The grill is the summer cook's best trick, because it takes all the high heat you could want and keeps it entirely out of the room you live in. Instead of a hot oven warming the flat for an evening, the fire burns outside and the kitchen stays exactly as cool as you left it. But a grill supper only works in your favour if it stays quick. Light a fire, cook for hours and hover over it in the heat, and you have simply moved the sweat outdoors. The suppers worth making in high summer are the fast ones: thin cuts and quick-cooking vegetables that hit a hot grate, char, and come off in minutes. This entry is about that kind of cooking, the twenty-minute grill supper that gets you fed and back into the shade before the fire has even properly settled. It leans on speed, thin food and a little planning rather than any special skill.
Thin cooks fast, and fast is the point
The single most useful habit is to cook thin. A thick chop or a whole chicken needs long, patient heat and a lot of standing over the fire; a thin cut is cooked almost before you have finished your drink. Butterfly a chicken breast so it lies flat, ask for thin-cut chops, flatten a piece of fish, thread small pieces onto skewers. Thin food takes a hot grate, colours fast, and comes off while the fire is still fierce, which is exactly the window you want.
Vegetables follow the same rule. Cut them so they cook through before they burn: courgette in long ribbons, peppers in flat panels, aubergine in rounds no thicker than a finger, spring onions and asparagus straight across the bars. Anything dense, like potatoes or whole onions, is better parboiled indoors in the cool morning and just finished on the grate for colour, so the fire is never the slow part.
Get the fire properly hot first
Give the grill time to reach a real heat before anything goes on. A grate that is barely warm steams food and makes it stick, while a properly hot one sears instantly and releases the food when it is ready to turn. If you are using charcoal, wait until the coals glow and ash over; on gas, let it run high with the lid down for ten minutes. Oil the food, not the bars, and lay everything down with a little space so it chars rather than crowds.
A twenty-minute routine
Once the fire is hot, a fast supper falls into a simple order. Cook in the sequence below and everything lands warm at the same time.
- First: anything that likes to rest, such as a thin steak or butterflied chicken. Sear, turn once, pull and let it sit while the rest cooks.
- Next: firm vegetables like peppers, courgette and asparagus, which take a few minutes a side.
- Last: quick, delicate things, such as spring onions, halloumi, bread or fish, that need only a minute or two.
- Off the heat: dress everything with lemon, oil, salt and torn herbs while it is still warm, so it drinks the flavour in.
Serve it all on one big board with a cold salad and some bread, and you have a proper supper that never touched the kitchen. Leftovers, if there are any, are excellent cold the next day, which brings the grill back into the no-cook column.
Cool tip: do your prep indoors in the cool of the afternoon, then carry everything out on a tray. Marinating, slicing and skewering in the kitchen means your time at the hot grill is only the cooking, which is the fast part.
Keep the flavour simple
Grilled food does not need much. The fire itself brings smoke and char, so a marinade of oil, lemon or vinegar, salt and one or two aromatics is plenty; anything more elaborate tends to burn before it does much good. Salt properly before cooking, dress brightly after, and let the char do the heavy lifting. A squeeze of lemon and a scatter of herbs over hot vegetables straight off the grate will beat a fussy sauce nearly every time.
Cook thin, cook hot, and be back in the shade in twenty minutes.
Handled this way, the grill becomes the one form of hot cooking that belongs in high summer, because all the heat stays outside and the meal is fast. Thin cuts, a hot fire and a bright dressing are the whole method. When even the grill feels like too much on a still, heavy evening, the next entry pours you something cold instead, the chilled soups that ask for no cooking at all and only get better while they wait in the fridge.