 Today, I am going to show you guys how to turn your gas or propane grill into a wood fired grill. The reason for this is because the flavor from a wood fire is so superior to a gas fire that if you try it once, you will never go back. Plus, you don't have to wait as long for the grill to heat up and it gets to a much hotter temperature. So if you're on a carnivore diet, a ketogenic diet or you just like grilling meat very frequently, this will save you a lot of time and will result in a superior product. Another thing to keep in mind is that very lean meat like chicken breast or leaner steaks, some pork tenderloin, whatever it is, don't tend to sear too well without added fat. But on a wood fire, you're able to get a hot enough temperature to caramelize the surface of the meat even if it's dry, even if it is not fatty or well marbled. I don't recommend doing this with a very expensive grill unless you're prepared to damage it in some way. The temperature gets very hot as you can see. My grill has a lot of damage on it and it gets very dirty when using wood frequently. You have to clean it out a lot. So maybe go on Craigslist and get a cheap wear and tear burner grill or do what I did. This is a Weber spirit grill. It's like a few hundred dollars and for someone that grills every day, it's a worthwhile investment. I'm sure some of you are much more handy than me and don't even need to buy a grill. You can probably make something yourself. All you need is a high pressure gas source because the more flame that comes out of the line, the quicker the wood will ignite and that is the main goal here. As you guys can see, there is quite a bit of damage to the top of the grill. That's from the very high flame and inside the grill here, it's very dirty, filthy and just the super high temperature pretty much turns everything black and ruins the metal. Even the outside gets a little bit charred if you put a lot of wood in here. A lot of this damage can be alleviated by being more careful than me and putting in a realistic amount of wood. But there have been times where I literally filled the whole thing up with wood and I pretty much had a pillar of hell in the barbecue. That's not really what you want but that's the type of stuff that will cause damage. So you can probably do this without damaging the grill. It just requires you to be more hands on and keep an eye on everything. Now this is how the grill would look normally. You have the burner grates down there and of course the grill grates up here. We're going to remove this and this. So these are the heat distribution plates. Underneath are the burners. There's one burner on the left, one burner on the right. What these do is simply allow the heat to go somewhere so your grill warms up. Normally you just turn this on, you wait 5, 10, 15 minutes, your grill is hot ready to go. If you take these plates off, the grill won't heat up because there's nowhere to dissipate the heat. There's essentially a burner and the flame's going nowhere and the grates don't get hot because the grates are pretty far away from the burner itself. But in order to have it wood fired we essentially just take these off and we expose the burners and as you can see there's quite a bit of ash and these burners are very beat up. What I have to do from time to time is come in here with a bristle and just clean out the burners so the gas comes out properly. You can see this gets clogged up a little bit but this gets it all out. So you have your burners exposed and you could even place the grates in here and then you could place the wood on top of this. But what I like to do is use either old grates or a rack like this. You have a steel rack. Now what actually helps is if you put the rack a little bit above the burners. So if the rack is directly on top of the burners, you have parts of the steel rack blocking the holes for the gas to get out and the gas gets hotter a few inches away from the source of the flame than it is right on the burner. So if you could put and elevate this slightly above the burner that would be ideal for igniting the wood. I mean yeah you could just leave it like this and this will work fine. So here I have some wood that I used yesterday that didn't fully burn off and I'm just going to add one more piece of wood here. Before I start the grill what I like to do is build up a little bit of gas in the line. So I turn the burners to off. I turn the gas on. I wait like 5 or 10 seconds then when I go to turn this I do it really slowly so I build up some pressure on the line then I turn it on and then you have a lot of gas that's coming up. Now we just need to wait a few minutes and then we can grill our steak. It's actually only been about a minute and I can already start cooking. This really depends on the type of wood you have, how small you cut it, you could have wood that's pretty much ignited like this in 60 seconds or less. So I'm going to go grab my steaks and we're going to throw them on the grill. Here I have some 100% grass fed and grass finished Prime New York strip courtesy of Frankie's Free Range Meat. So definitely check out frankiesfreerangemeat.com if you guys would like to purchase grass fed steaks of this quality. These will sear on the grill very quick, very nicely, but as I said earlier even if you have some leaner meat this method is way better. So we want to be a bit careful here. We have this one pillar of flame that's coming out. That's going to be too hot to put any steak directly over. So what we want to do is kind of arrange the meat around the hot spot so that we're cooking it but we're not burning it. And then as the fat renders down from the meat the flame is going to come up more. If the meat is lean the fire won't come up as quickly but as the wood continues to burn any night from the gas the fire will still come up. What you could also do is just take some beef tallow and brush it on your steaks and that will flare up the flame nice and easy. What I love so much about this is how quickly you can get a nice dark brown crust on these steaks as well as the flavor that the wood fire imparts. If you're one of those people that like your steak really raw in the middle black and blue this is the best way to do it. Because we are able to get a nice brown crust on the outside of the steak without cooking the inside at all. The only way to do that is with a very hot temperature like this. And most home kitchens can't get anything this hot. Cooking meat inside is like the opposite of this. When you cook inside it's like all greasy and smelly and it sets off your fire alarm but when you do this outside it smells good. Your neighbors are jealous you smell like a campfire and you get a nice flavor plus instead of the fat oxidizing in the pan that you're cooking in it just drips off. When the steaks are about half way done cooking depending on how ignited the wood is I will turn off the gas. Usually this fire gets a lot crazier if you have some really seasoned hardwood you know the fire will come up much quicker. Don't these look beautiful. Man let's take these off and try one out. Since we were able to get a crust so fast these are going to be completely raw in the middle. So what you could do is you could lower the heat on the grill and continue to finish cooking them or take the steaks off the grill put them in the oven for 10-15 minutes to whatever desired temperature you like. And yeah I mean this is literally a completely raw steak on the inside you know no gradient it's just a raw steak with a beautiful crust on the outside. Let's give this a shot. This is so good the flavor from the wood fire is unbelievable look at that piece with the fat in it this is so good it's crazy. Guys I cannot recommend this enough if you've never tried a wood fired steak or any wood fired food for that matter even vegetables you absolutely have to. It's probably difficult to find a restaurant that does have a wood fired oven but if you do definitely go there try some of the food see if this is something you want to do in the long term like I have a whole setup over there where I chop some wood on a block with an axe every day to get some wood for the grill but you can also go and buy wood that's already chopped firewood and it's very cheap and affordable I probably spend about two hundred dollars every two years on firewood. So you know just one piece of wood to grill your steak every day you know it doesn't cost a lot you know you're not heating a home with a fireplace. So thank you guys for joining me today if you could please like the video subscribe hit that bell icon share the video if you can if you guys would like to support me further definitely check out frankiesfreerangemeat.com we do sell these steaks as prime in New York strips we also have a bunch of other one hundred percent grass fed grass finished beef products wagyu organ meats raw cheeses caviar frankies free range meat will always be providing you with high quality nutrient dense animal foods at an affordable price. Thanks again for joining me guys and enjoy the rest of your week.