This Easy Trick Gives Meat Unbeatable Caramelization Without A Sear Zone

When grilling with charcoal, there's a seemingly bottomless well of advice on techniques for arranging coals, honing temperature ranges, or getting a beautiful sear. Cooking on gas, however, requires a bit more creativity. While some gas grills have the ability to place meat at different distances from the flames (usually just to keep it warm), they don't always get quite close enough to create the rip-roaring heat needed for the best sear. A nifty trick that effectively adds a searing level to most gas grills is to remove the grills from their normal position and lay them directly on top of the flavorizer bars. This can get your meat a few inches closer to the actual flame, meaning a much more intense heat, and a more aggressive sear for faster caramelization.

The idea is to expose meat to more intense heat for a short period, whether searing meat before finishing it at a lower temperature, or doing a reverse sear. Many common gas grills are designed to max out around 500-550 degrees fahrenheit, meaning that achieving a healthy sear in the range of 400-450 degrees is certainly achievable. However, for those wanting to crank up the heat for a faster sear, this method can increase the intensity. It's also a useful hack if you've got a small grill that might struggle to get as hot as you'd like. For searing, there's almost no "too hot" with some chefs even searing steaks at 1,000 degrees for shorter times.

Flavorizer bars are the angled metal "roofs" that fit above the burners in some gas grills, notably invented by Weber. They're designed to protect the burner tubes from dripping grease while also vaporizing fallen drippings from the meat to create a smokey flavor. To do this, the flavorizer bars (usually in direct contact with the flames) get exceptionally hot. By placing your grill directly on top of these bars, you can tap into a new, mega-sear zone that's hotter than simply placing meat on the grill in its normal position. 

Intensifying your sear helps to caramelize the meat's sugars and complete the Maillard reaction fast enough to avoid internal cooking. The Maillard effect is the point of the sear, and is the chemical reaction that happens rapidly when proteins and sugars pass 350 degrees Fahrenheit and create complex charred flavour profiles that get us salivating. The faster the Maillard reaction happens, the quicker your sear is complete, and the more control you have over the internal temperature of the meat during the actual cooking part of the process, whether that's in an oven or on a cooler part of the grill. For those who don't have two (or more) sections to their grill and aren't able to create a two-zone setup, this is a handy way to hack the equipment. A useful tip for searing steak is to drop the grill onto the flavorizer bars a few minutes before you put the meat on to get them up to temperature. If the grate usually rests on a ledge in your gas grill, turn it 90 degrees to sit directly on top of those flavorizer bars.