Grilling

For years, I thought the in-table-grill was such an important part of cooking bul kalbi that I never even tried to make it at home. I realized, however, that the time the meat spends over the coals—certainly less than five minutes—might be long enough to add the mental image of wood flavor, but certainly not the reality. So, with what might be described as typical American arrogance, I set about reinventing this traditional Korean dish, and I’m happy with the results. Grilling remains the best cooking technique—a couple of minutes over a very hot fire is ideal—but a stovetop grill or a very hot skillet works nearly as well, as long as you have a powerful exhaust fan to suck out the smoke. Alternatively, a good broiler will do the trick; just turn the slices once. Finally, if you set an iron skillet or a heavy roasting pan in an oven heated to its maximum, then throw the meat onto that, it will sear the meat and cook it through in a couple of minutes. No matter how you cook the meat, do not sacrifice internal juices for external browning; that is, it’s better to serve lightly browned but moist meat than tough, overcooked meat with a lovely crust.

The easiest way to make compound butter is to mince all the flavorings and then cream them and the butter together with a fork, just as you would butter and sugar in making a cake. But if your butter is ice-cold (or frozen), use a small food processor to combine all the ingredients quickly; there will be some waste here, as you’ll never get all the butter out of the container and blade, but the process will take just seconds. Skirt steak, the long, thin band of wonderfully marbled muscle (actually the cow’s diaphragm), was not easy to get even a couple of years ago but is now almost ubiquitous. It ranges as high as ten dollars a pound, but can often be found for well under half that, especially at supermarkets. It’s a moist, juicy steak, but not exactly tender—a little chewier than good strip steak—and does not respond well to overcooking. If someone insists on having it cooked beyond medium-rare, take no responsibility.

There are just two reasons for marinating before grilling: to add flavor and promote browning and crispness. Neither of these requires much time, although dunking the meat or fish for a few minutes in what is best labeled a grilling sauce may contribute to a slightly greater penetration of flavor. (On the other hand, if you really have no time at all, simply smear the food with the sauce as it’s going on the grill.) Promoting browning is easy: anything with sugar browns quickly—often too quickly, as you know if you’ve ever slathered a piece of chicken with barbecue sauce before grilling it. Which flavor to add is a matter of taste. My favorite is soy sauce; I love its taste, and it always seems to contribute exactly the right amount of saltiness. Any marinade that is made with a sweetener will need some acid to balance it; lime goes best with soy, but almost any acidic liquid will do, from lemon to white vinegar. One last note about marinades: Marinade that is applied to raw food should not be brushed on during the last few minutes of cooking, nor should it be used as a sauce unless it is boiled for a few minutes. And, as always, marinade brushes and other utensils that are used with raw food should not be used near the end of cooking.

Flank steak, more than most others, is tolerant of medium doneness, but in any case it must be thinly sliced. Slicing meat against the grain is especially important for tougher cuts like flank and skirt: it cuts the long, tough muscles into shorter, easier-to-chew pieces, giving the impression of tenderness. If you have a garden or a windowsill, both rosemary and lavender are easy to grow and maintain (and the small investment you will make in those plants will save you from paying the king’s ransom supermarkets charge for fresh herbs). If you can’t find any lavender, up the rosemary to 2 tablespoons. In any case, do not substitute dried herbs for fresh in this recipe: they will rob it of its charm.

I had something like this on a visit to Bangkok, chicken with a creamy but spicy lime sauce. At first I thought the rich texture had come from a pan reduction or even a béchamel-like sauce, but I detected the faint taste of coconut and realized it was little more than coconut milk spiked with lime. With canned coconut milk, it can be made in less than a half hour.

Branches of rosemary are ideal for this dish, especially if you live in a Mediterranean climate where rosemary grows in shrubs. You can slide the food right onto them (in the direction of the needles, so as not to dislodge them), and they flavor it brilliantly; but so does some rosemary tucked in among the chunks of food. If you skewer on wood or metal skewers, turning will be made easier if you use two sticks in parallel for each skewer, separating them by about a half inch; you can also buy two-pronged metal skewers that do the trick nicely.

The dark rich meat of a chicken thigh responds brilliantly to the strong, equatorial flavors associated most closely with grilling. This Mexican-style treatment packs plenty of punch, even if you use the minimum amount of cayenne (as I do) or omit it entirely.

Properly grilled chicken is a pleasure, even when you dress it with nothing but lemon juice—or even salt. But if you make this Ligurian-inspired full-flavored dipping sauce based on anchovies, you can turn the simple grilled chicken into something really special. And the sauce can be used for whatever else you’re serving at the same time. When you’re grilling the chicken, don’t build too hot a fire and keep part of the grill cool—don’t put any fuel under it at all—so you can move the pieces over to it in the (likely) event of flare-ups. And you can broil it if you prefer: adjust the broiling rack so that it is about four to six inches from the heat source and turn the meat as it browns.

Once in martinique I ate at a restaurant that was so simple that almost all of the food—chicken, tuna, quail, pork, and veal kidneys—was grilled. Not only that; it was all served with the same thin, powerful sauce, made of lime, scallion, chile, and garlic, with loads of allspice. It was the allspice that made the sauce unusual, but there was more to it than that: the garlic and scallion looked uncooked but had lost their harshness and become easily digestible. Furthermore, the base of the sauce was not oil, but water. With the help of a friend who was born on Martinique, I was able to duplicate the sauce at home. It’s called sauce au chien, which means “dog sauce” (a fact I chose not to research too aggressively). And it’s great with almost anything grilled.

