Athletes in the Kitchen: Healthy Grilling Guide Ep 24

Get your chicken, butterfly it out. You can use it whole, you can do wings, you can rub this on a whole chicken, it doesn't matter. But just take that, put it right there in the bowl with it, rub it all around. Takes just a few minutes. All that flavoring is going to be on the outside of that chicken and, and it's going to make this really nice yummy crust on that chicken when it's cooked.

Welcome to the Find Your Edge podcast. Get ready to dive into all things training, nutrition, recovery, and more. Whether you're a new or experienced endurance athlete, a weekend warrior, or someone who just wants to improve your health and fitness, this podcast is for you. I'm Kris Newport, founder, head coach, registered dietitian, exercise physiologist, and certified personal trainer with the Endurance Edge and the Fueling Edge. With more than 20 years experience in the fitness industry, 18 years in multi-sport, and over 10 years as a sports nutritionist, I'm speaking with athletes and experts about key actionable steps you can take to reach and sustain peak performance and health. Let's do it. Welcome back to the Find Your Edge podcast. I am your host, Kristen Newport, and I hope you enjoyed your month off and got caught up on some old episodes. But it is the first Tuesday of the month, which means we have our Athletes in the Kitchen episode, and I am pretty excited to have a special guest with me. He is our founding chef of the Fueling Edge, Chef Jay. Welcome to the show.

Hello, how's everyone?

So full disclosure, Chef Jay is also my husband. So if you notice a little bit of a different dynamic, that's where that is. And also you might hear in the background our air conditioning because it's 400 degrees outside, which means a lot of you are probably grilling. And that's what today's episode is all about. And also we do have a puppy and he likes to Make some noise too. So before we jump into that, wanted to let everybody know that today's episode is sponsored by, brought to you by The Fueling Edge. So you can order online at thefuelingedge.com, uh, no later than Thursdays and pick up your healthy meals and snacks fresh and healthy and ready to eat on Mondays or Tuesdays, including performance cereals and energy cookies and one of Chef Jay's famous meals, your chicken salad and your beef dish, which is one of the hottest things on the menu. And you're— I know you're very particular about that, so maybe we'll talk about that. But we're here to talk about grilling, so we need some equipment. Where do we start?

Well, a grill helps to start with, but we're specific about our grills. I recommend a, at the most, a middle-of-the-road grill. The— if you're going to be doing a lot of grilling, I would say spend a little bit more money on your grill. If you're just a once-a-month griller, you can go with a cheaper sort of entry-level grill. You won't notice much of a difference out of it. I like the stainless material as much as possible. Kind of stay away from those porcelain-coated grates and those cast iron grates, they work really good, but they don't hold up well with moisture. You'll have some rust and some stuff like that. So go with the stainless. If you're going to be like a weekend griller, I would say go middle of the road. If you're going to be a person who wants to grill every night and grill a lot of different things, I would say remortgage your house and take out another loan for a grill and you'll get your money's worth out of it.

Okay, so you touched on stainless steel, but there is a grill out there that belongs to us. And I thought we got it as a wedding present, but apparently we didn't. But that thing, I tell you what, this is what really makes Jay famous. That sucker, the stuff you cook on that thing is like magic. So you have to touch on those kind of grills.

One of my favorite grills alone that it probably takes a little bit more skill, but it's a charcoal grill. A lot of times some people stay away from the charcoal grills because they don't like to, they think they're messy or they're hard to light or You know, but I prefer the one— I like the heat that comes off them with the Weber kettle grill, which, uh, company has been in business for 100 years. They're great. They— I think they were all like, um, aeronautical engineers or something way back in the day, and they came up with this grill that you could do a lot of things with. Other people copied their designs and all that stuff, but the Weber kettle grill to me is one of the better charcoal grills that you can get. And you can, and if you mess with it, you play with it, you can do a lot of different things. But yes, I do like the flavor of hardwood charcoal. I don't like the briquettes that you get that are all little pressed stamped things. And I don't like the instant light charcoal. If you want to do charcoal, get yourself the chimney starter, some old newspaper, and some hardwood briquettes or hardwood charcoal. If you do it right, we're going to touch on a lot more of this stuff in other episodes, but if you do it right, you'll cook some of the best food you've ever had on a grill.

