A preview of the picks below. Full recommendations and notes throughout the article.
So. The first cookout I ever hosted by myself, I served everyone what I was pretty sure were chicken thighs. They looked done. They had grill marks. They were the color chicken is supposed to be when it’s finished. Everyone was very polite about it, the way people are polite when they’re a little bit worried about you. My friend Jenna took one careful bite and then very gently put her fork down and said the words “I think mine is still singing.” Which I have thought about, conservatively, every summer since.
I have a whole lot of feelings about grilling, and most of them are anxiety. I think a lot of us do. There’s something about cooking food outdoors, in front of other people, with actual fire, that turns me into a person who forgets how time works. Is it done? Is it not done? Should I poke it? If I poke it again will all the juices run out and ruin everything? These are not relaxing thoughts. They are the thoughts of someone who once served raw chicken to a friend named Jenna.
Anyway. I have spent a lot of summers since then quietly collecting little mistakes I was making, the kind that turn a perfectly nice Saturday afternoon into a smoke-filled apology tour. None of them are dramatic. Most of them I didn’t even know were mistakes until someone pointed them out, or until I bought one small thing for fifteen dollars and suddenly grilling stopped being a personality test. I made a list. Here are the twenty-one of them, what each one is quietly costing you, and the very small fix for each. I promise none of them require you to be a grill person. I am still not really a grill person. I am just a person who has stopped serving raw chicken, which is its own kind of growth.
The Setup Mistakes
Eyeballing if the meat is done.
This is the one. This is the chicken-singing-on-Jenna’s-plate moment. For years I assumed that if something looked cooked it probably was, and I think a lot of us were raised to believe that. Touch the chicken. Does it feel firm. Sort of. I don’t know. It’s outside and the light is funny and my mother-in-law is here. The whole system was vibes. The vibes were not reliable.
An instant-read thermometer takes the guesswork out of it in about three seconds. You stick it in the thickest part of the meat, it tells you a number, the number tells you the truth. Chicken at 165. Pork at 145. Burgers at 160. That’s it. The mental drama just sort of evaporates. I cannot overstate how much calmer summer became when I stopped trying to interpret poultry by feel.
It reads in about three seconds, it works upside down, and the backlit display means you can still tell what’s happening when the sun has gone behind a cloud and you’re squinting at a chicken thigh. Mine has saved me, conservatively, every single weekend in July.
View Pricing on AmazonLighting charcoal with lighter fluid.
I used to do the whole lighter-fluid ceremony. Soak the briquettes. Light them with great drama. Watch them flame up impressively. And then everything tasted like lighter fluid for the rest of the night, which, it turns out, is because everything I cooked was sitting in fumes from a petroleum product I had personally squirted onto our dinner. A chimney starter is genuinely one of the simpler revelations of my adult life.
You stuff a sheet of newspaper in the bottom, fill the top with charcoal, light the paper, walk away for about fifteen minutes. The coals come out evenly hot and they don’t taste like a garage. Once I switched I genuinely could not believe I had spent years marinating my food in accelerant.
It holds a full chimney’s worth of briquettes, the heat-resistant handle stays cool enough to grip, and the whole thing pays for itself in lighter fluid you don’t have to buy ever again. Fifteen minutes from cold coals to ready-to-grill, which is about the time it takes me to find the tongs.
View Pricing on AmazonBuying the saddest, cheapest charcoal at the gas station.
For a long time my system for buying charcoal was that I would forget I needed it until twenty minutes before people showed up, and then I would buy whatever bag the gas station had next to the windshield-washer fluid. That charcoal was not, you know, ideal. It burned uneven. It died fast. Half the time I ended up finishing the food in the oven and pretending that had been the plan the whole way through.
Real briquettes burn hotter, more evenly, and for about twice as long. Buy a big bag at the start of the season. Put it somewhere you’ll remember. Future you, hosting friends, will be so relieved.
The classic for a reason. Lights consistently, burns long enough to actually cook two rounds of food, and you can buy it everywhere. Pair this with the chimney starter from above and your fire situation gets dramatically less stressful, basically overnight.
View Pricing on AmazonPutting cold meat straight from the fridge onto the grill.
I would pull the chicken out, walk it directly to the grill, and slap it on. The outside would scorch. The inside, an icy little secret, would still be raw. I would then either cut it open to check (juices everywhere) or just leave it on and hope (raw inside). This was, as you can imagine, a fun system.
Pull meat out about thirty minutes before grilling and let it sit on the counter. It comes up closer to room temperature, the outside doesn’t have to fight the cold center, and everything cooks evenly. This is a completely free fix. It is just a small habit. It changes everything.
Not preheating the grill long enough.
