Smokers and pellet grills have a tendency to cause your entire neighborhood to salivate due to their ability to fill the air with tantalizing aroma. Understandably so, your food selections’ quality, proper grilling techniques and seasonings make up for a perfect dish; however, taking care of your grill is just as crucial because it helps make the food taste good and cook it safely.
A similar analogy can be made with proper car care, such as doing engine tuneups regularly, checking the tires for any issues and air pressure, and taking it to the car wash to clean the exterior will make the vehicle function for a long time, and you’ll be able to keep it running even beyond its service warranty. You can also achieve similar results with your grill if you follow the same suit.
Why Grill Maintenance and Cleaning Matters
Making your grill looking like new isn’t exactly the whole point of cleaning and maintaining it, but yes, it’s also good to make it look good as new – provided it is well sanitized that is. Aside from giving your grill an extended life, grill food safely, giving it proper care and maintenance also helps ensure your grilled food flavors are protected.
Cleaning your grill regularly will help reduce soot float and build up, remove grease and prevent it from corroding. While these may seem like simple details, addressing them has a great impact on the consistency of your grill’s performance and its serviceable life.
Routine Maintenance and Cleaning
To understand proper grill cleaning and maintenance, you must first know which parts to clean and how to clean them. You will be able to establish a consistent care routine for your BBQ grill by understanding the specific needs of it and make sure it will operate in prime condition each time you use it.
Simple Maintenance: Every Use
Whether you’re the type of person who likes to do grilling on a regularly basis for the sake of testing and/or improving your skills, or someone who just want to show off during special occasions, cleaning and maintenance on your BBQ grill should also be a priority.
Check for Grease Build Up
Most meat slices and chops that you cook on your grill actually have some portions of fat in them. Ideally, they help add flavor to your food, but they also create a lot of greasy byproducts.
Over time and if left unchecked, grease can build up in your grill, which can cause unexpected flare ups, influence the flavor in your food selections and even cause uneven heating. Do regular checks, especially inside your grill and look for grease build-up and remove them early on, in order to avoid these potential issues.
Always clean the drip pan to reduce the chances of any grease build-up. Using a Traeger Drip Tray Liner or even a simple aluminum foil can help avoid grease sticking to the grill grates and other parts of your grill, as you can just dispose of the ash and other dirt once it’s filled, or even just half full. Do not neglect checking and cleaning your grill for any grease build-up, because it is assured that there will be this kind of build-up in your grill, as your food selections will most likely include fat-laden meats.
Clean and Inspect Grates
The grill grates is more than just aesthetic or artistic design on your grill, it actually has an important role in crafting your mouth-watering masterpieces. The grill grates suspends your meat and other food selections far above the searing heat of the burner or charcoal flame that’s 2 feet below it, which allows heat via radiation to cook the meats and food and creating amazing flavors but not burning it.
No matter how much you will clean your food before cooking them in your grill, some bacteria will remain in it, therefore it is absolutely necessaryto clean them both before and after use. Your foods will leave residue on the grates that will need to be scraped off. A clean and well-maintained grill surface ensures that you will craft excellent flavors with your food selections every time you grill.
Use a wire brush, stone or sponge to clean your grill grates. These tools have been created specifically to remove grease and hard-to-remove gunk from the grates but not harm it. Thoroughly inspect the grill grates for any wires that may dislodge while you were cleaning it with a wire brush, this is not safe if ingested along with the food that was cooked on the grill.
Deep Cleaning: Every 3 to 5 Uses
Typically, you would want to clean your grill once after using it 3 to 5 times, but you may want to clean it more often if your food selections and grease content are more than what’s allowed. Regular grilling will also require weekly cleaning and maintenance, but for occasional grilling, cleaning it once a month will do.
Clean from the Inside Out: Scrape, Vacuum and Scrub
Each time you cook food or grill meat on your BBQ grill, it will leave some food residue which will build up in the grill’s interior, particularly on the grates, shelf brackets and sides. Ash or charcoal from the heating source will mix with this residue and form burnt-on gunk and stick to the barrel or main body of the grill that will cause problems to your grill later on. It will seriously undermine your grill’s performance unless you do something about it.
