Cooking With Fire

Cooking With Fire

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Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

Wednesday, May 25, 2016

Cooking With Fire
Sam Sifton


Good morning. The smell of smoke and melting fats accompanies the Food section we packed into blue Times bags for delivery this morning, as our cooks and reporters, photographers, video journalists, editors, engineers and designers celebrate the joys of cooking outdoors in advance of Memorial Day weekend.

Melissa Clark gets philosophical with a smart article that calls for thinking about your grill and its environs not as a single tool, but as the centerpiece of an outdoor kitchen, one that you need not use strictly for grilling. Pull out a cast-iron pan and make her recipe for roast chicken with spinach-ricotta crostini (above) outside, and you'll begin to get the idea. It's a recipe you may make all summer.

The fire wizards John Willoughby and Chris Schlesinger join her with an argument in favor of using the residual heat of a grill's dying heat to maximize your summer pantry game, using grilled lemons, limes and onions to make outstanding sauces and condiments. The recipes are bananas good: barbecued red onion chutney; a smoke-enhanced chimichurri; a fire-licked lime-chile dipping sauce.

Julia Moskin traveled to South Africa to explore the idea that the best way to cook outside is to cook outside often, and making the business of grilling a habit. Her recipes for braai-spiced T-bone and corn on the cob with chile butter help make that more than a palatable idea. They're delicious.

But wait, there's more! Jeff Gordinier asked professional chefs for their best advice for amateurs cooking over open fire, and rounded up recipes for grilled Arctic char with horseradish crema; grilled broccoli with apricot puttanesca; and grilled glazed carrots.

Eric Asimov delivered a terrific column on the best beers for the backyard. Florence Fabricant collected a bunch of new outdoor cooking tools and gewgaws for your delectation.

And I have a fairly exhaustive guide to the particulars of using your grill, whether gas or charcoal, to its very best effect. In keeping with a Wednesday tradition here at Cooking, it has plenty of what we call no-recipe recipes within it: simple narrative instruction for how to grill things well. I hope you'll find it all useful.

Other recipes to cook this week can be found on the Cooking site and apps. (Make sure to check out our giant collection of recipes for Memorial Day.) Save the ones you like, or share them with friends and family. And if you get in trouble with the technology, do not hesitate to ask for help. We're at cookingcare@nytimes.com.

Finally, a correction: In Monday's newsletter, I identified this recipe for roasted salmon with lime-herb butter as a Mark Bittman production. It is not. It came from our former restaurant critic and current obituaries impresario William Grimes, and it is awesome. Apologies. Feist, take it awa