Keep the lid closed and your hands behind your back like the pitmaster at legendary Cooper's in Llano, TX.

Stop the basting, mopping, and spritzing. Just cut it out.

Part of the ritual of working the grill is standing with the brush and periodically, like the great artists we are, painting the food with a magical liquid.

It allows us to inhale the aromas (ahhh it smells sooooo good), check on the progress (almost done, honey), look at the hypnotic flames (me like fire), and act like we know what we are doing. Well here's what we are really doing:

We are adding some flavor. Maybe. Thick barbecue sauces, like Kansas City style sauces, have tons of flavor and they sit right on the surface and stay there. They bring a lot to the party. But they should not be added until the last minute. Read my article on Saucing Strategies. Some bastes, especially those with lots of salt and sugar and spices will form a layer of flavor or even seep into open pores. But thin bastes like beer or wine or apple juice usually don't have much flavor, and don't penetrate very deeply. If we've marinated the meat, we've probably gotten about as much flavor into the meat as you can. The tradeoff for this small amount of flavor can be negated by the bad things that can happen by basting. Especially on thick cuts of meat like pork shoulder or beef brisket.

We are letting the hot air out. Pitmasters have a saying: "If you're lookin', you ain't cookin'." When we open our cooker the temperature in the oven yo-yos up and down. Ideally, we want to cook at a steady even temp. Opening the door lets out all that hot air and adds time to the cook. Just look at the thermometer and notice how long the oven takes to recover. You wouldn't open the oven in the kitchen every 10 minutes would you?

We are letting oxygen in. If we are cooking with charcoal, oxygen controls the temp, and oxygen is controlled by the vents. Open the lid and oxygen pours in and we stoke the coals, so when we close the lid, the temperature soars and we risk burning or drying out the meat.

We are retarding the cooking. That marinade came from the fridge and it is cold. So we are putting cold liquid on the surface of the warm food. Food cooks when heat in the grill warms the exterior of the meat and then it works its way into the center of meat. Splashing the meat with cold liquid just cools off the surface and retards the cooking process.Then the moisture evaporates further cooling the surface. Occasionally slowing the cooking is desirable. If you are cooking something like ribs or a beef brisket that needs to be kept at low temps, and if the cooker is getting hot and running away from you, mopping the meat can keep it cool until you can get the oven back down to the temp you want. Otherwise, let that heat transfer properly.

We may be dehydrating the meat. Now this may seem counter-intuitive, but in some cooking environments, especially those where there is a water pan like the Weber Smokey Mountain, the atmosphere inside the cooker can get humid and that helps prevent evaporation of moisture from the meat. When you open to baste, you let all that moist air out. The baste evaporates and helps add moisture to the atmosphere, but it may not be enough to replace all the moisture that escaped, so we may be encouraging dehydration of the meat.

We are contaminating the meat. Most meat has potentially toxic microbes on its surface. They are killed rapidly in the grill (most are zapped when the temp gets over 155F for a minute or so). If the marinade has had meat in it, it now has microbes from the surface of the meat. So we are putting live microbes back on the surface of the sterilized meat. They will die pretty quickly if we leave the meat alone under a closed lid for a few minutes, but if the lid is open, or if the meat is removed soon after basting, we could be serving our guests a tummy ache. Or worse. Click here for more info on food, grill, and knife safety.

We are softening the skin. A lot of the flavor of chicken, turkey, and duck is in the fatty skin. The skin is best when dark and crispy. This happens as dry heat drives off moisture in the skin and melts fats that baste the meat underneath it. Painting the skin with water-based bastes, even pan drippings, just wets the skin and keeps foul skin fowl and rubbery. Sometimes, if the cooker is hot, painting the skin with oil-based bastes can help browning and crisping, especially if the oil is really hot.

We are collecting soot. When the surface of the food is cool and wet from the baste, funky stuff like soot and creosote can condense on the surface. We like smoke flavor, but most if that is really the flavor of invisible combustion gases that penetrate the meat, not soot condensing on the surface.

We are preventing crust formation. Much of the pleasure of barbecue is the dark crunchy crust on meats like chops, steaks, and ribs called "bark" or "Mrs. Brown" by pitmasters. That crust is created by caramelization of sugars and a chemical reaction called the Maillard effect that alters the structure of the food's surface and the spices on it. Constantly wetting the surface can retard the formation of the crust. For more on these processes, read my article on meat science.

This page was revised 9/7/2009

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