Direct Grilling
When you fire up your BBQ grill and toss a couple of steaks right over the hot coals, you are grilling the meat, not barbecuing in the classic sense. In grilling, the heat is high (usually 400 degrees or more) and direct, and the cooking is usually quite rapid.

Grilled meat will be charred on the surface (not caramelized), will usually not have any smoky flavor at all, and will be tough as shoe leather unless you start with very tender cuts in the first place.

Thus, the direct grilling method is normally reserved for burgers, hot dogs, steaks, chops, and chicken pieces -- things that don’t toughen significantly even when exposed to high heat.

Outdoor Cooking
Getting right down to basics, if you build a fire in your grill and put the cooking grate on, what you have is the functional equivalent of a stove-top burner, and if you put the lid on, what you have is essentially a wood, charcoal, or gas-fired oven.

So basically, you can (and many people do) cook anything outside on your grill (or over an open fire pit) that could otherwise be cooked on or in your kitchen range. You can roast a turkey, fry potatoes, heat up veggies, cook a casserole, boil rice, or even bake a cake on your outdoor grill.

This is especially true these days when “outdoor grill” can mean a complete outdoor kitchen with multiple gas-fired burners and maybe even an oven, a rotisserie, and an infrared browning device. So if what you mean by “barbecue” is anything cooked outdoors, the sky’s the limit.

See also:

• History of BBQ
• Styles of BBQ