Food Theory: Do NOT Grill A Burger Like This!

[Music] and that finalizes the sale and congratulations sir you're now the proud owner of a backyard grove thanks i hold on what's happening to me don't worry sir you just achieved your final dad form that's all happens all the time around these parts i'm accustomed to it good to meet you i'm accustomed to it my name's dad pat he comes with dad jokes nice [Music] hello internet welcome to food theory where we're grilling up hot takes sprinkled with a healthy dash of reasoning loyal theorists as many of you know i'm a relatively new dad but what you may not know is that this summer i've been taking major steps towards achieving my final dad form i picked up some sunglasses with transition lenses i've started backing my car into every parking spot i encounter and as for dad jokes well i've been practicing those for years but there's one item left on mat dad's summer to-do list and it's to purchase the ultimate dad status symbol a backyard grill and if king of the hill has taught me anything it's that picking a grill means picking a team you're either team charcoal or team propane you brought charcoal into our house there's soot under my boy's nails you don't get that from a clean burning fuel you don't get the rich smoky flavor either shut your mouth captain america versus iron man edward versus jacob charcoal vs propane though it might not be quite as intense as hank hill makes it out to be the whole charcoal versus gas feud dates back to the mid-20th century charcoal grills became a hit in the suburbs of america after webber introduced the barbecue lid in 1952 which allowed outdoor grillers to cook their meat evenly on a portable grill a decade later the arkansas louisiana gas company was looking for a way to increase their sales so they came up with a propane-fueled version of that same grill and that was really surprising to me because i was under the impression that charcoal grills were way way way older than gas grills and that team charcoal had oodles of tradition on its side but in fact charcoal grilling and gas grilling as we understand them today are more or less the same age yet somehow after six decades of jostling for dominance neither type of grill has managed to corner the market today 64 of us households have a gas grill 44 percent of households have a charcoal grill it's about as pretty close to 50 50 as you come which means that the debate continues to this very day what i love about this that charcoal flavor cannot be beef all right this one's easy gas because you get control with gas no i cook with mesquite give me nice taste of wood i cook with propane gives meat nice taste of meat so the question i'm facing is i'm legitimately in the grill market right now do i want to be a charcoal grill type of dad or do i want to be a gas grill type of dad well the simple truth about me is that i'm a man who values science reason and objective truth above all else so if i choose to go with the charcoal grill it's not going to because i want to be in with team charcoal dads in my neighborhood it'll be because my own independent research led me to the conclusion that charcoal grills deliver a verifiably superior product if i go with gas grill it won't be because some stranger on the internet swears by it it'll be because the numbers swear by it so today loyal theorists i'm gonna determine once and for all which type of grill is objectively the best hike up those socks strap on those sandals and let's get cooking theorist style cause 2020 is mad dad's hot grill in summer and a quick note before we get too far you may notice me using the terms propane and gas interchangeably this episode when grillers talk about gas grills they're typically referring to propane as it's used by about 80 percent of gas grills in the us which is great news for me because now i have an excuse to insert plenty of king of the hill references into this episode i was not flirting i didn't even mention that i worked in propane one last housekeeping item grills can be used to cook a wide variety of things from corn to barbecue to whole chickens but in this episode i'm gonna focus on thin cut items like burgers and hot dogs since let's face it those are the things that are getting grilled the most often okay so today i'm gonna be judging charcoal and gas grills across three key categories first up cost i wanna know which grill is gonna get burgers into my stomach for the least amount of money second ease of use i wanna know which grill is gonna get burgers into my stomach fastest and with the least amount of hassle and finally the taste category i wanna know which grill is gonna get burgers into my stomach that are the absolute tastiest so first up we have cost of course there are some very nice very expensive grills out there a griller could drop thousands on either a charcoal or gas grill if they care to in fact there's even a grill that gives you both options but i'm more interested in what it takes for a new dad like me to simply get his foot into the grill game so i shopped around and found that it'll take a bare minimum of 91 dollars to get grilling with charcoal 59 for this charcoal grill 20 for the briquettes