We rounded up the best grilling tips from top chefs and barbecue experts to ensure your next backyard cookout will be the best ever.
Grilling Tips: 10 Tiny Changes to Improve Your Grill Skills
Updated on Apr. 30, 2025
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Stay Organized
Whether you’re just learning how to grill or are practically a pro, a few tiny changes can instantly upgrade your grill game. Your first tip: Be prepared and set up your cooking station. No one wants to have to scramble for tongs in front of a bed of hot coals. Having everything in order–veggies chopped, grill tongs ready–will go a long way.
We sent Taste Recipes Creator Tyler Smith to the Lone Star Smokeout in Texas! Find out what he learned from the pro pitmasters at the event.
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Clean Your Grill
It’s not the most exciting task, but keeping those grates clean is essential. Extra residue can cause food to stick, cling to unwanted flavors, or—worse—start a grease fire, one of the biggest grilling safety mistakes. To avoid serious buildup, clean your grill grates regularly.
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Add Wood Chips
Turn your grill into a smoker to add some major flavor to your meal. In Any Night Grilling, cookbook author Paula Disbrowe suggests soaking wood chips, then placing them with your grill’s hot coals. The smoke will bring bold flavor to grilled meats or grilled pizza!
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Cut Notches in Your Steaks
To stop grilled steaks from getting that dreaded curl, the Char-Broil Great Book of Grilling suggests adding a few small notches to the fat areas before putting them on the grill. They’ll be perfectly flat and ready for a slab of compound butter.
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Use Spatulas to Skin a Salmon
There are so many amazing grilled fish recipes! When you’re cooking it skin-on, the Char-Broil Great Book of Grilling suggests grabbing two spatulas to work some magic. When the salmon’s fully cooked on the skin side, it should be easy to slide a spatula beneath the skin to remove it.
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Don’t Form Burger Patties Too Tightly
Our Test Kitchen finds that loosely formed burger patties retain their juices better while grilling. So don’t worry too much about packing the meat into perfect circles–how you cook them is more important. That’s just one of the most common burger mistakes we see.
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Don’t Touch the Food Too Early
As Disbrowe explains in Any Night Grilling, meats will be easy to flip when they’ve spent enough time on the grill. But if you try to flip a beautiful burger too soon, it might stick to the grates. Give your food time before turning!
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Use a Two-Zone Fire
You can create direct and indirect heat zones on your grill by putting coals under just one half. That way, part of the grill is devoted to direct-heat cooking, while the other half is perfect for indirect cooking at lower temperatures.
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You Don’t Have to Marinate Everything
If you don’t feel like marinating your meat (or decided to grill last-minute), just brush on a glaze, like barbecue sauce, within the last 10 minutes of cooking when it’s no longer over direct heat.
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Think Beyond Meat and Veggies
Grilled vegetables and steaks are wonderful, but your grill can make so much more. Grilled fruit makes a delicious dessert, and it’s the perfect way to end a night of cooking. Between pineapple slices, bananas, apples and other fruits, the possibilities are endless!
