> Geez, everyone's got a gas grill. Charcoal is
>definately the way to go. Try throwing some
>mesquite or a dead rosemary branch on a gas
>grill to get some flavor going (or flavour for
>our non-American grillers). Can you do it?
>No! You might as well be using an electric
>grill.
>
> And of course there's always the possibility of
>accidentally blowing yourself up using a gas
>grill. Oooo, can't wait to fire up that baby.
>
> Assembly time? Charcoal grill - under ten
>minutes, very little chance of killing one
>self. Gas grill - it appears to be over three
>hours with a slight chance of dying from a
>sudden explosion. Don't believe me? You been
>to Boulder recently?
>
> There's your reader poll for ya. Grilling:
>charcoal, gas, or electric?
>

Personally, I bougt a gas grill for a few reasons: First, I'm completely, 100% inept at building any sort of useful fire. The only types of fires I can build are the ones that tower several feet high and burn out quickly. I can't build a good cooking campfire nor can I build a good charcoal cooking fire. I dump the charcoal in the grill, squirt a few quarts of the lighter fluid on it, get a huge mushroom cload when I throw the match in, and five minutes later it's completely cold. There is a certain art to building a good charcoal fire that just never got passed down to this generation. My dad can do it, but I certainly can't.

Second: I don't care about the initial setup time. Sure, it was a pain to put the gas grill together, but in the long run, it makes my life easier. You can easily control the heat level of a gas grill, just by turning some knobs. If the fire's too hot on a charcoal grill, what the hell do you do? I certainly don't know. Wait? Gah, I want results NOW, I don't want to wait twenty minutes for the fire to burn itself to a decent cooking temperature.

Third: What the hell do you do with those huge mounds of charcoal briquets when you're done cooking? I live in the city, I can't just dump them over the bank out back like my dad used to do. Am I allowed to throw them in the dumpster? I don't know. Besides that, I don't want to have to go buy that icky dirty charcoal every few weeks anyway. I'd rather have a nice clean propane tank I refill every few months or so.

So, for me, it's definitely not a macho thing. If I were the least bit macho about it, I'd probably go for the charcoal grill, *despite* all of my reasons not too, just because it's the "manly" way to cook, over a "real" fire that you built yourself that you waited half an hour for it to reach the proper temperature and it promptly went out on you ten minutes after plopping your steaks down on the grill.

I wanted a grill in the first place because I like the idea of all the mess of cooking being outside instead of inside, where there is more a chance of me having to clean something up afterwards. I like how meat tastes after being grilled--anybody who says that baked or fried meet tastes the same as meat from a grill is crazy. And I was coming home at night to the smell of fifteen neighbor's grills cooking up steaks and chicken and hamburgers and hotdogs--and then I was ordering pizza *again*. There's only just so long I could stand *that*.

-- Dave