You may have heard a few scary stories about grill brushes in the past few years. People have suffered major injuries from chewing, swallowing, and yes, passing, metal bristles that have gotten stuck in their food after grilling, frequently enough that medical professionals have issued warnings about using these common cooking tools. But Katie Lee Biegel has discovered a grill cleaning method that doesn’t require any metal bristle brushes at all, and it’s just as easy as scrubbing with your brush.
“So it turns out that using a grill brush isn’t always the best idea,” she said in a recent Instagram video. “I’ve been reading a lot lately about how the bristles can get stuck on the grill and then they can get in your food and they can puncture your esophagus. So, no thanks.”
“What I do is I just bunch up some aluminum foil and I scrub all those bits and they come right off of the grill,” she continued. “It’s really super simple and you don’t have to find a place to store your grill brush.”
People in the comments are writing that they’ve made the switch to aluminum foil, too. “I usually get my grill hot and ball foil up loosely and use long tongs to hold the ball of foil,” one person commented on Biegel’s post. “Then I scrape off the grill.”
Another person said that you can also clean your grill with a fruit you probably have on your kitchen counter. “Use half an apple it works great and is nontoxic,” they said. Someone else also suggested using a lemon half.
Others say that they use paint sticks to remove the stuck-on bits, and someone even said using a metal chisel has worked great for them. “Just use a wide metal metal putty knife,” they said. “Works great [and] cost a couple of bucks.”
There’s no need to stay married to the metal grill brush, especially when it can cause you or your family a trip to the ER. Use aluminum foil like Biegel (or any of the other methods people wrote in the comments) and keep your grilling season pain-free.
In search of more summer recipes? Giada De Laurentiis has plenty:
