Good morning. We’re a week out from Memorial Day weekend, the unofficial start of summer grill season. For those who take part in the festivities, first with a holiday cookout and then with regular meals cooked outside over flames and coal, as many as they can manage for the next few months, the next two days are important.
Because how’s that grill looking, after half a year spent alone and untouched in the yard, on the deck, in the garage, under the stoop? Did you clean it the last time you used it? Do you have charcoal? Do you have propane? Wood chips? Pellets? (Do you even grill, bro?)
This is the weekend to get everything sorted, cleaned and prepped, so that you can head into the holiday with confidence, with equipment that’s ready to serve you as you desire to serve others, in memory of those who gave their lives in service to us all.
I can help because I’m bossy. I can say with confidence (and experience) that if you spend a few hours tomorrow outside and at the hardware store, if you scrub and scrape and test and look around for that great spatula you haven’t used since late September, you can make grilled hamburgers (above) for dinner and count yourself prepared for the season ahead.
My colleagues at Wirecutter, The Times’s product recommendation site, can help because they do more than shout from a bully pulpit. They test, and test again, and test once more, to deliver ideas not just for what equipment you should use to cook, but how to use it, and to what end.
They did this for weeks this year, in advance of this very moment. And they’ve emerged with new recommendations for gas grills, for gas griddles, for barbecue sauce. They can tell you about the best charcoal grill (that’s me in the photograph at the top of the page!), the best pellet smoker and the best tools for grilling, all alongside great advice for how to grill safely, how to detect gas leaks, how to maintain your equipment and much, much more.
So get your work done, and then raise the flames high. Burgers, yes, but ribs and cabbage too, as well as yakitori and tofu and whatever else you want to kiss with flame. (I particularly like these grilled, soy-basted chicken thighs with spicy cashews.) Moderate labor this weekend will leave you happy through Labor Day at least.
Featured Recipe
Grilled Hamburgers
Of course, the indoor cats will scoff at all of this. Billowing smoke has no place in a studio apartment or fourth-floor condo. That’s just fine. I can make arugula salad with peaches, goat cheese and basil and be just as happy, just as summery, and so can you. So let’s do that this weekend regardless, and ready ourselves for summer 2025.
There are many thousands more recipes to consider cooking this weekend waiting for you on New York Times Cooking. Go see what you find. You need a subscription to do that, of course. Subscriptions support our work and allow it to continue. Please, if you haven’t taken one out yet, would you consider doing so today? Thank you!
And please write for help if you find yourself at odds with our technology or your account: [email protected]. Someone will get back to you. You can write to me, too, if you’d like to rattle our cage or say something nice: [email protected]. I can’t respond to every letter. But I do read each one I get.
Now, it’s a considerable distance from anything to do with the merits of hickory smoke or the perils of using aftermarket parts to repair your grill (don’t do it! OEM always!), but I just tore through Jordan Harper’s 2023 Los Angeles noir, “Everybody Knows,” and maybe you could do the same. “Every sentence sings with heartache,” The Times wrote in a review.
Our Alissa Wilkinson really didn’t like Neil Burger’s recent thriller, “Inheritance,” shot on an iPhone in far-flung places across the globe. I watched the movie on a plane, though, so all my emotions were heightened. And I liked it far more than I did “Anora.”
I loved these Gillian Laub photographs, in The New Yorker, of prominent New Yorkers in their living rooms.
Finally, here’s ZZ Top, “Bar-B-Q.” Play that while you’re cleaning your grill. I’ll see you on Sunday.
Sam Sifton is an assistant managing editor, responsible for culture and lifestyle coverage, and the founding editor of New York Times Cooking.
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