Rescues · TO GRILL
Sooty, acrid flavour.
Why it happens
Flare-ups. Flames touching food deposit unburnt carbon, which is not the same as smoke and does not taste like it.
Recovering it
A piece that has coloured too fast can be moved to the cool zone and covered, which lets the interior catch up without any more surface damage — this is what the two-zone setup is for and it rescues most situations. Sooty food can sometimes be improved by trimming the affected surface. Sugar burnt onto a glaze is unrecoverable; brush it off if you can and reapply late next time.
The mechanism
Grilling combines three heat paths that behave differently. Conduction from the bars makes the marks and browns hardest where metal touches food. Radiant heat from the coals cooks the whole facing surface and is far more intense than an oven's air — a bed of coals radiates at several hundred degrees. And convection carries smoke upward through the food. The distinctive flavour is not from the fire itself but from fat and juices dripping onto the heat source, vaporising, and condensing back onto the surface. That is also the failure mechanism: too much dripping fat causes flare-ups, and flames licking the food deposit soot, which tastes acrid rather than smoky. The essential setup is two zones — hot for searing, cooler for finishing — because almost nothing thicker than a burger can cook through directly over full heat.
The full TO GRILL lesson — how to tell, where to practise it, what it carries to.