Grilling is often associated with a certain brand of meat-centric, backyard machismo, but, really, cooking outside is for everyone — and has been since humans first applied flame to food, about 780,000 years ago. From the South American asado to the Indian tandoor, the fires are varied but often the process that surrounds them is communal. Some use raging heat, searing cuts of meat or a tangle of vegetables on a planchas or iron grate, while others smoke or braise low and slow in underground ovens, tank-style barbecues or kitted-out Green Eggs. Anything can be grilled: stone fruit, pizzas, parcels of banana-leaf-wrapped fish, bouncy cubes of mochi. It’s not air-fryer easy. Yet the effort is well worth it, say the three chefs who share their favored methods and recipes below. “There’s a romance to it — the smell of fish oil burning, mixed with wood smoke,” says the chef Jeffrey Ozawa. “It doesn’t get better than that.”
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– An Easy, Beautiful Tomato Tart to Make All Summer Long: The chef Yann Nury updated his childhood favorite with cherry tomatoes and an olive oil crust.
Jeffrey Ozawa, Ozu, Santa Fe, N.M.
Ozawa, 36, loves the “uniquely social aspect of grilling,” he says, pointing out that “it’s something you can reasonably do both in front of and with guests.” He looked to his Japanese heritage as well as the time he spent cooking in South America and Los Angeles to come up with a style he can take from a camp stove to the front yard of his year-old Japanese restaurant, Ozu. The traditional Japanese grilling technique of robatayaki relies on binchotan, a nearly smokeless type of charcoal, to cook meat, fish and vegetables, often on skewers. Ozawa, however, prefers the “flavor of wood” and opts for local ingredients whenever possible so, instead of importing binchotan, he “searches Craigslist for people getting rid of fruit trees,” which then become his kindling. His dishes are similarly hybrid: He prefers Anaheim peppers to more typical Japanese shishitos and leaves his fish whole rather than partaking in what he calls “prep-intensive” skewering. His go-to marinade is shio koji, a deliciously funky-tasting, porridge-textured mix of fermented rice, salt and water that he applies liberally to chicken, grouper, bass, bream, salmon and scallops. “It has a creamy rich flavor to it, which complements fish with any sweetness,” Ozawa says, adding that while you can find it at Asian grocery stores, it’s “super simple and more economical” to mix at home.
Jeffrey Ozawa’s Shio Koji Marinade
Yield: approximately 1 ½ kilos
Ingredients
Method
Mix the koji, water and salt well, then put in a lidded container with the lid ajar and leave at room temperature. Fermentation will take one to 10 days; Ozawa’s sweet spot is eight days. The shio koji is ready when it has thickened slightly. To use, apply 10 percent shio koji marinade in relation to the weight of whatever meat or fish you plan on marinating. Pour generously over meat or fish and allow to marinate in the fridge for between one and five days. Wipe off excess marinade before cooking and take care when grilling: The shio koji will caramelize quickly and burn if left over high heat unattended. The yield of this recipe is enough to marinate 15 kilos of fish or meat; take care to seal and store in the fridge and it will last for months.
Karla Subero Pittol, Chainsaw LA, Los Angeles
“This has been dubbed ‘the poor man’s smoker,’” says Karla Subero Pittol, 33, of one element of her South American asado-style grill, modeled after the ones she grew up using with her Venezuelan family. A domed structure that stands over an open flame, her setup is an amalgamation of cross-shaped pieces of metal for cooking large cuts of meat; dangling chains with hooked ends that suspend food high above the fire for slow smoking; and a flat plancha that gets blazing hot, for searing. “Before I built it,” she says of the contraption, which she generally sets up in her Los Angeles driveway, “I was hanging things in a tree in my backyard to get the same effect.” Subero Pittol, who now runs Chainsaw LA, a one-woman, grill-centric private dining business, was a pastry chef for years before returning to the open-flame cooking of her childhood. Now, she cooks everything from whole chickens to halved peaches on her brasero, a firebox that relies on wood or charcoal, and hangs cabbages, pig shoulders and pineapples from the smoker. Once they’re charred and flavorful, she slices and serves the citrus and vegetables alongside meat or fish, often accompanied by sauces, including her signature guasacaca, a creamy blend of cilantro, jalapeño peppers and what she calls a “somewhat nontraditional” version of nata, a tangy Venezuelan cream. “Smoke can be an intense ingredient,” she says, noting that she always finishes her dishes with plenty of fresh green herbs. “I don’t want it to be the only flavor.”
Karla Subero Pittol’s Guasacaca
Yield: Approximately 3 cups
Ingredients
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205 grams labneh
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205 grams crema Salvadoreña
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1 medium jalapeño pepper, roughly chopped
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1 serrano pepper, roughly chopped
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2 cloves of garlic, smashed
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1 teaspoon Maldon smoked sea salt
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1 teaspoon aji amarillo paste
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1 tablespoon good olive oil
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60 grams cilantro (leaves and stems), roughly chopped
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20 grams parsley (leaves and stems), roughly chopped
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Kosher salt and olive oil to finish
Method
Add everything except the chopped cilantro and parsley to a blender, blend until smooth. Once the mixture is blended, add the cilantro and parsley and blend on high for about 30 seconds until the sauce turns green and slightly speckled with the herbs. Blend just until the herbs are incorporated and no longer; overblending may cause the herbs to brown. Finish with kosher salt to taste and garnish with a hearty drizzle of good olive oil for serving.
Sheldon Simeon, Tin Roof Maui, Kahului, Hawaii
On Maui, chef Sheldon Simeon, 42, and his wife, Janice Simeon, run the bustling local lunch spot Tin Roof, which is known for its speedy Hawaiian fare (mochiko chicken and tuna poke). Growing up on the island, however, he learned a more time-consuming type of cooking: imu pit cooking. Baking in an imu, an underground oven traditionally used to roast a whole pig for a luau, can take anywhere from six to 10 hours. “It tends to be a ceremonial moment,” says Simeon. On Thanksgiving, for example, his friends and neighbors often get together and put their turkeys in an imu. The underground heat, he explains, “is more of a steam,” resulting in food that’s incomparably tender. And the oven isn’t just for meat: One of Simeon’s favorite desserts is imu-cooked rice pudding, a local favorite that each family seasons after cooking according to their own tastes. “Some like brown sugar, while some do cocoa or molasses,” he says. On weeknights, Simeon relies on a Filipino cooking method passed down by his family: wrapping whole fish in tea or banana leaves before throwing it on the grill. He often flavors the seafood with just pa’akai, a mild, flaky, hand-harvested local salt, but sometimes, he says, he likes to “go the crazy route of making an aioli loaded with ginger and soy sauce and slathering that on the fish, so that it’s almost like a casserole under the leaves.”
Sheldon Simeon’s Ginger Aioli
Yield: Approximately ½ cup
Ingredients
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½ cup mayonnaise
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1 tablespoon ginger, grated
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1 teaspoon shoyu
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1 teaspoon oyster sauce
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1 teaspoon lemon juice
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Fresh ground black pepper, to taste
Method
Mix all the ingredients together in a bowl and apply generously to whatever you’re grilling.
