Grilling tips from the pros

Grill It! Recipes, Techniques, Tools
By Chris Schlesinger and John Willoughby
DK Publishing, 352 pp., $25

Every May, they march off the shelves, usually with a slab of red meat on the cover bathed in flames over steely grids. It's grilling cookbook season.

Grill books are either highly technical, for those who worship at the altar of barbecue, or they're entertaining volumes with a lot of cocktails. "Grill It! Recipes, Techniques, Tools," by longtime collaborators Chris Schlesinger, chef and owner of East Coast Grill in Cambridge, and John "Doc" Willoughby, executive editor of Gourmet magazine, is neither. The authors aren't measuring the grill temperature within five degrees. They write about low vs. high fires, direct and indirect, and tools and techniques, then it's off to the backyard.

Smoke-roasted chicken thighs is an easy grill recipe. A simple cumin-coriander-brown sugar rub gives instant character while the ketchup-maple sauce leads to a round of finger licking.

Korean-style short ribs are made with flanken-cut ribs, whose porous texture is perfect for soaking up the soy marinade. The slaw uses 1/4 cup of chili sauce; it was so hot I wept.

A foil-wrapped brick stars in a squid dish with lemon. Squid curls when cooked, and the brick keeps it flat. You can fit two bodies under the brick; they're sliced into rings later. There's no hope of eating them hot. A bright cilantro dressing brings smoky overtones to life.

The bane of grill cooks is pork ribs, usually charred outside and near-raw inside. The authors cook their ribs for three hours in a low oven, then grill them.

Sharp onions and bell peppers, when charred, become muted on lamb kebab, with its woodsy oregano-lemon dressing. A minty cucumber yogurt is delicious with crispy pita.

Schlesinger and Willoughby break down ingredient lists into components: meat, rub, glaze, sauce. It's an obvious way to organize a multi-part recipe, but so often cookbooks omit it. Also helpful are the "flavor footprints," which tell you how to invoke the flavors of India or North Africa or Latin America.

Only experience will teach you to avoid flare-ups and slow coals. But this book will go a long way toward shortening the knowledge gap. In a couple of years, the pages will be as gritty, stained, and frayed as your favorite grill brush.