Rub Your Grill Grates Down With Leftover Meat Fat And Thank Us Later

Grilling is one of the greatest simple cooking pleasures you can have; it smells great, the end result tastes great, and you feel surprisingly accomplished for having successfully cooked outdoors (especially if in doing so you had to successfully do battle with a charcoal grill). But one consistent issue with grilling is that things can sometimes get stuck to the grill — even if you've been careful to keep it clean — and become a huge hassle.

So how do you deal with this problem? You can spray the grill down with cooking spray, or oil it by hand (for the love of your own safety, please do this before you heat it up), but there's another method that works even better: Use leftover meat fat like bacon grease or beef lard to coat the grill before you get started. Not only will it solve the sticking problem, but it will also boost the flavor something fierce.

It makes sense that using meat fat on the grill would be a smart move here since you pretty much always want to cook meat in some sort of fat. Sometimes that's oil, sometimes that's butter or ghee, but meat fats themselves can be amazing for this purpose, as well. There's a reason humans have been cooking in lard for centuries, and why bacon grease is a home chef's secret weapon (try it on a grilled cheese!). When you cook with fat, your food doesn't stick and it tastes better to boot.

On a grill, it's going to serve the same purpose and that melting fat will impart its goodness and flavor right into the meat itself. Heck, you might not even need to use leftover fat that you've saved in the past(we know you all have that jar of bacon fat stored away somewhere); if the cut of meat you're working with has a particularly noticeable fat cap, you can just grill with that side down first, rendering it out at the same time as the fat melts, functioning as a cooking lubricant. Fat equals flavor, and you want to make sure you're giving your BBQ as much flavor as you can.

There are other tricks at your disposal when it comes to grilling, too. Aside from the obvious advice that you should clean your grill grates more often than you probably are (that carbonized material messes with the sizzle), there are all sorts of other things you should be aware of, too. You should boil sausages before you grill them (it keeps the ends from exploding), while smoking chips can really boost the flavor of either a charcoal or gas grill. You also shouldn't marinate veggies before grilling them (it creates a huge amount of steam), and you should never take your meat directly from the fridge to the grill (it kills the juiciness).

Whichever tips you decide to follow, as long as you're operating your grill safely, you should be having a good time. Just don't be afraid to try new cooking methods and find out what works for you.