Cleaning Your Grill

There isn’t a single cooking tool in your kitchen that you would clean only occasionally. Although you don’t need to run your cooking grates through the dishwasher every time you grill, it is important to keep them clean. The dishwasher offers the most sanitary cleaning option, but it requires a lot of extra effort. As an industry, we have popularized the idea that grilling is so easy, and in many ways, it has created a negligent grilling culture with regards to cleaning. If I could give any griller three core steps to follow before and after every cookout, it would be this:

1. Burn the grill off. If there’s smoke, there’s combustible organic material, so burn it to ash before you brush. When it stops smoking move on to step two.
2. Let it cool and then brush it down. Brushing ash instead of sticky grime greatly extends the life of your grill brush since there’s no way for it to get sticky and matted. Get a good brush—most plastic grill brushes cannot handle high heat and they’re packed with thin bristles. Invest in a good quality heavy–duty Broil King brush.
3. Rinse and season. Always have two spray bottles on hand—one full of water to rinse the ash from the cooking grids after you are done brushing, and another filled with oil for seasoning them. Rinsing will tell you two things. As the water vapor hits your hot cooking grids it should rise like steam; white and clean. If it rises from the grill with a brownish hue, it’s full of grease and needs more burn time. This is also why you should turn the grill off, because that brown vapor is combustible. If your steam is dirty, repeat step one. Seasoning creates a polymerized layer of oil on your cooking grids which helps prevent sticking when grilling, so be sure to season both sides of your reversible cooking grids if that’s what is in your grill. Remember oiling your food is the best way to prevent sticking, while seasoning is a more useful tool to extend the life of your cooking grids.

 To clean the outside of your grill we have three great grilling products to strip away grease, remove any stubborn staining and bring your grill to the perfect shine.