and 12 for a charcoal chimney starter as for a propane grill setup the cost to get started looks to be about 139 bucks 119 for this simple two burner gas grill plus 20 for a pre-filled 15-pound propane tank that means charcoal is the most cost-effective way to get through my first cookout but what i'm more interested in is the cost of operating the grill over time so i need to determine whether charcoal or propane is going to cost more per cookout kingsford claims that you can get about 10 uses from their 20.2 pack of charcoal which means that charcoal costs roughly two dollars per cookout a 15 pound propane tank holds 3.53 gallons of propane and the u-haul nearest me currently charges 3.51 cents per gallon to refill the tank according to santa energy an average griller can cook about 8 meals per tank that means i should expect to use about a dollar and 55 cents worth of propane each and every time i fire up that gas grill so while a gas grill costs more up front it might wind up costing less in the long run if i use it enough but would i use it enough to make the difference because i'd have to cook 107 meals on my gas grill in order to break even so let's think about this there are basically 16 weekends in any given summer if we include memorial day weekend labor day weekend and everything in between that means i'd have to use my gas grill every summer weekend for six and a half years but i just don't think i'm gonna get that level of use out of my grill for one most americans grill fewer than 16 times per summer for another the average american throws their grill away get this after only three years which seems insane to me because never in my life have i known anyone to get rid of a grill but given that i'm buying the least expensive grill available i'm willing to accept that six and a half years might be pushing its limits and that means that charcoal wins the cost category and takes itself the early lead next up is the ease of use category to test this out i enlisted the help of my neighbor who owns both a gas grill and a charcoal grill and i'm not gonna beat around the bush here i'm just gonna go out and say it the gas grill runs away with this category the gas grill got up to cooking temperature in just under eight minutes and when we were done there was essentially no cleanup to speak of contrast that with charcoal grill which felt like stepping back in time it took almost 20 minutes for the briquettes to heat up and after the cooking was over the ash still had to be properly suffocated and disposed of and this is mostly my own fault but the charcoal and its ashes wound up getting all over my hands and clothing and not to pile on but the gas grill was also great because i could raise and lower the temperature of the grill with the turn of a knob on the charcoal grill we had to spray the charcoal briquettes with water bottle to get the temperatures down getting the temperature right on the charcoal grill required a lot of intuition so it was just harder for a newbie like myself to get the patties done exactly how i like them yep these are medium rare what if somebody wants theirs well done we asked them politely yet firmly to leave so as we head into the third final and probably most important category the two grills are tied one apiece not gonna lie i was kind of hoping that one of the grills would sweep the first two categories so i could just call this thing now because the taste category is by far the most difficult to judge objectively there are a gazillion articles and interviews and books and blog posts about this very topic many claim that charcoal gives grilled food a smoky flavor others say propane gives food a bacon-like flavor still others claim that there's no taste difference at all because it's not the fuel source that's adding flavor to the grilled meat it's actually the meat drippings which fall down into the heat source burst into smoke and flame and then rise back up into the meat to add the vast majority of the flavor of course burning wood is known to affect the taste of meat being grilled over it and many charcoal briquettes are made primarily of sawdust it's for this reason that wood chips are sometimes used on gas grills it's a way to get a wood-like taste out of your gas grill so there are just a lot of stances on this topic and it seems that at the end of the day taste is well a matter of taste i suppose but i've come this far and i'm not turning back i'm committed to determine which grill's taste is preferred by the most people and i'm committed to doing it in a scientific way so what does that mean exactly well for one thing it means tuning out all the charcoal versus gas opinions and anecdotes flying around the internet it means ignoring potentially biased blog posts made by propane or charcoal companies who have vested interest in guiding the public discourse it means overlooking sources that describe the results of a taste test without offering any insight into their methodology provide no direct quotes from the paper and have no links to the actual study while researching this episode for instance i found numerous articles and websites that referenced a supposed blind taste test carried out by the good