How to Grill on Cedar Planks

But plank grilling isn’t just about making salmon filets utterly kill it on visual appeal. Not only is there an entire smorgasbord of flavorful grill plank options beyond the classic cedar choice, but there’s an entire science behind squeezing the most out of the art. From delicious wood pairings to appropriate maintenance and sourcing, we’ve sat down with the famed Chef Kenneth Temple to pull back the sail — we mean, veil — on this misunderstood style of grill mastery.

What is Plank Grilling?

Plank grilling falls neatly under “simple to learn, hard to master.” For the highest-level overview, what you’d do is set up your grill for indirect heat, preheat it to temperature, then plate your meat over a specialty wooden board and put it to work grilling. There are a number of benefits to doing this (and we’re about to cover them), by what not take a quick detour through the more common legendary pairings?

Cedar Plank Salmon

Simon & Garfunkel. Hall & Oates. Jack Black and Kyle Gass. Cedar planks and salmon. All iconic power duos. (And the steamy sizzle of that last one is equally music to our ears.) Cedar plank salmon is where most folks first witnessed plank grilling in action, and it’s a delicious spin on the dish. To give credit where it’s due, we all owe cedar wood smoking (and alder, another great choice) to northwestern Native Americans. For centuries, they tied fresh-caught fish and game to large western red cedar or altar planks around open fires, residually cooking the meat into incredibly tender, delicious, and smoky grub. There, a quick culinary trivia lesson. Think of us when you win that next pub quiz.

Hickory Plank Ribeyes

Hickory plank grilling treats red meat just right. There’s something about a great hunk of grilled cow served on a hunk of singed wood (food-safe, of course) that just bellows to the open range mentality, no? Ignoring, of course, the open range’s resounding lack of trees. Invoke your inner herd-wrangler with a bold, boastful flavor of hickory smoke wafting across the juiciest, meatiest ribeye steak this side of a Western flick. Is it your lucky day? Plunk yourself down to a hickory plank steak and find out.

Cherry Plank Chicken Thighs

From henhouse to hot grill, the entire chicken species collectively has one iconic hobby: being difficult. Chicken loves drying out in a heartbeat in flame-kissed conditions, and cherry wood planks love denying the raucous birds that final vengeance. They keep the meat hydrated with steam, infuse it with a fruity smoky flavor, and often impart a fantastic light mahogany bark fitting for any dish. And to think, they were pterodactyls once! Well, that’s what they get for trying to taking us on our own turf — the ground.

Maple Plank Pork Chops

Chicken doesn’t have a monopoly on meats overly fond on dehydration. When it comes to grilling pork, it takes a page from its feathered distant cousin and tries to dry out like nobody’s business. Slap that hunk of hog on a maple plank, and you’ll bathe it with balmy steam vapor while complementing its porky palette with sweet, smoky flavor. Best part? You don’t even have to book Canadian travel to get your mitts on maple planks. Wage your private vendetta against your local pig population, right from the comfort of America.

How to Grill With Cedar Planks

By now, you’re probably wondering if we would ever get around to actually explaining how to actually grill on wood planks. Let’s reward your patience with an exhilarating spin on a seemingly modest art: now you, too, can go about taunting the very laws of thermodynamics, cooking your food straight through an ordinarily combustible surface. Much like attaching any of our best boat grills to your vessel and parading around fire over the open water (now, there’s an idea), we here at BBQGuys believe grilling can be a wonderful form of mad science. We just make our mad science delicious.

Soak Your Planks

Soaking your grill planks isn’t optional, and we know three excellent reasons why. Firstly, a quick science lesson: what might a dry, flat piece of wood might do when resting on a high-heat surface? While waging your war against combustion itself, why not adopt a flavorful solution like juice, wine, or beer? Plus, the steam from the soaked wood will help cook and moisturize your meat while imbuing delicious smoky flavor. For these reasons and more, embrace soaking those thirsty planks — even if you’re otherwise willing to commit treasonous acts of meat mayhem to spite your own guests.

