itself.
Cook with the lid open and you’ll be playing cat and mouse with unruly flames as they try to burn your food. Cook with the lid closed and the game becomes one focused on keeping the smoke under control and the flames stoked.
Use your discretion here. Find the balance—if it’s getting too hot and the flames are auditioning for a cameo in Inferno II, then close the lid to cool them off. Do the opposite if those coals are thirsty for air. Stay close to your grill and watch it as intently as you do when you hand your phone over to someone to flick through your camera roll.
Depending on what’s on the grill plate, cooking can be as quick as 15 minutes or it can take an hour or two.
Phase three is when you get to enjoy the fruits of your labor. Luckily for you, this needs no verbose commentary.
The reason I say all this is not because I want to write a love letter to charcoal grilling—I’ll save that for another post—but because I think there’s something to be said about enjoying the process.
We live in a world obsessed with speeding through the mundane to get to the end faster. Presumably, so we can post about it on Instagram or tell people that we did something cool because that’s more important than enjoying the activity itself.
Sometimes it feels like we’re on a never-ending quest to get whatever we’re doing done, so we can do something else.
The other day while we were perched on the balcony overlooking the bay, sunken into the coach indulging in some late afternoon back and forth, the discussion moved to virtual speed dating.
Two sides made their case.
The pitch in favor: Zoom dating is superior to in-person dating because you can cram six 10-minute dates into an hour compared to one date if you met in person, thereby streamlining the dating process and increasing your chance of finding a keeper.
Hard to argue with that efficiency when the aim of the game is finding a mate.
The counter pitch: Faster doesn’t equal better.
Granted, I’m happily married and am over a half-decade removed from the brutal dating scene so my opinion on dating do’s and don’ts means little here.
For the record, I always enjoyed dating and the process of it all. Even the bad dates were fun in their own kinda way, and could always double as stories to share at the pub. Maybe it wouldn’t be as fun now in my 30s as the anxiety of finding a like-minded mate to settle down with intensifies. Maybe it would.
But I do wonder why efficiency is so often pegged as the holy grail for these inherently human experiences. Sure, I’d rather microwave some noodles in two minutes than spend 10 minutes waiting for a pot of water to boil. But applying the same logic to everything else in life feels like we’re missing the point.
The idea that skipping through an experience trumps the experience itself ignores the fact that many times the process is the experience we’re meant to enjoy, not the end game.
And let’s talk about the end game. What are we rushing towards?
It’s ironic that a lot of the people who talk about speeding up these supposedly menial experiences rarely talk about all the fun things they do with all the spare time they’ve created. Sure, they get all those dates squeezed in and out of the way, so they can….what?
You can bet they’ll still moan about how busy they are. Funny how there’s always time to post 46 Instagram stories about last night’s bar crawl or today’s reading nook or the cup of tea they’re drinking or the workout they’re grinding through.
Rushing through the mundane to do something equally mundane seems redundant to me. But no one talks about that because any idle time is considered time wasted.
That’s why I enjoy nights and late afternoons around the charcoal grill. There’s no manner of efficiency that can hurry those coals up or make that meat cook faster. And that’s just the way I like it.
Sure, there are faster, more efficient, even easier ways to cook. I could get one of those pressure-cooker-type gadgets where you dump the ingredients in, press a button, and come back whenever it beeps. But where’s the fun in that?
And besides, what else am I going to do?
Check Instagram?
Never hand your phone over to someone to flick through your camera roll >:)