housekeeping institute in 1988. apparently this taste test compared charcoal grilled foods to gas grilled foods meaning it would have been perfect for this episode but thing is i cannot find this thing anywhere there are a whole bunch of websites referring to its supposed existence even summarizing the results but for the life of me i cannot cannot find the actual article or paper put out by good housekeeping after hours and hours of scouring the internet and library in vain well let's just say i'm not in a great place that's a clean burning hell i tell you what and it's not just this one individual study either there are plenty of charcoal versus gas blind taste tests out there but a lot of them choose to compare slow cooked barbecue samples as opposed to grilled foods which cook much faster and therefore don't have time to retain as much flavor from the smoke for my purposes today barbecue taste tests aren't gonna cut it i'm interested in the most common thin cut cookout items like hot dogs and burgers furthermore many of the taste tests i found online had only one or two test subjects in order to accurately determine which grill most people prefer i want to get more data points than that so the perfect charcoal versus gas grill taste test may not exist but you know what it's fine i'm trying to answer a very specific question which means i need a very specific experiment and as any dad can tell you if you need the job done right sometimes you just have to do it yourself so that's exactly what team theorists did we carried out our own experiment my neighbor and i cooked up some ground beef patties veggie patties and also hot dogs on both types of grill we cut them up into bite-sized portions and gave a charcoal grilled sample as well as a propane grilled sample counterpart to various volunteers the taste test volunteers were made aware that one sample was from a charcoal grill and that the other was from a gas grill but they weren't told which of the two samples was which then in order to obtain as many taste tests as possible we froze half the samples and reheated them a day or two later reheated charcoal samples were always tested against reheated propane samples in the end 45 taste tests were conducted hot off the grill and another 45 were conducted in the days following for a grand total of 90 separate data points the taste testers were asked to state which sample they preferred as well as describe what they were tasting and offer a guess as to which grill they believed the sample was cooked on so on one hand the experiment was surprisingly difficult to carry out wasn't easy getting that many taste testers on board especially on a budget definitely walked away with a newfound appreciation for researchers and what they do but i will say it was also really fun as far as scientific experiments go i mean the weather was fantastic the whole patio smelled incredible from the grilling plus stephanie and i got to carry out a fun little mini taste test of our own before the craziness got underway so after an entire afternoon full of grilling we are ready to present our feast to the masses in a very safe socially distant way we're not pulling a youtuber party here we're doing science we're shipping out some of this we're freezing some of it and sending out team members we're doing this in as a responsible way as possible but first steph and i are gonna do a little small scale taste test if you have a food channel but you never actually try any of the food what's the point what is it there's no point so this is all a glorified excuse for us to just buy food and eat which is why our secret fourth channel is obviously gonna be fitness theory yeah the aftermath of food theory okay i'm going in blind here even though i cook them it's not like i can recognize them so so steph and i tried all the samples and we recorded our results oh yeah okay this one's jumping out to me more this one's giving me a little bit of that smoky grill flavor getting a little bit more of the char on this one yep you went pink pink pink i did and this one i think it's giving me a flavor that i expect to be charcoal so i'm gonna say propane charcoal charcoal you're correct yeah really to me the biggest flavor difference actually came in the form of veggie burger right where all of a sudden you could tell like oh this one seems to have more flavor than this one so i just assumed hey hey buddy hey hey do you want to do a flavor taste test yeah so i'll admit that our mini taste test definitely got derailed by cat pad a bit which one do you like what do you like better do you like which one is which but i know you didn't come here to watch cats eat burgers real quick though just in case you're wondering skip prefers propane burgers but now i know what you folks are really hungry for you want the human results from the large scale taste test over 43 of the respondents preferred food grilled on charcoal while just over 34 preferred propane this means charcoal just won the taste category it also means that charcoal has won the overall contest mat dad's first grill will officially be charcoal or will it because here's the thing the overall results don't actually tell the whole story