Why You Should Always Grill Your Brats Over Direct Heat

Highly involved smoked meats like brisket and ribs may be the biggest showstoppers, but it's hard to beat a brat for pure grilling joy. Packed with pungent spices and fatty, juicy pork, brats require no prep and deliver an amazing amount of flavor in a tidy package. It's also easy to customize or upgrade bratwurst with tons of different toppings, making them perfect for an easy family meal or a big backyard party. And while brats are plenty tasty boiled or pan-fired, they are all-stars on the grill. Live fire brings out the best of the cased meat, they cook up in a matter of minutes, and they're almost impossible to mess up. But there are still a few best practices that can deliver the perfect grilled brats to the table, especially with the choice of where to place them on the grill. That's why Tasting Table reached out to expert Pete Fjosne, executive chef at Rhein Haus Seattle, to ask how he cooks his grilled brats.

With any grill, gas or charcoal, you have the choice to cook your brats over a lighter indirect heat or the most intense direct heat over the flames, and for Fjosne there's a clear winner. "I prefer direct heat," he explains. "It creates a nice and crispy skin with a good snap." The best grilled brats don't just have charred flavor, they also have a textural contrast between that snappy skin and tender interior, and direct heat really helps with that.

While grilling brats over direct heat is going to give you the best finished result, there are a few things you can do to make sure you don't burn or overcook them in the process. If you're using a hotter charcoal grill, direct heat risks cooking the outside of the brats faster than the inside. To deal with that you can use the two-zone grilling method: Start your brats on the indirect heat side of your grill for about 15 minutes to make sure they get cooked through, then transfer them to the direct heat for the final five minutes to get that crispy snap and charred exterior chef Fjosne is looking for.

If you don't mind a little extra work you can make your brats even juicer, which better prepares them for direct heat, by simmering the sausages in liquid first. Beer brats are the classic, and simmering your brats in beer before grilling infuses them with more flavor and helps them plump up and stay tender over the high direct heat of the flames. You can even add extra ingredients like onions to the beer to add more flavor to the broth, and then use the cooked onions to top the brats after you're done. A perfectly flame-kissed brat with all that grilled flavor doesn't need much else, but nobody has ever complained about a grilled sausage that has too much flavor.