The Best Bar-B-Que Starter
The Boston Globe Magazine
June 25, 1995
There's nothing worse than trying to set fire to a pile of balky
charcoal.
The average back-yard chef, wishing to cook hamburgers, tries to ignite
the charcoal via the squirt, light, and wait method, wherein you squirt
lighter fluid on a pile of briquettes, light the pile, then wait until
they have turned a uniform gray color. When I say "they have turned a
uniform gray color," I am referring to the hamburgers. The briquettes
will remain as cold and lifeless as Leonard Nimoy. The backyard chef
will keep this up - squirting, lighting, waiting; squirting, lighting,
waiting - until the bacterial level in the side dishes has reached the
point where the potato salad rises up from its bowl, Bloblike, and
attempts to mate with the corn. This is the signal that it's time to
order Chinese food.
The problem is that modern charcoal, manufactured under strict
consumer-safety guidelines, is one of the least- flammable substances
on Earth. On more than one occasion, quick-thinking individuals have
extinguished a raging house fire by throwing charcoal on it. Your
backyard chef would be just as successful trying to ignite a pile of
rocks.
Is there a solution? Yes. There happens to be a technique that is
guaranteed to get your charcoal burning very, very quickly, although
you should not attempt this technique unless you meet the following
criterion: You are a complete idiot.
I found out about this technique from alert reader George Rasko, who
sent me a letter describing something he came across on the World Wide
Web, a computer network that you should definitely learn more about,
because as you read these words, your 11-year-old is downloading
pornography from it.
By hooking into the World Wide Web, you can look at a variety of
electronic "pages," consisting of documents, pictures, and videos
created by people all over the world. One of these is a guy named
(really) George Goble, a computer person in the Purdue University
engineering department. Each year, Goble and a bunch of other
engineers hold a picnic in West Lafayette, Indiana, at which they cook
hamburgers on a big grill. Being engineers, they began looking for
practical ways to speed up the charcoal-lighting process.
"We started by blowing the charcoal with a hair dryer," Goble told me
in a telephone interview. "Then we figured out that it would light
faster if we used a vacuum cleaner."
If you know anything about (1) engineers and (2) guys in general, you
know what happened: The purpose of the charcoal- lighting shifted from
cooking hamburgers to seeing how fast they could light the charcoal.
From the vacuum cleaner, they escalated to using a propane torch,
then an aacetylene torch. Then Goble started using compressed pure
oxygen, which caused the charcoal to burn much faster, because as you
recall from chemistry class, fire is essentially the rapid combination
of oxygen with the cosine to form the Tigris and Euphrates rivers (or
something along those lines).
By this point, Goble was getting pretty good times. But in the world
of competitive charcoal-lighting, "pretty good" does not cut the
mustard. Thus, Goble hit upon the idea of using - get ready - liquid
oxygen. This is the form of oxygen used in rocket engines; it's 295
degrees below zero and 600 times as dense as regular oxygen. In terms
of releasing energy, pouring liquid oxygen on charcoal is the
equivalent of throwing a live squirrel into a room containing 50
million Labrador retrievers. On Goble's World Wide Web page (the
address is http://ghg.ecn.purdue.edu/), you can see actual photographs
and a video of Goble using a bucket attached to a 10-foot-long wooden
handle to dump 3 gallons of liquid oxygen (not sold in stores) onto a
grill containing 60 pounds of charcoal and a lit cigarette for
ignition.
What follows is the most impressive charcoal-lighting I have ever seen,
featuring a large fireball that, according to Goble, reached 10,000
degrees Fahrenheit. The charcoal was ready for cooking in - this has
to be a world record - 3 secs.
There's also a photo of what happened when Goble used the same
technique on a flimsy $2.88 discount-store grill. All that's left is a
circle of charcoal with a few shreds of metal in it. "Basically, the
grill vaporized," said Goble. "We were thinking of returning it to the
store for a refund."
Looking at Goble's video and photos, I became all choked up with
gratitude at the fact that I do not live anywhere near the engineers'
picnic site. But also, I was proud of my country for producing guys
who can be ready to barbecue in less time than it takes for guys in
less-advanced nations, such as France, to spit.
Will the 3-second barrier ever be broken? Will engineers come up with
a new, more powerful charcoal-lighting technology? It's something for
all of us to ponder this summer as we sit outside, chewing our
hamburgers, every now and then glancing in the direction of West
Lafayette, Indiana, looking for a mushroom cloud.
The Boston Globe Magazine
June 25, 1995