Uh, I will definitely upvote that for sure. And all of these things I will put in our link in our notes about like any specific products that you mention, including the briquettes and the chimney starter. Maybe I'll get a little YouTube video of you next time you— this guy is very anti-social media, so I'll have to very secretly take this video of him lighting it. But I feel like patience is also in order. So talk a little bit about that because that's probably why people don't cook on a charcoal grill. And I tell you what, it really truly is phenomenal, the flavor that you get out of it versus a gas grill.

I guess I'm going to have to like come up with a couple of things like, like key points with charcoal grilling or any grilling whatsoever is don't think that you can just put it on the grill and walk away. Make sure you have everything ready. So like if there is some sort of like you have a flare-up or you drop something on the ground or something like that, it's not a panic situation. Just have a, have like a plan A and a plan B just in the back of your head.

Safety. Let's talk about that real quick because let's just say Jay has a little experience in fire suppression.

So grill safety, I can say, is one, it's a fire, and it's— and if you have it on your, your porch, which is made out of wood, obviously everyone knows what fire and wood can do together. My suggestion is to grill at least 10 feet away from your house. And like I said, not many people do that. Some people— everyone likes it on their porch where it's easy, they can step out of their back door and it's right there. I like mine down on our little paver patio surrounded by, you know, it's concrete and dirt. There's nothing that's going to, you know, if an ember falls out of— and this is— I'm talking charcoal grills. If an ember falls out of it or I spill the charcoal starter or the chimney starter or something happens, hurricane comes up and blows my grill over, it's not dumping a bunch of fire on my porch. Gas grills— things you can have going wrong with gas grills are you can have a gas grill that's not clean, so it has a lot of grease buildup in it, and then you go out there to light it one day and it reaches its ignition temperature and all the grease inside that grill catches fire. You have a gas tank, which are very safe if used properly, but you have a lot of hoses and connections that can leak. So you want to make sure that those are all tight and safe, and you can test all that with a little bit of soapy water and a spray bottle. Just go out there and pressurize your grill, turn the tank on, but keep all your burners off. And spray all your hoses and connections. And if you see a bubble, try to tighten that up. Or if you see it in the middle of a hose or line, you're going to want to replace that grill or that part.

Cool. Okay.

And always have a good fire extinguisher.

I was about to say, I was like, Fireman Jay, you forgot something.

I mean, even with a, with a gas grill or charcoal grill, even your garden hose stretched around the house and turned on is just fine. You can sit there and watch your, your grilling and water your plants at the same time.

Just one of these little guys. The little fire extinguisher.

Go to your, your regular, your Lowe's, Home Depot, Ace Hardware, True Value, whatever you like. I'm sure you can order them online too, but just get you an ABC fire extinguisher. It'll handle everything you need.

Cool. All right. So we got our two potential types of grills. We got our things that we're going to start it with, our propane or charcoal briquettes, our extinguisher. Gadgets, tools. Like, I feel like there's like, buy this grilling package for, you know, your significant other or whatever, and do we care about all those, like, knick-knacky things in there? I feel like there are a lot of knick-knacky things.

I think everybody has a thing they like. There are a lot of, uh, and I'm gonna touch on, like, apps and phone temperature monitors and timers and stuff like that you can buy now. If you like them, I think they're great. I like to think of more of grilling as getting back to more primitive kind of thing. And I get along with an instant-read digital probe thermometer. You can buy those online. Make sure it's an NSF-safe thermometer. That just kind of means you're getting a good product. And you can have— and then that it reads quick. So most of them, you don't want something that's going to sit there and read in, in 20 seconds. You want something that's going to read in under 3, 4 seconds like that and get you the temperature you want.

I love our one. I'll put that on the link to it because it like folds up and then it's magnetized.

So you just— yeah, so you can like, if your grill is, you know, not in a place where it's getting rained on real heavy, you can stick it right to the side of a steel part of it. Or like, we keep ours, uh, stuck to the kitchen hood above the stove. I mean, so it's always kind of like right there at a hand's reach. So if you need your thermometer to make sure something's done— because I tell people this when they ask about grilling, like, make sure that it's— you can always like cook something a little bit more, but if you overcook something, you can't uncook it. So make sure you're temping those foods and getting them off of the grill when, when they're getting close to what you want, what sort of doneness you want on the stuff.

