It's Saturday afternoon, and your barbecue plans are locked and loaded. You've marinated and seasoned your meat, and your grill is ready to be fired up. But as you lift the hood, you're left staring at greasy, crusty grates forgotten from your last cookout.
Don't feel like grabbing a grill brush, soap, and water? No problem. Just head to the fridge, grab an onion, slice it crosswise, spear it with a grill fork, and run it down the preheated grates. Voilà! Using half an onion to clean your grill might seem like another gimmicky TikTok trend, but it's a practice that has been used for ages.
It's long been a traditional method in Latin cuisine, as highlighted in Bricia Lopez and Javier Cabral's book "Asada: The Art of Mexican-Style Grilling."But you might ask—does it actually work? And how does it work? As it turns out, onions are an effective solution for cleaning grill grates due to their natural acidity. The onion juice helps lift grease and dried-up debris.
And as a bonus, they can even improve the flavor of grilled food and serve as a natural non-stick coating. This can be especially useful when . Do onions disinfect grill grates? Before you get too excited about this new discovery, it must be said that there is still some debate about how effectively onions can disinfect a grill.
Onions contain antibacterial properties, mostly due to a chemical called allicin (the stuff that makes you cry when slicing onions). Allicin is commonly known for inhibiting and killing many s.
