Over the weekend I finally had a couple of hours that I wasn't working and had caught up enough on things around the house to take on a new project. Getting the grill up and running. The grill was given to me last year from someone who'd bought a shiny new stainless grill and didn't have anything to do with the old dirty greasy one. With all of the other drama and business of the past year I never did get a chance to do anything with the grill last summer. I finally had both the time and energy to get this grill ready and at long last break out my barbecue tools.
One of the big wind storms over the winter that toppled a tree in my yard also toppled the grill. This caused much internal mayhem within the inner workings of the grill. After getting things mostly cleaned up and taking an inventory I headed off to my friend Homer's for parts and pieces. In short, they had pretty much everything I needed and with an armful of grill repair stuff and a new propane tank I was ready to get started on the process of readying the grill to begin the journey of starting to grill. By the time I had everything together and cleaned up and ready to go it was too late in the day to start grilling. And secondly I really had nothing around worth grilling. Cheerios are pretty much still Cheerios no matter how you cook them.
With the grill now ready to go, all that remained was to get something to grill and to dust off my grill tools. Despite the fact that I have only owned a grill since last summer and have not in fact actually had a chance to grill on it yet I have owned a set of barbecue tools for longer than I have owned my house or a grill to use them on. I have always been a proponent of having the best tools for a given job. I see no point in getting cheap or chincy tools to do work. Invariably any savings over having gone for the good tool is quickly erased and negated by the frustration and extra time it takes to do the job with the wrong equipment. I would always rather buy one expensive tool than to buy the same crappy 1/2 price items 3 times over.
To this end, several years ago I found what is probably the finest set of grill tools I had ever seen. Most all barbecue and grilling stuff is absolute garbage. The handles are almost never long enough. Who wants to singe off arm hair reaching for the brats on the back of the grill? Invariably if they are long enough they are so flimsily made as to immediately bend or distort. Cheap plastic and chromium plating have no business whatsoever anywhere near a barbecue. Neither does sheet metal, rivets, spot welds or any other annoying shortcuts taken by nearly all of the barbecue tool sets available. The tool set I found was at Williams Sonoma and they were everything that good tools should be and nothing at all like the other crap I had seen previously.
These tools are magnificent in every thoughtful detail. They are about 18" long and crafted of solid stainless steel with teakwood handles. Each piece weighs easily a pound and they are well balanced and solid. They feel absolutely solid and "right". The handles are generously sized and are unadorned. At the same time they are not clunky or overly large. They are nicely machined and gracefully curved. The grill cleaning tool has a replaceable brass brush and stainless brillo pad. They came in their own storage case with small velcro closures to hold the tools in place. There is no crappy molded plastic tray for these. The best part of all of this was perhaps the fact that these tools were on sale when I bought them. At the time I was living in an apartment that forbade grills of any kind, but I knew immediately that if ever I did have a house or a grill or became a champion traveling grill master that these would be my tools. W&S has since changed their grill tools slightly to a stainless and black composite plastic. While this is no doubt still a very fine set of tools I am even more pleased that I bought my set when I did and got the real wood handles (and a better price)
While $70-100 is probably a lot to pay for a set of grilling tools that you'll use maybe a dozen times a year, how much would you be willing to pay not to have second degree burns or to not have your grill tongs fold dropping $30 worth of steak on the ground. How much would your guests be willing to pay not to have to taste charred arm hair and singed fingers in their flank steaks.
I rest my case. Here's to many years to come of happy grilling here at Windemere.