I was so eager. The second the flame was on, the chicken went on. The grates were lukewarm. Nothing was searing, nothing was getting those beautiful grill marks, everything was sort of just sitting there going pale. Then everything stuck to the grates. Then it ripped when I tried to flip it. Then I cried a little bit, internally.
Preheat for at least ten to fifteen minutes with the lid closed. The grates need to be properly hot. You should not be able to hold your hand over them for more than a second or two. When you put food on properly hot grates, it sears, it releases on its own when it’s ready, and you stop feeling like you’re losing a small wrestling match with a piece of chicken.
The Tool Mistakes
Trying to grill with regular kitchen tongs that are too short.
I used my regular salad tongs at the grill for about three years. They are eight inches long. The grill is six hundred degrees. The math, in retrospect, was not in my favor. My forearms had little burn spots all summer and I just sort of accepted that as part of grilling, like it was a hobbyist’s tax.
Proper grill tongs are sixteen or eighteen inches. They keep your hands away from the heat. They have enough grip to flip a steak without making you negotiate with it. The difference between cooking with grill tongs and cooking with salad tongs is about the same difference as cooking with shoes on versus cooking barefoot. Same activity, but one of them is so much calmer.
Sixteen inches of distance between your hand and the fire, which honestly feels like a luxury after a season of singed knuckles. The silicone grip stays cool, the scalloped tips actually grab the meat, and the locking mechanism means they tuck neatly into the drawer when summer’s done.
View Pricing on AmazonUsing oven mitts that aren’t rated for the grill.
The oven mitt is fine for the oven. The grill is not the oven. The grill is several hundred degrees hotter and the metal stays hot for a very long time. The first time I grabbed a hot grate with my oven mitt I felt the heat come right through, and I had a small panic moment and dropped the grate, which then bounced off my foot. It was not my best afternoon.
Proper grill gloves go up to nine hundred degrees and they come up to your elbow, which protects the part of your arm that always seems to find the hot metal. Once I had a real pair I started doing things I’d been avoiding for years, like rotating logs in the smoker without panicking, and adjusting a hot grate without a small prayer first.
They go all the way up to your elbow, which is the part of you that always seems to brush against something hot at the worst moment. Waterproof and oil-resistant so handling sauce-covered ribs is no longer a sticky horror movie. Worth every cent the first time you grab a piping hot cast iron handle and feel exactly nothing.
View Pricing on AmazonOwning one tool when you really need a small set.
I had one set of tongs. They lived in the kitchen mostly, occasionally migrated to the grill, occasionally went missing entirely. I would be flipping burgers with one hand and trying to slide a spatula under a fillet with the other hand, which was the wrong hand, and the spatula was actually a pancake turner. Nothing matched. Everything was improvised.
A proper four-piece set, tongs and spatula and fork and brush, all from the same kit, all in the same drawer, changes the whole experience. You stop hunting. You stop using the wrong thing. You start to feel, just a tiny bit, like a person who knows what they are doing.
The matching set, all in one place, all the same handle length. The hands-free locking mechanism is the small detail I didn’t know I needed, because I always seemed to need a third hand at exactly the wrong moment. Mine lives in a little canister next to the grill, and grilling stopped being a scavenger hunt the day I started using it.
View Pricing on AmazonA wire brush that’s quietly falling apart into the food.
This one I learned about from a news story and then I went and threw mine away the same afternoon. Wire bristles can come off the brush, land in the grates, end up in the food, and end up in a person. A real person, in a real hospital. I had been using a wire brush for years and I had genuinely never thought about it once.
Bristle-free brushes use coiled steel or scraping edges instead of those little detachable wires. They clean just as well. They don’t shed. There is, I think, no good reason to still be using the old kind, now that the new kind exists and costs about the same.
No little wires that can shed. The replacement heads mean you don’t toss the whole brush when one wears out, which is a small thing but a satisfying one. Five heads is essentially a season-and-a-half of grates that are clean and, more importantly, not embedded with tiny metal hazards.
View Pricing on AmazonNo scraper for the burnt-on bits.
The brush is for the loose stuff. The burnt-on bits, the carbonized rib of sauce from last Sunday, those require something with an edge. I tried to deal with these for years using just a brush, which is a little bit like trying to clean a frying pan with a sponge that has never been wet. It does some good. It does not do enough good.
A grill brush with a built-in scraper handles both. You brush in one direction, you scrape with the other end, and the grates come out actually clean rather than mostly-clean-with-some-personality. Clean grates also mean food doesn’t stick. It is a small upstream investment that pays off downstream, repeatedly.
Brush and scraper in one tool so you don’t need two. The safe-bristle design means it works the way the old wire brushes did but without the shedding problem. Extra strong handle so when you really lean on a stuck-on spot, it doesn’t bend like a sad spaghetti noodle.
View Pricing on AmazonThe Cooking Mistakes
Flipping things every thirty seconds because you’re nervous.
