26 Quick Grilling Recipes to Make All Summer

By Food & Wine
Updated May 22, 2019
These delicious grilled recipes include juicy bacon burgers on brioche buns and a smoky grilled eggplant Parmesan, as well as grilled short ribs, spicy wings, and corn on the cob with seasoned salts.
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Grilled Shrimp with Oregano and Lime

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The sauce for this shrimp is a simple version of Italy's salmoriglio, typically made with lemon and herbs in a mortar. The sauce is also delicious spooned over grilled swordfish or any other meaty fish.

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Grilled Chicken Breasts with Lemon and Thyme

© Ben Dearnley
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A bold mixture of red-pepper flakes, garlic, thyme, lemon juice, and olive oil serves as a spicy marinade for bone-in chicken breasts. If you want your chicken spicier still, increase the red pepper or leave the breasts in the marinade for an hour or two.

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Bacon Burgers on Brioche Buns

JOHN KERNICK
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The burger at Tyler Florence’s Wayfare Tavern in San Francisco is called Le Grand with good reason: It’s a custom blend of ground prime rib, brisket, skirt steak and tenderloin, topped with Nueske’s bacon and Cowgirl Creamery’s triple-cream Mt. Tam cheese. The recipe is also delicious with a mix of chuck and sirloin.

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Sausage Mixed Grill

Con Poulos
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Prick fresh sausages all over before grilling to release the excess fat.

5 of 26

Crosshatch Hot Dogs on Grilled Croissants

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These sweet-savory glazed hot dogs were inspired by a dish Marcia Kiesel discovered at a Manhattan Chinatown restaurant. They’re cut in a crosshatch pattern, which makes the franks cook even faster, and served in a grilled mustard-brushed croissant.

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Grilled Red Curry Chicken

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Roasting a whole chicken takes about an hour, but cut out the backbone and flatten the bird and it will grill perfectly in 30 minutes. Melissa Rubel Jacobson rubs the chicken all over with a very simple, Thai-inspired mix of red curry paste, coconut milk and brown sugar.

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7 of 26

Grilled Steak with Cucumber-and-Daikon Salad

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Home cooks can use a grill pan or any kind of outdoor grill for strip steaks. The topping: lemon zest, chile, daikon and cucumber salad.

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Grilled Apricots with Burrata, Country Ham and Arugula

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Depending on the season, Travis Lett also makes this salad with plums, peaches and pears.

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Grilled Short Ribs with Anchovy Vinaigrette

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“This type of dressing is in my blood,” Alex Raij says. “It’s like the chimichurri I grew up eating when visiting family in Argentina.” The thinly sliced short ribs here are perfect for quick grilling. Ask your butcher to cut them flanken-style, or look for them at Asian markets.

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Spicy Apricot Wings

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An apricot-based sauce brushed on chicken wings before grilling gives them plenty of flavor; extra sauce is good for dipping.

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Grilled Salmon with Dill Pickle Butter

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For Marcia Kiesel, salmon is an excellent low-maintenance ingredient for the grill because it doesn’t need careful testing for doneness—the fish is wonderful cooked anywhere from rare to medium. As soon as the fillets come off the grill, she tops them with a tangy pickle-studded butter.

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Chipotle-Marinated Flatiron Steak with Avocado-Corn Relish

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The flatiron steak, a.k.a. the top blade steak, is a marbled cut of beef from the shoulder. Uniform in thickness and rectangular in shape (just like an old-fashioned iron), it’s easy to butterfly for quick cooking on the grill. Here, Melissa Rubel flavors the meat with a bold Southwestern-style marinade made with smoky chipotle and fresh orange juice.

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Grilled Mini Meat Loaves

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Marcia Kiesel’s sister Susie created this recipe one day when she was craving meat loaf but didn’t want to turn on the oven. The delicious individual meat loaves—made with just six ingredients and stuffed with cubes of fresh mozzarella that become warm and gooey—cook directly on the grill for less than 10 minutes.

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Corn on the Cob with Seasoned Salts

CON POULOS
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“Walk to pick it, run to cook it,” was the mantra back in the days when corn turned starchy within hours of harvesting. New varieties stay sweet and tender longer. Flavoring the ears here is a trio of seasoned salts.

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Grilled Manouri Cheese with Caramelized Plums

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Michael Psilakis likes to riff on saganaki—fried cheese with lemon. He uses manouri, a fresh, milky white cheese made from the whey that’s drained off during feta production. Like nearly all Greek cheeses, it’s produced from either sheep’s or goat’s milk.

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Watermelon and Squid Salad

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Most of the dishes on the menu at Iranian chef Hoss Zaré’s restaurant are not ones his mother would have recognized. “I like to bring together the cuisines I’ve learned—French, Italian, Californian—with Persian flavors,” he says. For instance, his grilled squid and watermelon salad would never be found in Iran. But its dusting of ground sumac—a tart dried berry—is distinctly Persian.

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Pop-Open Clams with Horseradish-Tabasco Sauce

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“You can’t get lazier than this,” says Marcia Kiesel, who simply puts clams on the hot grill and waits a minute or two for them to open and start sizzling. Then she takes them off the heat and tops them with a spicy sauce spiked with horseradish and Tabasco.

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Grilled Eggplant Parmesan

JOHN KERNICK
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This grilled-vegetable version of eggplant Parmesan, like the one Grace Parisi’s Calabrian grandmother used to make, is much lighter than the fried kind.

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Grilled Oysters with Tabasco-Leek Butter

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“Oysters on the half shell can wobble on the grill,” James Holmes says. “That’s a good thing—some butter will spill onto the coals, which smokes the oysters at the same time.”

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Grilled Shrimp with Sweet Chile Sauce

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Chile-spiced shrimp cooks on a grill or in a grill pan in just 30 minutes.

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Celery, Grilled Grape and Mushroom Salad

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“Celery is a vegetable people either love or hate, and we try to get people to love all their vegetables,” says chef Amanda Cohen. She sets off celery’s bitterness and crunch with meaty oyster mushrooms and grapes that have been grilled until almost bursting.

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Grilled T-Bone Tostadas with Spicy Radish Salad

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The dish's spicy radish salad perfectly complements the grilled meat at the core of the recipe.

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Grilled Tofu with Asparagus and Nori Vinaigrette

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Lee Anne Wong plays with an array of Asian ingredients to create a wonderful marinade for extra-firm tofu or high-fiber tempeh (cakes made from fermented whole soy beans). Tempeh’s nutty flavor and grainy texture make it an acquired taste, but Wong loves it here.

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Mango-Glazed Turkey Breast

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This easy grilled turkey dish gets its terrific flavor from mango chutney.

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Tuna Tacos with Onions

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To accompany his fresh tuna tacos, chef Aarón Sanchez makes a quick, vinegary, supercrunchy red-onion pickle. It’s lovely with the warm, soft tortillas. To bump up the flavors of the tacos even more, he also adds a dash of hot sauce and a healthy squirt of fresh lime juice.

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Grilled Swordfish with Lima-Bean-and-Herb Butter

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Lee Woolver uses lima beans from the Beekman garden to make a green butter for fish. For a neat presentation, roll the herbed butter in plastic wrap into a cylinder and refrigerate until firm. Slice off rounds of butter as you need them.

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