The Lid

The first rule of charcoal is you don't open the lid. And I know the first rule. The problem is I don't believe it, and that's the whole thing.

My buddy told me this, and he's a good griller. I believed him for the first twenty minutes, and then I stopped, because the chicken was doing something and I wanted to know what.

You can't hear a grill from the porch. Or you can, some of the time. There's a sizzle that means it's ready, and a sizzle that means it needs attention, and I didn't know which I was hearing, so I opened the lid.

It was a mistake. The smoke thinned and I felt it. I put the lid back, waited, and did it again.

My buddy was sitting on the cooler the whole time, not touching his grill once. I asked how he knows when to stop, and he said, I can hear the smoke, and I said, you can't hear smoke, and he said, you can, if you know what it's supposed to sound like.

I let him finish. His lid stayed shut. Mine didn't. And the chicken is good, I want that in the record. But the smoke was doing something and I wasn't going to miss it, so I had to keep looking.