I am, by nature, a tinkerer. I do not like to leave things alone. So at the grill I would flip a burger, look at it, flip it again, look at it some more, poke it with the tongs, flip it again, just to be sure. The result was that nothing got a proper sear, nothing got any character, and the burgers came out grey and worried-looking, like they had been having a hard week.
Put it on. Leave it alone. Flip it once. That’s the whole instruction. The grill knows what it’s doing. The longer you let one side sit, the better the crust gets, and the easier it releases when it actually is time to flip. This is hard advice for a tinkerer like me. It is also the difference between a good burger and a sad one.
Cooking everything over direct high heat.
This was my big one for a long time. Hot side of the grill, food on top, cook till it looks done, walk away. The problem is that anything thicker than a hot dog needs more time than direct high heat can give it without burning the outside. Chicken thighs got black on the outside and pink in the middle. Sausages split open and ran dry. The bone-in pieces basically never worked.
Set up your grill in two zones. One side hot, one side cooler with no flame directly below. Sear the meat on the hot side for color, then slide it to the cool side, close the lid, and let it finish gently. This is the single biggest jump in skill that costs nothing. It just requires using half the grill at a time.
Pressing down on burgers with the spatula.
This was something I picked up from watching diners cook. They press down on the burgers, the burgers sizzle, it sounds dramatic, it makes a great little plume of steam. Looks like a chef move. Tastes like the chef pushed all the juice out of your burger, which is exactly what is happening. The flat-press squeezes the fat and juice into the fire and you get a drier, sadder burger.
Leave them alone. Let the heat do the work. If you want grill marks, just don’t move them for four minutes per side. If you want flavor, the fat needs to stay in the burger and not in the flames. (And if you’re a cast iron person, my instant pot mashed potatoes are honestly the side I make for burger nights now, because they take fifteen minutes inside while the grill does the outside work.)
Forgetting that thinner things need a press, not a flip.
Reverse situation. For thin things, sandwiches, chicken cutlets, paninis that I’m doing on the grill for some reason on a Thursday, you actually do want gentle, even pressure. A heavy cast iron press makes the contact even, the cook time consistent, and the marks gorgeous. I went years not knowing this was a tool, and I just used another pan upside down on top of things, which worked badly and looked deranged.
A real grill press costs less than dinner out and turns the panini situation into something that looks intentional. It also works on bacon, smashed potatoes, and chicken under a brick, all of which I now make on the grill instead of dirtying a stovetop in July.
Heavy enough to do the job, wooden handle that stays cool, the rectangular shape covers a sandwich without overhanging onto the grates. Use it for panini, for chicken-under-a-brick, for pressing bacon flat into something almost prettier than it deserves to be. Mine has earned its drawer space.
View Pricing on AmazonLetting small vegetables fall through the grates.
Sliced peppers, mushroom caps, asparagus stalks rolling around like a slow-motion tragedy. I have personally lost about, conservatively, two pounds of vegetables to the coals over the years. They fall through. They burn down there. They are completely gone. And I just kind of accepted this as the price of grilling vegetables, like a small tax.
A grill basket holds them all together. They get the smoke and the marks and the slight char on the edges, but they don’t fall through and they don’t burn. Once I had one I started grilling vegetables intentionally, instead of resentfully, which has changed what dinner looks like all summer.
Sturdy enough that it doesn’t warp after a season, holes small enough that even sliced onions stay put, big enough to hold a side of vegetables for four people. The handle locks for easy stirring. This is one of those tools you didn’t know would change weeknight dinners until you started using it.
View Pricing on AmazonNo grill mats for the delicate things.
Fish. Pizza. Eggs (yes, on a grill, it’s a whole thing). Anything that does not want to be ambushed by an open flame from below needs a barrier. I tried to grill salmon directly once and the fillet basically welded itself to the grate and then surrendered itself, in pieces, to the fire below. It was not a recipe I shared.
A nonstick grill mat sits right on the grates, gives you a flat cooking surface, takes the heat, and means you can grill the things that are too delicate or too small for direct contact. They wash, they reuse, and they are one of those tiny investments that opens up what your grill can actually do.
Two mats plus a basket, all in one bundle, so you’ve basically covered the delicate-food problem and the small-food problem at once. The mats wipe clean, they last about a hundred grills, and they let you cook a piece of salmon on the grill without the salmon disappearing into the embers.
View Pricing on AmazonTrying to grill vegetables in a wobbly aluminum tray.
The first thirty times I tried to grill vegetables, I used those flimsy aluminum trays you get at the grocery store. They sag. They tip. The vegetables roll out one by one. I would chase a single mushroom across the grill and lose to the mushroom every time. The trays were also a single use, which felt fine, and then I added up a season of them and felt less fine.
