White-Hot Coals, Sparkling-Clean Grill

• Food cooks faster, more evenly and with that rich, grilled-outdoors flavor when you work with white-hot charcoal raked evenly across the bottom of the grill. Get the coals started in a pile, using a lighter chimney or minimal lighter fluid, then let them burn down until a layer of white ash coats each coal. Use an old hand trowel, gardening tines or a convenient stick to rake the coals in an even layer, then place your grill over the coals and let it get smoking hot.
  
  Food turns easier and sticks less to a clean grill, so scrape the grill with a wire brush specifically designed for this purpose once the metal is hot. The grill cleans easily when heated.
  
  

Beyond Basic Grilling

• Once you know the menu, take time to read how to cook the food you plan to serve. If you are grilling chicken, you'll need more than intuition to tell you that chicken takes longer to grill than fillet of sole or a bratwurst. Get a good grilling recipe and follow the instructions.
  
  Almost any grillable food (which means almost any food) can be marinated for extra flavor. Oil and vinegar or fruit juice marinades are excellent for fish and chicken. Don't marinade fish for more than 20 minutes before cooking, as the flesh is delicate and may begin to disintegrate or literally start cooking from the acid in vinegar or fruit juice.
  
  Heartier marinades with more tenderizing ingredients work well for cuts of beef and pork. Try inexpensive burgundy and cracked pepper as a marinade for flank steak, or apple cider vinegar and brown sugar for marinating a pork roast.
  
  Most grilled foods should be turned only once. If more frequent turning is necessary to keep food from scorching or drying out, you should probably be grilling with the indirect heat method discussed below.
  
  As for turning, you can achieve those professional-looking cross marks on beef, pork, fish and chicken by placing the food on a smoking hot grill for five minutes, then rotating each piece 45 degrees and leaving it on the grill on the same side for another three to five minutes before turning it over to cook on the other side.
  
  Let thick cuts of beef and pork rest for three to five minutes once they are off the grill to allow the natural juices to flow back through the meat. Juices retreat to the center of the cut when exposed to heat, so the rest period lets them flow again for a more flavorful result.
  
  

Smoking Foods

• Use your charcoal grill to make real barbecue by following the indirect heat method. Stack charcoals on one side of the grill and allow them to burn down normally, but leave them in a pile to one side when they're ready. To the coals add two to three cups of wood chips soaked in water for at least an hour, then set your grill in place and put the food on the opposite side of the grill from the coals. Close the grill, open the vents in the top and sides and leave it alone for the duration of your smoking time. Open the grill only to add more charcoal for the long smoking periods that are necessary with thick cuts of meat like beef brisket and pork shoulder. The slow-smoking tenderizes the meat and imparts a rich, complex flavor from the aromatic wood chips. Hickory and apple-wood chips are a traditional favorite with pork. Mesquite gives a hearty southwestern flavor to chicken and beef. There are many other varieties of wood you can experiment with; just stay away from using resinous woods like pine.