BBQ Cleaning, at your home

Almost everybody who books a BBQ clean has already done the grills and plates, more than once, with a wire brush. That is the part that is reachable, so it is the part that gets done. It is also the part that matters least to how the BBQ cooks and how the food tastes.

Underneath the plates sit the flame tamers, the angled steel covers over each burner. Their whole job is to catch dripping fat and vaporise it, so they carry the heaviest carbon in the machine and they are the main source of the acrid smoke that gets called flare-up. They lift out, and once they are out you can see the burner tubes.

The burner tubes have a row of small ports along each side, and those ports block with carbon and with debris that has fallen in from above. A partially blocked tube lights unevenly, which is why one end of a BBQ runs hotter than the other and why people slowly stop using the far burner. Clearing the ports is a few minutes of work that returns the machine to even heat, and it is almost never done.

Then there is the base, the tray under everything, which is where all of it ends up. On a BBQ that has run a few summers without being stripped, that is a solid layer of fat and carbon rather than a residue. Scraping it flat, which is the usual approach, achieves nothing except redistributing it. It comes out.

The hood is the last one and the one that surprises people. The brown-black flaking that appears on the inside of a hood is not paint peeling, whatever it looks like. It is carbonised fat and smoke that has built up in layers and started to lift, and it is the thing that drops onto food. It cleans off, and once it is off the difference to how the BBQ smells while it heats is the part customers mention afterwards.

This is also why we do the BBQ last on any visit that includes indoor work, and outside. It is the messiest job we do, and none of what comes out of a BBQ base should travel back through a kitchen we have just finished.