Because the sauce is so moist, swordfish treated in this way will take a little longer to grill than usual; the interior, after all, has what amounts to a thick liquid cooling it off. So instead of cooking a one-and-a-half-inch-thick steak—about the right size for this procedure—for eight to ten minutes, I’d estimate twelve to fourteen. The actual time will vary depending on the heat of your grill or broiler, but you can assume a little bit longer than what you’re used to. Check by cutting into the fish when you think it’s done; the interior can be pearly but should not look raw.

Slow cooked onions are good enough by themselves, but when you combine them with the liquid exuded by olives and tomatoes you have a gloriously juicy bed on which to serve any fish fillet or steak. This combination, I think, is best with grilled tuna or swordfish—their meatiness gives them the presence to stand up to the richly flavored mass of onions, creating an easy dish that is strikingly Provençal and perfect for summer.

This is one of those recipes in which the shopping may take you longer than the cooking, because fennel stalks—or those from dill, which are nearly as good—are often discarded by grocers. When you buy a bulb of fennel, you’re buying the bottom, trimmed of its long stalks; when you buy a bunch of dill, you’re buying the feathery tops, trimmed of the stalks that support them. Because this recipe requires some of those stalks, you will probably have to speak directly to a produce manager, visit a farmstand or a friend’s garden, or simply get lucky. The technique of grilling fish on top of fennel or dill stalks solves a couple of problems at once: it seasons the fish subtly and without effort, and it helps prevent the fish from sticking to the grill and falling apart. In fact, this method allows you to grill even relatively delicate fillets like cod, usually one of the most challenging fishes to grill because of its tendency to fall apart as it nears doneness.

Boiling or steaming lobster is the simplest cooking method, and it may seem like the best when you consider that plopping a lobster into a pot of boiling water is also the easiest way to kill it. Fortunately, there is a way to “parboil” lobster to kill it that will then allow you to grill or broil it without overcooking. The technique outlined here is easy, foolproof, and perhaps even humane. Make sure you boil plenty of water for the first step. You want to cook the lobsters barely but quickly. And have an ice-water bath ready to stop the cooking.

Though you can just shove the crabs under the broiler in this recipe, this slightly more complicated procedure works best: Preheat a large roasting pan in the broiler for ten minutes or so. When you’re ready to cook, put the crabs in the pan, adjusting the broiler rack so that it’s two or three inches from the heat source or as close as you can get it (in my oven, this means propping the roasting pan on top of another pan). The crabs will be done in less than 5 minutes. Remember that some oven broilers work best if the door is ajar, which will keep the element from cycling off and make cooking time faster, not slower.

Many people will find this their idea of paradise: simply grilled shrimp in a strong-flavored soy dipping sauce.

Despite its name, this dish isn’t fiery hot, but the addition of a fair amount of paprika gives the shrimp a bright red color that makes people think they’re eating spicy food. The real key here is fresh paprika, not that tin you inherited from your mother. After you buy it, taste it; if it is hot, use half a teaspoon. You can let the shrimp sit in the spice paste for hours. (In fact, I like to dump both shrimp and paste into a covered plastic container, shake them together to coat the shrimp, then carry the container to a party and grill the shrimp there.) But you can also mix the two together right before cooking.

Many years ago in Barcelona, I saw mussels and clams cooked a la plancha—on a thick slab of hot metal much like the griddles used by short-order cooks. The technique is common in Spain, indeed throughout the Mediterranean. Though the mollusks are usually served unadorned, they’re filled with their own flavors as well as a certain smokiness contributed by their juices, which burn on the hot surface. This smokiness sometimes makes people think that mussels cooked this way are cooked over wood, but that is not the case, nor is it necessary. It’s best to serve the mussels in the same skillet in which they cooked. To eat, remove a mussel from the shell and dredge it on the dried juices of the pan.

Everyone loves bread salad, which—traditionally at least—was most often made with stale bread. You can wait around for bread to get stale, but really the best way to ready bread for salad is to use the grill or broiler to quickly dry the bread while charring the edges slightly, adding another dimension of flavor to the salad. But watch the bread carefully as you grill or broil it; a slight char is good, but it’s a short step from toast to burned bread. The time you allow the bread to soften after tossing it with the seasonings varies; keep tasting until the texture pleases you. If your tomatoes are on the dry side, you might add a little extra liquid in the form of more olive oil and lemon juice or a light sprinkling of water. Because it’s juicy, almost saucy, and pleasantly acidic, this salad makes a nice accompaniment to simple grilled meat or poultry and has a special affinity for dark fish such as tuna and swordfish.

The perfect whole-meal salad features as much flavor, texture, and bulk as any other well-prepared meal, and the fact that the base is a pile of greens makes me feel like I’m getting away with something. This one takes about ten minutes longer than a plain green salad and by changing the topping can be made in different ways every time, always with a minimum of effort. Use a blender for the dressing; it makes quick work of dispersing the sesame paste or peanut butter throughout the liquid ingredients—something that can be a real hassle with a fork or a whisk—creating a perfect emulsion. And because the blender purees the garlic and ginger, there’s no need to mince them; just peel, chop roughly, and drop them into the blender with the other ingredients. My first choice for topping this salad is grilled scallops—they’re almost ludicrously fast and easy, and their texture and flavor complement both greens and dressing—though shrimp, steak, or chicken thighs all could be substituted.

This salad features grilled chicken; a superflavorful dressing based on soy sauce, peanut or sesame butter, and spices; and cucumber for crunch. Make extra dressing and you can serve the chicken on top of a bed of salad greens. Boneless chicken thighs are preferable to breasts, because their flavor and texture are superior, they remain moist during grilling, and they brown perfectly.