Seasoned Advice is a question and answer site for professional and amateur chefs. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I can understand that an electric/gas BBQ is very practical for outdoor events because you can cook a large amount of food in a relatively short amount of time, without smelling up the house.
A charcoal BBQ can impart a smokey flavour to the meat from the briquettes but what can say a gas BBQ do in terms of flavour? Is there any difference between using a gas BBQ and cooking the food indoors with a griddle/frying pan?
When you're grilling food at high temperatures on a barbeque most of the smoke comes from fat that strikes the hot surface of the coals/vapourizer. It's only when you're slowly barbequing food, cooking it at cool temperatures, that the difference becomes important. With a gas or electric barbeque you'll need to add a source of smoke (eg. wood in a smoker box) if you want to add any smokey flavour. Even with charcoal it's normal to add wood to the coals in order to increase the amount of smoke.
When cooking on an indoor griddle or frying pan, unless something goes seriously wrong, there's usually no smoke so the flavour will different than when grilling on any sort of barbeque.
