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How To Build a Wood-Fire Grill

And this week's links ICYMI

Melissa McCart

Jul 1, 2022

Hi there. We hope you’re on your way to summertime relaxation and fun for this long holiday weekend. We have some leisurely reading material for you from Mike Diago — a piece on how he built his grill — which we think is appropriate for the unofficial grilling holiday, the Fourth of July. Here’s a link to the piece where he first talks about it on The Bittman Project.

The Bittman Project

A DIY Grill Inspires a Summer's Worth of Dinners

At some point, I decided I’d rather grill with wood than gas. It smells better, there’s a wider range of heat, and it’s more cathartic. Recently, I finished building the wood-fired grill station of my dreams. It has a white stucco base with built-in wood storage and a firebrick top with a blue and white tile counter area. It’s all part of a larger campaign to make my backyard feel like a lazy rustic villa…

a year ago · 10 likes · 6 comments · Mike Diago

In addition, we’ve got our Friday roundup of this week’s posts. Enjoy your weekend and we’ll see you back here Tuesday.

How To Build a Wood-Fire Grill

I’ve wanted to build a simple wood-fire grill for my entire adult life. I learned how to grill on one at my father’s house in Mexico while I was living there around the age of fifteen. It comprised a long beige-tiled counter with built-in Argentine-style grill grates that you could raise and lower over the fire with a hand crank. My father and I shared Carta Blanca beers while grilling chuletas de filete (filet mignon) almost every weekend that year.

These grills are common throughout Latin America and the Mediterranean, but I couldn’t find helpful YouTube tutorials until I typed in the word “Uruguayan.” Judging by the results, I would bet that Uruguayans have the most wood-fired grills, or parrillas, per capita.

Traditional Uruguayan parrillas are enclosed, with a slanted roof and a chimney. I watched about a dozen videos on how to make them, but I decided to stop short of building the chimney section. I built it in a way that will make it easy to build up later if I find it necessary. What I did is extremely simple, by comparison, but it will still leave you with a sore back.

Here are my guidelines.