And I'll give a little cheat sheet for like what temperatures you should cook all of your various things. So we'll link to that in the show notes. So you touched on a thermometer. Is there anything else that we need, like tongs or turners or, you know, towels or those types of things?

Okay, I recommend, I guess they call them spatulas, but spatula is that like kind of rubber scraper thing where your turner is the flat metal.

Yeah, spatula is like what you scrape the side of a, like, a, like, container.

Right, everyone has a different name for a lot of things. So, I like the turner. It's kind of similar. A buddy of mine actually used to have one of these that he loved it for his grill and he called it the Burger Master. And it was about like 8 to 10 inches of like actual blade on this thing where he could like get up under 2 burgers at a time or get up under a whole steak or a whole chicken and flip that whole thing over. But what I like to do is I like something about that size for a turner, but I also like to have a large set of tongs. And by large, I don't mean like 20-some inches. I'm talking like maybe 14-inch long stainless steel commercial kitchen restaurant tongs.

AKA not expensive.

Not very expensive.

Yeah.

Do yourself a favor and don't get the ones that lock. It's a pain in the butt that they don't lock, but I have had them where you go to grab something off the grill and they, all they do is lock every time you try to grab something.

Or they pinch you in a very annoying way.

If you grab them wrong.

Yes.

But they are, they're, they're very utilitarian. They're not, they're not fancy. But the thing is, they're also really cool because you can open a beer with them. And we'll have to do a—

Priorities.

We'll have to— and you can impress your friends with your like really utilitarian tongs that also can open beer bottles.

Nice. Okay, we got a tong, we got tongs, we got a turner, we got a thermometer. How about cleaning things? We got to clean the grill and definitely touch on that because we were at the beach last week and somebody had a grill there. Do you remember how disgusting disgusting that like grease trap was.

Yeah, every grill has a little— should have a little grease pan in it somewhere to catch a lot of that liquefied grease that comes off stuff. People for some reason forget about this little thing and it fills up with grease and then it fills up with rainwater. And I don't care if you have a cover on your grill, it's still going to somehow fill up with rainwater. It gets nasty, it gets rancid, it starts to stink, it attracts raccoons and possums and, and things up in your, your yard. So keep those things clean. I recommend if you're serious about grilling, check it after you grill. Like, after you go out there at night to shut your stuff down, go out there and check all that stuff. And it's easier to clean up a little tablespoon of grease out of that pan than it is when that thing is overflowing into your grill. As far as routine cleaning and maintenance on your grill, I would say at least once a month, tear it all the way down. Take it all apart. And I'm not talking like screws and nuts and bolts. I'm talking like, you know, lift the grates out, lift the burner covers out, and just give them a good scrub. You can use a non-toxic degreaser. I'm not sure, there's a thousand of them out there nowadays, but I wouldn't put oven cleaner on it, and I wouldn't put—

could you use like Dawn?

Yeah, you can use some, some Dawn in a bucket, like soapy water in a bucket, and do that. I like Charlie's Soap. Charlie's Soap makes a All-purpose cleaner.

And they're a North Carolina company.

And they're a North Carolina company. They do, they say what they call, I haven't drank it to see if it makes me sick, but they say it's a non-toxic, safe cleaner that cuts grease pretty well. That's one of the ones that I like. And it's not harsh and it's not stingy and it's not, doesn't, it doesn't feel like you're destroying the environment either. But yeah, once a month do that. Get in there with like a putty knife, scrape down all that grease and that gunk, get that stuff off there because that's what's going to cause a fire. And a clean grill, everyone always says like, oh, Oh, well, you're taking the seasoning off that grill. I'm like, no, you're actually doing yourself a favor. A clean grill tends to burn more regular, more hotter, and you're not picking up the flavor of rancid grease burning in your food. So that's a good tip.

You've convinced us. Okay, so now we're ready to grill. We got the stuffs, and now we're ready to grill. So turn everything on, whether it's, you know, or we get our charcoals ready.

Or yeah, or light your charcoal.

Yep.

Get all that stuff set.

Are there like next steps that we need to make sure that everything is like just right in terms of being prepared? Because we already cleaned it, but do we need to oil it, grease it? And what tips do you have for that?

