To explain what I mean, I think you can level up a cooking style. For example, pasta. At level 1, you’re boiling dried pasta and adding sauce out of a jar. At level 1, you add your own spices. Level 3, switch to fresh pasta. Level 4, make your own sauce. And finally at level 5, make the pasta from scratch.
So with BBQ, I guess level 1 would be cooking the meat so it’s neither burnt nor underdone. Maybe level 2 is mixing different meats/cuts that have different heat/time requirements and cooking well. Further levels = ?
At least one of the levels is practicality: The acts of buying and/or preparing every other food, condiment and implement that will be used for the barbecue, then cleaning everything up afterwards without implicitly relying on anyone else.
The grilling might be the fun bit, but there’s a lot else either side.
You don’t just hand someone a grilled meat patty, however beautifully it’s cooked and seasoned. The required bun has to come from somewhere. So did that plate. Maybe there’s butter on the bun. Maybe there’s salad. Maybe the meat needed marinating, etc.
In most areas of the US that take BBQ seriously, grilling != BBQ.
Grilling means direct heat, BBQ in those areas refers to indirect heat, usually with some smoke component.
Right verb or wrong verb, it doesn’t really invalidate the point I was making. If all you do is stand by the barbecue, put things in it and flip the food occasionally while everything else magically happens around you, you’re only doing the fun bit.
What is the right word for indirect heat cooking anyway? “Smoking” in that context doesn’t necessarily imply making it hot for close-to-immediate consumption, and “cooking” seems far too general.
Likewise, “barbecuing” could mean grilling, so that’s too general as well.
I’m from North Carolina. There was a candidate for NC governor once who lost his race because he was heard saying he was “sick of barbecue.” It’s a THING here.
No. No it doesn’t.
Grilling is a short duration, high direct heat process.
Barbecuing is a long duration, low indirect heat process.
Those who use barbecuing as a synonym for grilling are objectively wrong and have measurably damaged you and your ability to communicate about food preparation.
Objectively wrong for your part of the world maybe.
I guess my part of the world probably doesn’t have a word for the distinction because here it can mean either.
Either that or it’s a case of common parlance versus learned parlance, like, for the sake of any example, when people say “theory” but mean “hypothesis” and in learned parlance “theory” has a different meaning.
My part of the world uses the word “barbecue” specifically to mean the kind of cooking we were talking about and avoids that ambiguity you were struggling with, so I think I can confidently say use of the word “barbecue” as a synonym for “grill” when the word “grill” is also in use is uselessly defective.
Yeah, no one cares. We’ve all had grilled hamburgers at backyard BBQs.
I think you’re about to find out just how much people care lol