But how long should you soak them for? It really depends on who you ask, but we recommend at least half an hour. That gives your wood time to drink up some of that greatness through its pores, all while embracing a film of liquid tension that will provide the first line of defense against the tyranny of the fire beneath. The wood won’t exactly sponge up the water (otherwise, we’d still be stuck as a civilization trying to work out “the raft”), but all you need is just enough to repel most of those hungry, licking flames.

Prepare Indirect Heating

Unless you’re the type to handle delicate things with a baseball bat, you’re probably aware that cooking fragile food requires extra care. That’s why indirect cooking methods are so vital to the entire “planks, meet fire” situation — let alone gentler food on those planks, such as fish. Indirect heat swaps out the volatility of crackling flames for the calmer heat of what’s effectively a really nice convection oven. Although radiant and conductive heat are reluctant to leave entirely, this wipes out the appealing, blackened lines typical to the grill hood experience. That’s the trade-off you take when you make your grub walk the plank. No sear marks — but no scorch marks, either.

Stage Your Planks

The grilling itself is luckily about as straightforward as it comes. While one side of the grill heats to perfection and the other lazily basks in the warmth, stage your planks with your proteins of choice. Crucially, keep your boards divided by meats and vegetables — grill planks have a long memory, and crossing over food items between cookouts will carry hints of their flavors. (Quick note: in this case, “vegetables” is the full category. Your plank won’t penalize you for mixing mushrooms with onions.)

Notice that we didn’t say “preheat the planks.” Some seem to swear by the practice, but it accomplishes less than you’d think. With that said, here are two exceptions: you’ve stored your planks in the freezer and forgotten to take them out early enough, or you’ve decided to go for that extra charred taste and want to slightly blacken the board before the main course begins. Sure, you can do that, but that calls for watching the planks even more like a hawk and replacing them a lot quicker than otherwise necessary.

Get to Grilling

Once you’ve made it this far, all the major choices have been made and you’re ready to bring it all home. Keep a squirt bottle of water nearby to spritz out flare-ups or any light burning on the edges while you grill on cedar planks (or whichever flavor you picked). Stay glued to your grill as much as possible, and keep that hood down as often as you can. Follow your recipe’s general cook times and, if it doesn’t call for plank grilling, add a few more minutes to account for that new gap between your grub and the grill grates.

We’ll go ahead and say it again: you’re cooking on flammable wood in an environment specifically designed to make fire happen. From a culinary perspective, the result will be a rewarding experience for both griller and guests, but it is a glutton for attention and can certainly act up when ignored. Respect the fire and be prepared to put it in its place if it decides to steal the show. Trust us, it’s worth it — keep a leg to stand on, and plank grilling will hook you. Oh, thought we forgot about the pirate thing, did you?

Maintaining Cedar Planks for Grilling

Before we let you go, there are a few tricks to squeezing the most out of your best wood planks for grilling. For a couple of parting pointers, here’s how you can maintain those grilling planks beyond your next cook — and some common questions answered after, such as what to do with them when they finally blacken too far.

Reusing Wood Planks

You can absolutely reuse wood planks, with a few caveats. For starters, this isn’t your regular wooden cutting board: when you clean the plank, wipe it down with water and water alone. (Let soap near that board’s thirsty pores, and you’ll add a new flavor profile to every forthcoming meal — “antibacterial.”) Any juices will have the same effect; you’ll need to keep your boards separated by meat, unless you like your chicken on the fishy side, or a pork taste hanging around your asparagus.

Cleaning Wood Planks

Clean your planks by scrubbing them down with a scouring pad and plain water before letting them dry completely. If you run into stubborn food debris or lingering char, lightly sand the damaged region until the discoloration is closer to your satisfaction. As far as food safety goes, the high heat in use will kill off bacteria and sanitize the board. But, if you’re willing to hang around the grill a while longer, you could always keep an eye on the planks over a clean, high-heat section of the grill grates.

Storing Grilling Planks

We strongly suggest storing your grill planks in the freezer when out of service. Not only will that keep them safe and sound from use to use, but it’ll vastly help minimize the dangers of developing bacteria between culinary adventures. Invigorating conversation, compelling memories with new friends, and exotic flavor experimentations are the sorts of cultural growth we want you to experience — not, you know, salmonella.