Brine-Boiling Meat Is The Easy Step To Speed Up Grill Times

Grilling is one of the great American pastimes, and no matter the season, it's always a great time to get out there and get your BBQ on (just make sure you keep your grill clean). But while grilling may result in great eating experiences, sometimes it can be exhausting because it takes so long. Getting the grill going is enough of a nightmare if you're dealing with charcoal (although there's a neat trick for keeping the grill lit). If you're cooking something like ribs or chicken legs, you'll be waiting for them to be ready for a while — and you have to watch them the whole time to ensure nothing goes wrong.

Fortunately, though, there's a method to speed up the process: brine-boiling. If you brine-boil your meat before you grill it, it'll massively speed up the grill time and boost the flavor of your BBQ to boot. It can quite literally save hours of your life, and the best part is it only makes your food taste better in the process.

Brine-boiling isn't the same as a wet brine, where you leave something like a Thanksgiving turkey to soak overnight. Wet brining can certainly tenderize and impart moisture to the food. It also tends to have a negative effect on flavor (this is why a dry brine is usually superior for most foods). On the other hand, brine-boiling has no such issues because you're not leaving the raw meat to soak for an extended period.

First, create your brine. As in every brine, salt and water are the necessary components, but beyond that, what you add is really up to you. Sugar can be helpful, as can garlic (smashed, unpeeled garlic works for this), aromatics, and whatever other spices you want to use to impart flavor to your food. From there, bring the whole mixture to a boil until the meat is fully cooked, about 20 minutes for chicken, half an hour for pork ribs, and 40 minutes if you're making beef ribs.

From there, take the meat out and let it dry on a wire rack for about five minutes; you don't need to pat it dry, but you don't want it sopping wet, either. Once it's ready, brush it with oil, season it however you want, and then it's grilling time.

Because you've cooked the meat through, you don't have to worry about internal temperature here; you're just grilling to get the exterior crispy with a nice char and to impart that smoky flavor. Since this is all about the outside of the meat, this takes no time at all compared to what you'd typically be dealing with, just five to ten minutes. You can brush on BBQ sauce in the last few minutes, letting it caramelize.

Nobody wants to stand around a grill for hours if you can avoid it. Brine-boiling solves that problem, and you might even prefer how your meat tastes at the end of the process.