Hasta La Ideas

All Unitasker Wednesday posts are jokes — we don’t want you to buy these items, we want you to laugh at their ridiculousness. Enjoy!

I use a non-conventional barbecue grill cleaning method — I remove ashes and wipe down the grate with a dry, cotton rag after I use the grill, but I don’t thoroughly clean the black coating off the grate. I wait to clean off the black coating until I heat up the grill the next time I use it to keep the grate from rusting in between uses. When I do clean the black coating off the grate, I let the grate heat up over the fire for 10 minutes and then scrub it deeply with a metal grill brush. The heated black crud comes off without much elbow grease, and cleaning gives me something to do while the flames are dying down and the coals are heating up.

A friend recently suggested to me to ditch the metal grill brush and to wipe the grate down with half an onion instead. He explained that there is something in onions that eats away at the black gunk (he’d read an article once on Lifehacker about it). I have yet to try this method because I’d rather eat grilled onions than use them as cleaning products, but based on his experience it seems to be a legitimate way to clean the grill grate if you don’t mind the smell and taste of onions.

My friend simply stabs half an onion with his long-handle barbecue fork and rubs the onion over the hot grill grate to clean it (like I do with the metal grill brush). If he can’t find his barbecue fork, he just uses a regular dinner fork while wearing an oven mitt. He does not, under any circumstance, require the help of The Grillion:

The thing that resembles a small hatchet is to cut your onion in half (apparently, a knife you already own isn’t good enough to cut your grill-cleaning onions) and the plunger-Starship-Enterprise looking thing is the specialty plastic tool that holds the onion while you clean the grill grate. Upon seeing the device, my immediate thought was that the inventors of this device never had an Easy Bake Oven as a child. This is clear because every child who had one of these toys quickly learned that heat and plastic do not mix. If something as tame as an incandescent light bulb can melt a plastic orange stick in a matter of seconds, just imagine what a roaring fire will do when it comes into contact with that plastic claw holding the onion.

I’m going to stick to using my metal grill brush and my friend is going to just use his onion on a barbecue fork when cleaning the grill. I’ll use the extra $20 to buy a nice Porterhouse, which I’ll probably drench with a balsamic vinegar steak sauce. Yum.

Thanks to reader Verily for bringing this unitasker to our attention.

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