I like to get my grill hot, and if there's any sort of like food remnants, or if there's still something on the grill from the last time you cooked, maybe it was like the night before or something like that. Get your grill hot. Take those nice tongs I told you, and then you're going to have like what I call kind of like a two-bowl system. One's going to be water and one will have a little bit of oil in it. Go out to your grill, have some old kitchen cotton. Cotton is very important. Don't use polyester or nylon or anything like that. Some cheap cotton dish towel or kitchen towels that you can get from— I think you can buy them almost anywhere.

You can probably buy them at Lowe's.

But we get ours at Restaurant Depot. But just look up kitchen cotton kitchen towel, 100% cotton kitchen towels. Yeah. Super cheap for like $30 or $40 in a big box or a big bag. Take those outside with you. Have one for the oil, one for the water. When your grill is nice and hot, before you put your food on, open it up, take the water-soaked towel, just kind of ball it up with your tongs and wipe your grill down with it. Don't use your hand, use the tongs. It's going to make a little steam. It's going to sizzle. Watch out for that. But that will wipe all that— with it being hot, it basically like takes that grease and gunk right off the grill. Or your grates. It's nice and hot. You put that back, drop that rag back in the bucket. Your grill is hot, so it's dried off already. Dip into that oily rag. Now be careful with this one because if your grill is too hot, you might get a flare-up. So what you want is a, you want an oil-soaked rag, but not a dripping oil rag. Take that, wipe down your grates with it.

And this is like a high smoke point oil.

High smoke point oil. You want your grapeseed oil or your canola oils. Peanut oil, stuff like that. Stay away from your other oils. I don't like using this. They make some grill sprays that you can spray on your grill. Sometimes those can be a little bit flammable because the accelerants are sometimes propane themselves in them. So no one wants to like do that thing to their grill.

Okay.

Wipe it down. If it smokes a little bit, that's just because it's hot. It'll, it'll cool off. That's kind of like if you've ever seasoned a cast iron pan, or something, or a cast iron grill or a griddle, that's kind of like what you're doing just in the grate form. So you've cleaned it, you basically are putting a little bit of oil back on it, and that kind of seals up that metal, the pores in that metal, and allows your food not to weld itself to a grill.

Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up because that's probably the reason why a lot of people don't grill certain things. Like, I'm thinking immediately of like chicken and fish. In particular of like sticking, do you think that's because the, is it temperature that's an issue? Is it that it's not been cleaned? Is it that it's not been greased appropriately? What are your thoughts?

All three.

Okay.

So kind of, kind of all three. And, and I said the debate on temperature is, I guess I could say, cuz if you're not leaving it, like if you have to leave it still long enough and basically it'll eventually release. Now I'm not saying that in 3 hours that piece of chicken will finally come off of there, but like it, there is a, a sweet key spot in, in the cooking where once you put that on the grill, they say like put it where you want it because it's going to like stick immediately once it hits. It's going to sit there. This goes the same with frying pans and, you know, other kinds of cooking. Uh, let it sit. Those tongs are nice because what you do is that tongs spatula combination, nudge at it a little bit and you'll see it's kind of sticky, but all of a sudden you'll nudge at it with those tongs and it'll actually like break loose and it'll slide across the grill. Then you kind of get under there with your spatula, turn it over. As soon as you turn it over, it's going to do the same thing. It's going to stick right where it was.

Those proteins have to release.

Yeah, those proteins, they, they, proteins turn into glue when you kind of get them hot.

So I like that. All right, cool. So since we touched on chicken and since that's such an easy protein that I feel like it's an acceptable lean protein for most people to put on the grill. Do you have any tricks specifically for chicken? Let's go with breasts first. Chicken breasts.

Chicken breasts. Everybody knows if you take a boneless chicken breast, it looks like a teardrop, has a thicker end and a thinner end. First of all, one of the things you want is even cooking. There's no law that says you can't put that entire chicken breast on there. But the thing is, that thinner end is going to cook a little bit faster than that thicker end. And what you're going to do is you'll have an overcooked side and a side that's perfectly cooked, or you'll have a perfectly cooked side and an undercooked side. So what I like to do is actually take— and they call it butterflying— you can take a knife and cut about 3/4 of the way flat, like through, like lay that chicken breast on the counter, cut right down through the middle of it, side, like flatways, and then open it up and it almost looks like a heart. So remember, like in Valentine's Day when you would like cut little hearts out of paper and open them up? It will look kind of like that.

