And you thought your barbecue cooking choices were limited to propane and charcoal, didn’t you? Well, how about nuclear barbecue? Just kidding on that (though you’ve got to wonder how far in the future we have to go before that won’t be a joke). How about infrared cooking? No, this kind of infrared is nothing like the infrared warming lights that they use in the chain restaurants to keep your food “hot off the grill” fresh (even though it was sitting around for the past two hours). This infrared grilling method is quickly becoming main stream, and even the king of barbecue grills, Char-broil, has jumped into the fray by offering “affordable” infrared technology on several of its grills.

“What’s so special about infrared?” you might be thinking. Well, it replicates charcoal cooking to a very high degree - sealing in the flavor through charring - but it does it in only a fraction of the time. According to some grilling experts, infrared technology can let you have a meal completely cooked in less than 15 minutes. An infrared grill creates the same type of energy that your traditional barbecue creates, using gas to heat up the ceramic burners, through the tens of thousands of invisible-to-the-naked-eye flame ports. What’s different about infrared is that it only takes a few minutes to reach proper cooking heat and it evenly and consistently distributes that heat. But if you like to use charcoal ash as a flavor enhancer (or an excuse), you’re out of luck, because there is no ash residue with infrared cooking. Only radioactive particles.

Just joking. (But keep your Geiger counter handy, just in case.)