1.) Scrape the Grates, Shelf Brackets and Sides
Use a BBQ Butler Bristle Free Grill Brush, BBQ Grate Scraper or 3-in-1 cleaning tool and start cleaning the interior of your grill by scaping the grates individually to remove the grease and gunk build-up. Scrape all food residue, grease and gunk into the ash catcher below in order to dispose of them properly (place old newspapers in the ash catcher so that it will be easier to dispose the grease). Remove the grates after you’ve cleaned both sides and then scrape again to get rid of any remaining residue from the shelf brackets and sides.
2.) Vacuum the Grill Barrel
It’s not just the cooking residue that you need to clean but you also need to remove the ash and soot build-up as well. You will need a shop vac or vacuum hose to suck up the ash and soot inside the grill barrel.
3.) Scrub for an Extra Clean Grill
After successfully getting rid of the food residue and soot from the inner parts of your grill, it’s time to scrub off whatever is left. A clean rag rag and grill safe cleaning spray will do the job and you just have to wipe the sides, shelf brackets, and barrel to keep the inside of the grill dry in order to prevent it from rusting. The Q-Swiper which is grill-safe is also a good alternative to cleaning the cooking surfaces of the grill and remove grease from the grill’s exterior.
Grease Bucket and Drip Tray
Do not neglect the drip tray and the grease bucket, because these parts needs cleaning and maintenance too! To reduce grease buil up and make it easier to clean the inside of your grill, use a drip tray liner.
This grill maintenance tip is critical to extending the grill’s life span and also to your safety, because grease build up not only has the potential to cause harm to your grill but also create grease fires if there’s too much heat in the grill.
Seasonal Care for Pellet Grills
No one can deny that pellet grills provides better flavor to the food selections it cooks and it’s the reason why it’s growing in popularity. Wood pellets apparently give off better taste to the meat than gas or charcoal flame and it makes the enticing flavors produced by the grill irresistible. If you’re considering buying one for the winter season, then we recommend that you learn some important maintenance tips for your pellet grill.
Insulated Blankets
The cold temperatures of the winter will force your grill to pump more heat in order to keep up with the required heat for cooking, burning more pellet fuel in teh process. More fuel spent means more build up of debris.
In order to mitigate this problem, you need to use an insulated blanket to keep ideal cooking termperatures in your grill. Your grill’s heat source will work more efficiently even as you spend less fuel than necessary for winter cooking conditions. Removing the debris, ash and soot build up regularly will keep your grill heating optimally also.
Considerations for Gas, Charcoal and Pellet Grills
The 3 different types of grills – gas, charcoal and pellet – all have unique appearances and also have different heat source that they use to prepare and cook your food. Each grill also has its own unique way of grill care and maintenance that you need to learn to ensure safe and lasting operability.
Gas Grill
Gas, propane or natural gas grills have a tendency to get clogged or corroded over time because they are liquified gas, and they produce soot as a byproduct which is the root cause of clogging and corrosion. Not only do they require to be cleaned regularly but you may need to replace the gas burners after every 3-5 years.
Pellet Grill
Burned wood like the wood pellets fuel for your pellet grill releases carbon ash that turns into soot and while their flames help add rich flavors to most food selections, they will also force you to do maintenance work on your grill more frequently than other grills. The soot byproduct of the wood pellets mostly end up sticking to the inner walls of your grill, but they’re not difficult to remove though. Pellet grills also have a feeding mechanism called “pellet hopper” that feeds wood pellets into the combustion chamber and you can’t just leave that unattended, or it will run out of pellets and your grill will shutdown.
Charcoal Grill
The charcoal grill is probably the easiest to operate among other types of grills and cleaning and maintaining them is pretty easy. However, like wood pellets, they also produce soot and ash that over time may cause some issues with your grill, so learn more on how to clean them properly to make them last.
Stick to the Basics
While not all grills look and function similarly and, of course, the heating sources for gas, charcoal and pellet grills are unique to each other, the process of cleaning, maintaining and keeping them safe for use is pretty much the same.