Just like that Valentine's Day present you gave me that one year. One year? Yeah.

So yeah, then now that chicken is, is, it's flat, it's even all the way across, right?

And no pounding, right?

No pounding. Um, some people like to pound their chicken out, stuff like that. If you want to, it's going to, like, you pound down a whole chicken breast, it's going to take a little bit longer. Sometimes it looks a little mutilated. Yeah, some people say it tenderizes it. If you want to go through the work of doing all that stuff, go right ahead. I like to butterfly because I want to be kind of in and out.

What about for the person? Because I know there's a lot of people out there that don't like to touch chicken. Like, do we buy, like, the tenders at the store? Like, what can we buy that's, like, really quick but still a good lean chicken that can go immediately on— like, the minimal touching?

Minimal touching. Go look around. You'll pay a little bit more for it because obviously it has to be— it's, you know, it's it's being custom cut. So I've noticed that like some stores carry thin sliced chicken breasts, so there's already cut down to that even size. They cook in minutes. If you like any other type of meat, talk to your butcher like at your local store. A lot of times if you go in there and say, hey, look, I want a certain amount of product, they'll do just about anything to, to sell it to you. And if you ask like, can I have all these butterflied, they probably Well, they may do that. They may charge you a bit more for them. I don't know if some places have a custom price. Most of the time butchers are really cool and they'll do it for— because that's what they do.

Yeah.

But always ask your— ask the butcher first and see if they do it. And if they don't do it or if they want to charge you money, try another store because all the chicken probably comes from the same place.

Yeah.

And if they're— if you'll find a store that the butcher will do custom cuts and stuff for you, That's the place I would go.

Yeah. Okay, so we got our chicken prepped and now we want some flavor. We want some goodness. Do we marinate it first? Do we like— what are your suggestions?

So with chicken breast, you have a couple, you have a couple different things you can do. A lot of them just require either time and planning. There's brining, which takes a little bit longer. You basically make a salty sugar solution that you soak your chicken breast in, and through osmosis, it pulls a lot of that flavor and moisture into the meat. I think it works really well. You have to be careful with your salt and sugar levels because sometimes you can make something that's a little bit too salty, or you can make something that's too, like, sugary, and when you put on the grill, it'll burn. Um, but I do like that. That's a big thing around Thanksgiving, as you know, everybody likes to, like, brine that turkey. Uh, so if you can look up some of those turkey brine recipes—

I feel a holiday episode coming on.

You still can, uh, you still can do that same turkey brine recipe, right, with chicken breast. Give it a shot and, and see how it comes out. The only thing I've never— I've brined that didn't come out well was beef. Beef does not brine well. But we won't talk about that right now.

Let's get back to chicken.

Uh, you have brining, you have dry rub type seasonings. If anybody's familiar with like the, uh, blackened chicken or, or something like that, or, you know, like you basically just shake on a dry rub. Even salt and pepper is considered a dry rub. Put that on there, throw it on the grill.

And this is not when it's on the grill, this is before.

This is before, you know, lay it out on a plate or a tray depending on how much you have in an even layer and season it all, cover it all so you don't have buildup of a heavy spot of salt here, heavy spot of pepper there. Get it all nice and evenly coated to your taste. If you like things a little saltier, go saltier. If you like things a little peppery, or less. You, you know what you like. Uh, you can buy some dry rubs in the stores to season stuff with. What I would recommend is watch out for that sugar content in them because some of them have some sugars in them and those are meant for slow cooking or barbecuing. Um, we'll talk about that on another episode too, but you don't want to go out there and like slap that brown sugar rub on your grill because when we talked before about the— you'll have chicken brûlée and that's not what people want. Yeah. Unless I can't understand why I would want chicken.

I don't either. And also that like black stuff. I know grill marks are beautiful and they are probably visually appealing, but we actually want to be consuming that as little as possible because of their carcinogen— as a direct carcinogen, you are ingesting a carcinogen. So, okay, so we touched on chicken breast and we touched on dry rubs, dry rubs, brining, brining. What about like Quick weeknight.

