Actually, Roberta made a grill. She’d been wanting to grill for a long time. I think because there is a place around the corner with a huge grill that cooks about 40 chickens every night on the sidewalk and it smells fantastic from our house. The problem is that we couldn’t find any affordable grills anywhere. The only one we found was a very small Weber grill in the big hardware store, Lugo, but they wanted about $125 USD for it. Too much for something we’d probably use every night for a week out of excitement and then not touch for months and would just end up a rusted heap on the back patio. I speak from experience, here.
Walking around Granada we always see people grilling; either small restaurants with outdoor grills or individuals, but the grills are always hand made out of barrels or some other container. Except in Lugo, we’ve never seen a commercially made consumer grill in use. Of course, in larger restaurants like El Zaguan they have huge commercial grills
So Roberta went down to an appliance repair / salvage place by the market and picked up an old oven rack, a big metal dish, and a couple of cinder blocks and – voila – we have a grill!
UPDATE: The chicken breasts you see cooking there on the grill turned out great. They were a bit charred on the outside but they were perfectly done on the inside. Very moist and tender. I think next time we’ll use less charcoal.
3 Comments
Claudia
Love this! The other homemade grills I’ve seen a lot around Nicaragua are made from old tire rims. Some are pretty basic – just the rim welded onto some scrap metal and not much else, others have legs added for elevation.
Clif
Thanks! We’ve expanded on this one quite a bit since this post, adding another oven rack and building out the brick platform to make room on the side for a tray or bowl.
Gordana
Clif, you can also buy Nica bbq’s in the market. They come in different sizes or they will make one whatever size you want. Very basic but it does the job. Still bugging hubby to get down there to buy one and when we do, I’ll post a pic of it. If I remember correctly they wanted something like $180 cordabas for the one we were looking at.