Outdoor Cooking

The best outdoor cooking methods for whatever you’re grilling this summer, plus one of my favorite summer recipes

I'm unapologetically a Weber man. So much so that when we bought the house in France, I shipped one from New York just because I wasn't sure if I was going to find one there. But once I started spending a lot of time in Southwest France and the Basque Country, I noticed that in many restaurants, they were using a plancha, a type of cast iron cooktop connected to a gas tank. It’s a standard cooking method there—in Spain they always use them for things like grilled fish and sardines. And when you go into a hardware store in France, you see planchas of all different shapes, sizes, and price points.

After years of eating great dishes made on them, and pondering buying one every time I was in my local hardware store, I finally pulled the trigger and bought one—the best one they had—for around 350 euros. It’s a French-made plancha, aesthetically very simple—an enamel cast iron top with a little hole where the grease goes down and collects in a little stainless steel cup that you put in the dishwasher when you’re done.