I was wondering if anyone had any tips on grilling food without a grill or bbq? Basically I am trying to get that oh so grilled taste without those tools.

You can grill on your stove top with a grill pan like this one from Calphalon:
http://www.amazon.com/Calphalon-Cont...6443408&sr=8-3

Just be sure your exhaust fan is turned on high! I have one and it leaves nice grill marks on steaks and fish. I prefer to grill outside, but not so much when it's snowing out so this is a nice alternative.

I love this pan from Le Creuset. Bought it at Amazon for less $$ than Williams Sonoma.

http://www.williams-sonoma.com/produ...et%7Cckwlcebst

For light cooking of things like burgers and grilled chicken for sandwiches, I still swear by my George Foreman Grille. Though I know it's a bit college dorm-y.

For those without a kitchen.

If you have the space ... and if it's a suffficiently serious desire ... then I cannot recomend installing an electric lava brick grill in the kitchen enough.

We are lucky to have one in our built in Britannia oven. Unluckily they no longer offer the option because customers weren't buying proper extraction - but they are available as stand-alone grills from several manufacturers for the kitchen.

We've been using the grill pretty much two or three times a week for around 8 years and it's a great joy to have proper barbecued food during the winter. You let them warm up for around 30 to 40 minutes or so then turn them down a little to actually grill. It's not only good for kebabs and steaks - but great for tandoori and whole fresh fish. I also do my own version of donner kebabs ...... Miele and a few others make a modular grill. Important to have the elements actually in the rocks. Also important to have industrial quality extraction to avoid the smoke!

This seems drastic but once you have a proper grill in the kitchen the amount of grilled food increases drastically and you'd never want a kitchen without one.

An alternative is a very heavy cast iron ridged pan / griddle that fits over a couple of hobs - although I'd suggest that you certainly get what you pay ofr if you choose one of these.

Good luck.

I love my (John Lewis) anodised griddle pan, it now gets used almost all the time, for anything from tuna steaks to asparagus (you'll never go back to blanching!)

(However, as we rarely eat red meat, extraction's not so much of an issue...)

You can also get a George Formby grill. It always turns out nice, again.

first, grilling and bbq are 2 separate things:
bbq: low heat, long cooking time, typically enhanced with wood smoke
grill: high radiant heat from below, typically over a grilled/ribbed rack on a kettle or similar setup

the "grilled" taste is 2 parts:
maillard reaction: or "browning"... comes from high application of heat
flavor from heat source: charcoal and different woods have distinctive flavors

in the absence of the live fire, you can still get the taste.
the maillard reaction happens occurs with high heat, ie simple sear on a pan on stovetop.
the most common problem with this is 1) weak heat source 2) low thermal mass. if you have a really thin pan, it retains a bit of heat, slap a fat piece of meat on it, heat-be-gone.
thick cast-iron pans (or griddle, whatever you want to call the vessel, popularly made by Lodge and Le Creuset) has lots of thermal mass. a bonus is if you get the ridged version, the ridges will produce the grill "marks".*
*my problem with the Lodge is the ridges/ribs are so high, there is little surface area contact between most of the meat and the pan... very poor sear

aside from the pan, you can also use the oven on broil mode. place the food close to the broiler element (up top). broiling is essentially grilling upside-down. bonus points if you have a gas broiler, as they can hit higher temperatures (mine does 600-650*F)



so you have 1 component of the grill taste. to add wood smoke flavor you can add some liquid smoke but it is a terrible alternative. also possible to make a contraption using a tin foil pan with some small soaked wood chips in the oven to get it to "smoke" out... but really there is no substitute for real outdoors smoking

I so love our cast iron grill pan. When we switched stoves and could no longer use cast iron on it, the first pan we bought was a new cast iron grill pan with the outside coated in enamel.

I've had the cast one probably 20 years, and expect to get even more use out of the enamel one.

I have a Calphalon grill pan and love it. I do have an outside grill, but find that the grill pan gives me almost the same flavor (and with better temperature control.)

I typically get it very hot, sear the meat on both sides and then toss the pan in the oven at 350 until I reach the desired doneness.

Only problem is that the pan is virtually impossible to get completely clean no matter what I do.

That's my complaint as well with the Lodge grill pan. I have no idea why they designed it this way.

I have a Farberware electric grill and a Foreman grill, but I�ve not used them for years. Grilled meats need at least a little smoke for a good grilled taste, and that�s not going to happen with these guys. The WX outside needs to be really nasty if it's so bad I can't fire up one of the Webers.

I love my Weber. I'll grill out in the dead of winter if I need my fix.

id use the bottom fo the cart for the cross-hatch marks without having to rotate the meat!