Quick weeknight is, I do what's called, I call them slathers. So you can take, basically you take oil, it can be, at this point it doesn't need to be a high smoke point oil. It can be olive oil if you like the flavor or peanut oil.

Or a combination perhaps?

A combination of oils. I mean, use any oil, any cooking oil that you use will work.

Right.

Take that and take your rub, whether it be say, let's say it's a blackening season, your favorite blackening season that you can buy in the store, and you, you can basically add that to amount of oil to make almost like a paste. And it's kind of a loose paste. It looks like if you, if you had it in a bowl, if you added more oil to it, the oil would float above the paste. Or if you added more dry rub to it, the dry rub would pile up on top of the paste.

So you want that like even, like, even kind of looks kind of muddy in a way.

Yeah. Yeah. And like a consistency. Of, let's say, like mashed potatoes or a little bit looser.

Yeah, looser than that.

Take that. It's going to be a little bit messy. If you have some gloves or something like that you like to wear, food prep gloves, go ahead and put those on. It just makes it easier to get that stuff off your hands. Get your chicken, butterfly it out. You can use it whole. You can do wings. You can rub this on a whole chicken. It doesn't matter. But just take that, put it right there in the bowl with it, rub it all around. Takes just a few minutes. All that flavoring is going to be on the outside of that chicken, and, and it's going to make this really nice yummy crust on that chicken when it's cooking. So like I said, it's that— say we use that blackening season, that oil, put it on the grill. I like low to medium heat on the grill. I usually like to do something like a low to medium heat to start with, get that crust kind of built up, and then move it to a cooler part of the grill or an indirect heat area, and then use that thermometer to check it to make sure it's done. That way You're not getting an overdone crust on the meat, but you want it to, you want it to be completely cooked all the way through.

Cool.

Obviously for chicken.

And we're using our thermometer to check. And chicken is 165.

Correct.

But again, I'll provide a little like cheat sheet for you guys. Okay, so we made chicken, we got good grills, we got good safety tips, we got some gadgets and tools. What would be your 2 to 3 takeaways from what we talked about that people can walk away with? If they're maybe afraid of grilling or they don't want to cook chicken or— yeah, what are your tips? What are your takeaways for today?

Biggest thing I can tell people with grilling is, is always have fun with grilling because like, if I remember grilling as a kid, it was— it took me back to like, you know, grandparents, you know, grilling around burgers or, you know, and all the kids were excited about, you know, the smell was great. And, you know, it usually meant that like everybody was outside and the weather was nice. So always have fun with it because your kids, your loved ones, all that stuff, they'll eventually remember that as something that was a cool thing. And when the grill was lit, then you know you were getting some good food.

You are the local hometown hero in our neighborhood, by the way, because of your grilling skills.

Every time I light it, everyone's like, "Oh, something smells great." It's Jay. But yeah, that— be safe. Burns are not fun. Make sure— and, and burning your house down, that's not a good thing either. So just be safe with it.

Words of wisdom.

And, and the grill— grills today are, are, are super safe. There's lots of, like, you know, safety features in them. Keep them clean. That's one thing is, like, that grease buildup inside them is actually— that's fuel that will, will light off and can cause some problems. So keep them clean, keep them away from your house, keep them away from flammable stuff, and have fun with it.

Cool. And we'll plug in like a little one of your favorite, like, uh, I know you were talking about a slather and a dry rub, so we'll do like a really quick recipe in our show notes on your favorite, um, and some— and we're, we're not tied to any companies, so you can, you can name drop if you want.

And if we do some more, we can talk. I know there are some more stuff we talk about— marinades or injections, how to cook the perfect steak. Jay makes amazing steak. So rotisseries. Yes, we can do a lot of these shows.

Yes. Stick around. Look at you. So proud of you, Chef Jay. All right. So just to reiterate, this show is brought to you by The Fueling Edge, and we got a little special for you. If you use the code GRILLING, thefuelingedge.com, you get 25% off your first order and you too can try one of Jay's most popular dishes, which is called the Hardtail, and his chicken salad and a bunch of other stuff. So check it out. Order online at thefuelingedge.com. Chef Jay, you rock. Thank you.

Thank you.

And I'm sure he'll be back. Thanks for listening, guys.