remember we grilled three different items beef patties hot dogs and veggie burgers and what we found is that there's no one-size-fits-all grill solution different grills perform better for different items when it came to beef patties for instance the taste testers were evenly split and i do mean evenly split exactly forty percent preferred charcoal and exactly forty percent preferred propane it didn't matter if the samples were fresh off the grill or reheated participants were split exactly down the middle on beef patties in every scenario that we tested the most commonly used descriptor for the charcoal beef patties was smoky while the propane grilled patty was often described as having the traditional or normal taste of a backyard burger 83 of respondents were able to correctly identify which burger patty came off of which grill which does tell you that there is a perceptible flavor difference and just that human taste is divided about what they like in the flavor of their grilled beef patty but here's where things start to get really interesting respondents had an even easier time identifying the grill type when it came to the hot dogs 93 of them correctly identified which sample was cooked on charcoal and which was cooked on gas furthermore the respondents preferred gas grilled wieners by a 40 to 23 percent margin multiple participants reported that the gas grilled wiener had quote more taste but to me the veggie patties actually had the most interesting results of them all first off charcoal crushed when it came to the veggie patties a whopping 67 prefer the charcoal and only 23 prefer the propane which means that if you're grilling veggie patties on the regular you absolutely want to go with charcoal seems overwhelmingly to deliver a better taste experience but even more interestingly the participants had a difficult time identifying the heat source for the veggie patties unlike with the two other meats where it was very clear what was and wasn't grilled on propane or charcoal with veggie patties the guesses were only right 50 of the time which is no better than a coin flip and that's a really unexpected result because remember the vast majority of the respondents noticed a difference in taste so the two grills did affect the taste and i'd assume that this was because the charcoal briquettes gave off a wood-like smoky flavor however it doesn't explain why the gas grilled samples were described as tasting smokier roughly half the time nor would explain why the charcoal grilled veggie patties were described as having a gassy flavor roughly half the time so how do you explain this phenomenon well my mind goes back to the meat drippings argument that we discussed earlier the theory that suggested that it isn't the heat source itself that's affecting the taste but rather the burned meat drippings these results would seem to validate that theory because the veggie burgers have no drippings to speak of they didn't perspire the way that beef patties and beef hot dogs do on the grill so in the absence of meat drippings it seems like the veggie patties didn't follow the same taste rules so to speak as the two other meat samples did so ultimately if i'm a dad of my word and going by the overall results i have to get a charcoal grill i promised i'd get the grill that won today's head-to-head matchup and i intend to do just that but the thing is my family loves their hot dogs and where hot dogs are concerned the numbers suggest that a gas grill is the optimum way to go so really it boils down to what you're most likely to grill on these things are you grilling beef patties doesn't seem to matter are you grilling hot dogs gas is the way to go and if you're a vegetarian who's grilling a lot of meat substitutes well then charcoal is the only option as for me well i'm going charcoal this year but if it all goes well maybe next year i'll just splurge on some propane and propane accessories just to round out the collection but hey that's just a theory a food theory bon appetit do you enjoy food experiments like this one subscribe to food theory today because we have plenty more in the works oh and to all you theorists who've been asking for more history based videos i hear you i see you i made this episode about coffee dedicated to you so give it a watch and prepare to be enlightened

Channel: The Food Theorists

Views: 3,861,327

Rating: 4.9368429 out of 5

Keywords: grill, grilling, summer, burger, burgers, hotdog, hot dog, bbq, food, recipe, how to grill, charcoal grill, propane grill, pellet grill, grill chicken, grilling steak, grilling chicken, bbq recipe, burger recipe, the burger, how to make a burger, chicken burger, mcdonalds, burger king, hotdog song.ninja grill, foodi grill, food theory, food theorists, matpat, game theory, game theorists, film theory, film theorists, eat the menu, rosanna pansino, binging with babish, bon appetit

Id: IuU2bfzT1J8

Length: 18min 10sec (1090 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 27 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Cakeboy327]

I find that these episodes are so much more fun to watch because they’re a bit more hands on, like compared to this the cool aid one is super boring.