A proper stainless steel vegetable basket is the same shape but rigid, with handles that don’t collapse, and it lasts forever. It pays for itself in about six cookouts compared to the disposables.
Heavy gauge so it doesn’t warp, sized to fit on the grates of a standard grill, and the handle is removable so you can store it flat. I use mine for shrimp, sliced peppers, brussels sprouts, and one memorable batch of crispy chickpeas that nobody believed I had made outside.
View Pricing on AmazonThe Sauce & Finishing Mistakes
Sauce on too early.
BBQ sauce, teriyaki, anything with sugar in it. I used to slather chicken from the start, thinking the longer the sauce was on, the more flavor it had time to develop. What was actually happening was that the sugar in the sauce was burning, turning the chicken black on the outside, and creating a flavor that you might politely describe as “challenging.” I served my husband a very dark wing once, and he said, just diplomatically, “this is very smoky.” Which is how he tells me something is burnt.
Sauce goes on in the last five to ten minutes of cooking. Not before. The sugar gets a beautiful caramelized finish without burning, the meat stays moist, the flavor lands where it’s supposed to land. This rule changed my entire ribs game in about one weekend. (If you’re stuck for ideas on what to put underneath, my crockpot bbq chicken is what I do when it’s raining and I can’t grill, and it gives you that same sticky-sweet finish indoors.)
A basting brush with stiff plastic bristles that sheds.
The old-style basting brushes had those hard nylon bristles that would catch fire, melt, or shed little plastic flecks directly into the sauce, depending on the mood of the brush that day. I once pulled a small black plastic strand out of a chicken leg right at the table and pretended to find it interesting rather than alarming.
Silicone basting brushes don’t shed, don’t melt, don’t burn. They wash in the dishwasher. They cost about six dollars. There is, honestly, no good reason to still be using the old-style ones.
Silicone bristles that hold sauce instead of shedding it, an angled head that gets into the curve of a chicken thigh, and a small enough size that it’s perfect for delicate jobs like glazing salmon. Dishwasher safe, doesn’t melt, doesn’t deposit little plastic surprises into your dinner.
View Pricing on AmazonA short basting brush that’s not made for grill heat.
Even with silicone, a kitchen pastry brush has a short handle. You lean way in over a six-hundred-degree grill to apply sauce to a chicken thigh in the back row, and your forearm hairs do not love that. (Mine, in particular, have a very expressive memory about this.) A long-handled grilling brush keeps your skin away from the fire.
This is a small purchase, ten dollars or so, but it changes the late-stage sauce-application moment from a nervous lunge into a calm, controlled motion. Which, for someone like me who is mostly nerves at the grill, is a meaningful upgrade.
A long enough handle that you can sauce the back row of ribs without crouching dangerously close to the flames. The silicone head holds plenty of sauce in one dip, the handle is grippy even when wet, and the whole thing comes apart for cleaning. Mine lives on a hook by the grill.
View Pricing on AmazonCutting the meat the second it’s off the grill.
The hardest one. I would pull a beautiful steak off the grill, lay it on the cutting board, and immediately cut into it because I wanted to see if it was done. All the juices ran out onto the cutting board, the steak collapsed a little, and what was left was, you know, fine but not what it could have been. I had ruined my own work, repeatedly, by being too eager to look at it.
Rest the meat. Five minutes for chicken pieces and burgers. Ten minutes for steaks. Fifteen for a whole roast. Tent it loosely with foil so it stays warm. The juices redistribute back into the meat instead of pooling on the board. The meat is more tender. This is, again, completely free. It just requires patience, which has never really been my strong suit, but I have been working on it. (My slow cooker whole chicken taught me a lot about the patience thing, since it actively rewards you for leaving food alone, which is the lesson I keep relearning.)
So that’s the twenty-one. None of them are dramatic. None of them require you to become a person with a smoker and a hat. Most of them are little tools, little habits, little ways of standing at the grill that don’t make you feel like you’re about to ruin the chicken. The thing that surprised me, when I went back and added it up, was how much of the difference came from just a handful of small, calm fixes. The thermometer. The chimney starter. The long tongs. The bristle-free brush. The decision to rest the meat instead of immediately cutting into it. Once those were in place, the whole afternoon got quieter. The food got better. Nobody, including Jenna, has had to politely set down a fork in years. If you want some good things to grill on, my instant pot shredded chicken tacos are what I do with leftover grilled chicken on Sundays, and my instant pot beef stew is what I make with the steak we don’t quite finish on a Saturday night. Mine still isn’t perfect. I still get nervous. But it’s gotten so much better, and most of it was just twenty-one small things.
If grilling has felt harder than it should, it probably isn’t you. It’s probably one of these.
Craving More Recipes?
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- Cheesy Potato Soup
- Slow Cooker Chicken Noodle Soup
- Instant Pot Pot Roast
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