Technique #83: Grill-Roast for Juicy Meat with a Browned Crust

If you follow our tried-and-true techniques, you'll be able to turn out even more impressive main dishes that have lovely char and a smoky grilled flavor.

Grill-roasting involves cooking over indirect heat at a fairly constant temperature, mimicking the environment of an oven. It requires longer cooking times than regular grilling simply because the pieces of food are larger.

Because of that longer time, this technique calls for heat that is more moderate. The grill is typically set up with a half-grill fire for indirect cooking—that is, part of the grill is left free of coals, or some of the gas burners are turned off, to create two temperature zones.

As a result, large pieces of meat can be cooked through without danger of scorching the exteriors or drying out the interiors.

To avoid flare-ups when there is fat to render, as with a leg of lamb, a ham, or a skin-on chicken, you should start the meat over cooler heat to cook it through at a lower temperature and then move it to higher heat to sear it and create a flavorful browned crust—our reverse-searing technique brought to the grill.

Using this method allows the fat to gently render long before the meat sees the direct heat, minimizing flare-ups.

Occasionally, if the roast is very lean, it’s better to flip the script, starting the meat on the hotter side of the grill to sear it and then moving it to the cooler side to finish cooking it through.

When grill-roasting on a charcoal grill, we choose briquettes over natural hardwood charcoal. Though both hardwood charcoal and briquettes burn fast and hot for the first 30 minutes, we’ve found that hardwood then abruptly turns to ash while briquettes keep going for the longer cooking time that’s required.