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In the old days, when you saw a soldier scrubbing toilets there was a good chance he was laden with that job because he made the fatal mistake of cleaning his Sergeant's coffee pot. The more scum of old burned coffee built up inside the pot the better! I wholeheartedly agree with that, and apply the same featherbrained logic to my grill grates. The grill we have now is thirteen years old. It has its original grates, and they have "never" been cleaned with anything but fire! Furthermore, either I am becoming a better cook, or the silly logic just gets better over time.

I know, some of you who use those insulting "gas" barbeque grills will never comprehend the sense of this. The reason for that misunderstanding goes back to the logic of the army sergeant. You see, water is full of minerals. The more of those minerals that are boiled out and baked on to the pot, the more your coffee takes on its own unique (tasty) flavor. You may not realize it, but every once in a while, when you stumble across a great cup of coffee, it won't be because of the beans, it's because the maker knows this secret. So too, when you fire up a coal/wood fire pit, the smoke and flavor of those coals and that wood will bond themselves to any leftover tidbits, fat and even burnt cheese from the cheeseburgers. Of course, after making something a bit sloppy like barbequed chicken I let the grates scorch in the fire, then I scrape the top most layer of leftover burned goodies off the grates.

Ha! Got those clean freaks shaking their heads. Guess what, I am one of those clean freaks. I do all the cooking and only touch food with a new set of surgical gloves each meal. You see, when you clean, scrub and scour off your grill grates, you are not just removing flavor from your next meals. You are, no matter how well you do it, going to leave behind your cleaning chemical and or your microscopic particles of steel wool. In addition, anything that scratches into many of today's grill grates will in fact expose metals and compounds used in manufacturing that are far more dangerous to eat then old burnt food. You don't realize these things are there because they are hard to see; just experiment once. When you are all done ruining your grate, (cleaning it) take a white paper towel and look at what you can wipe off it? ICK! I'd much rather eat my own burnt food then particulates off the floor, melted into the metal at some foreign factory.

In truth, the explosive, flammable, toxic, petroleum burning grills

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