When cooking over charcoal or other non-lp surfaces, there is always a challenge to get a good consistent heat - simply by the nature of stacking hot coals, you tend to get hot spots. To resolve this, I find myself flipping the food, then rotating the grill cooking grate around 1/4 turn each time I open the grill (only works on round grills of course). I thought it would be neat to set up a rotisserie motor that would slowly spin the round cooking grate, so that all areas of the cooking grate get an even amount of hot and cool spots... Should be easy to place on any round charcoal grill, as the motor could simply be outside the bottom part of the grill with a spindle that enters the cooking area.

I have seen grilling rotisserie devices that rotate vertically (like wheels and spits) but not ones that spin horizontally. But then again, I dont scope out fancy grills often.
-- bigdumbdane, Aug 02 2006

Must you be so practical? Why couldn't this have been a centrifugal grill with horizontal flames *rising* to the center? In any case, microwave ovens do this, so I can't imagine it isn't baked for charcoal.
-- ldischler, Aug 02 2006


Exactly! Like a microwave - I would think this has been done, but when I searched on grill and spinning via google I just ended up with some really odd dental implements. word.
-- bigdumbdane, Aug 02 2006


Works for me, even though my grill is gas. [+]
-- jhomrighaus, Aug 02 2006


Wow... a cylindrical centrifugal grill does sound exciting...
-- ye_river_xiv, Aug 02 2006


It does sound pretty simple and useful, but I'll give a grilled bun anyway.+
-- xandram, Aug 03 2006


But if there's a hotspot right in the centre of rotation of the grill, the burger/sausage/chicken wing above it will char while the others remain raw. A better solution would be to have a grill with "Sliding Block Puzzle" technology which randomly rearranges the small sections of grill, ensuring each piece of foodstuff gets an even grilling. As an added advantage there will always be a square with no grill above it, through which you can poke the charcoal with a stick.
-- hippo, Aug 03 2006


Or the grill grate could move around in some sort of epicycle -- the grate would be smaller than the grill as a whole, and would spin around it's own center, while at the same time, the center of the grate would be moved in a circle around the center of the grill.
-- goldbb, Jul 07 2009


I hate to point this out, since it's cliche, but you have a hot side and a cold side here. No need for independent power, use a stirling engine.
-- MechE, Jul 07 2009



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