The Kitchen Tool You Can Use As A Back-Up Grill Basket

There's something about cooking over an open flame that brings out this primal urge in all of us. Some people even find that grilling is the easiest type of cooking to master. Whether grilling for you is the easy or the hard way to get dinner done, it is undeniably one of the most delicious. Having the right grilling tools can help you effortlessly whip up a meal and avoid wasting or burning any of your food in the process. Some grilling tools can even be improvised using things you already have around the house. (You can turn your ordinary grill into a smoker easily with just a few tweaks.) 

However, grill grates can often be too wide for smaller vegetables like baby carrots or green beans. To avoid having to surrender your veggies to the fiery coals, place a metal cooling rack over your grill to cook the smaller pieces. It's important to use an oven-safe metal cooling rack since the temperatures of an open flame can damage a rack that's not made to withstand high heat. You can spray a nonstick coating on the surface of your grill or rub it with a raw potato (yes, this works!) before cooking. 

Before the invention of modern grilling accessories, sticks or skewers were used to braise meat over an open flame. This was especially common in a cuisine known to the Taino-speaking people of the Caribbean as barbacoa. It's this word that we derive the English term barbecue from. The first commercially manufactured barbecue coals weren't created until around the late 1890s. Some of the earlier versions were engineered by Henry Ford who repurposed industrial waste from his car manufacturing plant to produce charcoal briquettes.

The modern version of the grill did not make its debut until around the 1940s followed by gas grills in the 1960s. Since its invention, so many different grilling accessories have revolutionized the age-old cooking technique by adding modern convenience to fire pit cooking. Think of kettle grills that can be used for smoking or rolling grilling baskets. These baskets can hold small foods on your grill and cook them evenly on all sides. But, if you don't want to spend money on a new fancy contraption, re-using something you already have is a better solution. Next time you feel the urge to satisfy your hunger with deliciously charred meat and veg, try this simple hack of repurposing your cooling rack to save your little veggies from being sacrificed to the flames.