The Curve is a column dedicated to exploring and feeling out the corners of complex, multi-dimensional, often hierarchical and always completely random subjects. The aim is to inform readers – in progressive, graduating fashion – on everything from gin and poetry to cheeseburgers and trees. For this edition of The Curve, we find out everything we can about charcoal grilling.

Peak grilling season has arrived, which means a lot of us are standing around backyards, campsites and patios staring into the coals and pretending we know exactly what we’re doing. Most of the time, that’s fine. Put food over fire, pay attention, try not to burn dinner. You can have a pretty good summer that way.

But spend five minutes talking about charcoal with Pete Ho and you begin to understand just how deep you could go. Grill dimensions. Airflow. Heat zones. Chicken butchery. Skewer geometry. And the sugar content of a sauce. The difference between a 20-kilogram grill he can haul to a pop-up and the 80-kilogram fire-brick grill he works over at the restaurant. For Ho, grilling isn’t just a job anymore. It’s a craft he has spent years trying to understand, and one he is still working to get better at every time he lights the charcoal.

It started with yakitori. “The charcoal-grilled skewer, the aroma, the flavour. I think all of that got embedded somewhere in the ‘good taste, good smell’ part of my brain.” Years later, the smell still gets him. Walking down a street, catching charcoal in the air, feeling the craving come back. “I think this is probably a scent and flavour that all of us can relate to and enjoy. It’s the most primitive way of cooking, and I think also the best way to cook.”

So, with grilling season fully underway, we asked Ho to take us through the learning curve of cooking with charcoal, from buying your first bag of lump charcoal to understanding heat well enough to know that the hottest part of the grill is exactly where the centre of your ribeye cap skewer belongs.

Beginner

Number one is safety. You’re working with fire. Have proper gloves, a spray bottle or water nearby, and something to treat a burn when you inevitably touch something you shouldn’t. Then buy a bag of lump charcoal.

I would avoid briquettes. Lump charcoal is still made from pieces of wood, so you get a much better aroma. You don’t need a huge or expensive grill either. Something small, maybe around 10 inches in diameter, is enough to start learning.

Put a grate over the coals and cook.

Steaks, whole chicken breasts, corn and zucchini are all good places to begin. The point isn’t to make things complicated. It’s to familiarize yourself with charcoal: how to light it, how long it takes to get ready, where the grill is hottest, and how moving an ingredient a few inches can change the way it cooks. A grate also gives you the freedom to move things around, flip them and make adjustments. That’s important when you’re starting out. Get comfortable around the fire first.

Intermediate

Learn to Control the Fire. Once you’re comfortable with charcoal, you can start getting more specific about the kind of grilling you want to do. Yakitori, yakiniku, Basque-style grilling. Different traditions have developed different grills because they’re trying to accomplish different things.

In Japan, a yakidai simply means charcoal grill, but they can be incredibly specific.

A yakitori grill is usually narrow because bamboo skewers are generally only 15 to 18 centimetres long. Yakiniku grills tend to be wider, rectangular or square. Unagi grills are much larger and don’t have air vents because cooking eel requires consistent heat distribution. Even the alignment of the charcoal is specific.

You don’t necessarily need a separate grill for everything. A larger rectangular grill can be a good all-purpose option. Put a wire mesh over it and you can grill directly on the grate, or place two cast-iron rods across the top to support bamboo skewers for yakitori.

This is also when you can start experimenting with different charcoals, including shirozumi, a white charcoal made from eucalyptus, and binchotan, the very hard Japanese white charcoal traditionally made from oak. You’ll probably want to start collecting tools at this stage too….

Advanced

At the advanced level, you stop thinking of the grill as one temperature. You learn to read the charcoal.

You should be able to recognize its different conditions during a grilling session, build separate heat zones, move the charcoal around to adjust temperature, and know exactly where an ingredient belongs on the grill. Then you start thinking about the food differently too.

With chicken, that means understanding individual cuts, weighing the meat for each skewer and learning different ways to skewer it: weaving, folding, zigzagging, and changing the size and shape depending on the ingredient. You can do the same thing with a steak.

Take apart a ribeye and make separate skewers from the cap, the eye and the fat. On my grill, the centre is the hottest section, so I would place the ribeye cap in the centre of the skewer.

At this point, you’re also learning how to retain moisture and build flavour throughout the cooking process. I use sake before and during grilling to add flavour and depth. Brushing proteins and vegetables with different fats, including vegetable oil, chicken fat or olive oil, can enhance flavour, hold onto the aroma of the charcoal and create a protective coating that helps prevent moisture loss and burning.

At the restaurant, we make a blended soy sauce with two kinds of soy, mirin, sake and bonito flakes. We brush it onto some skewers just before they finish grilling. Then there’s our tare.

The tare we use was given to us by Master Ikegawa. It was given to him by his master, who started it in 1995, which means the original tare is now 31 years old. We still use the same recipe as Torishiki and top up the original tare with fresh sauce every day. When you’re grilling over charcoal, understanding sugar is important. The more sugar a sauce contains, the easier it is for the food to char or burn. Salt matters too.

We use a blend of Japanese fine sea salt and moshio, a seaweed salt with lower salinity and a sweet umami quality. Blending the two gives us the balance we’re looking for. The grill itself becomes more important as you advance.

Japanese charcoal grills are generally made from three types of material. Diatomite is a type of clay that retains heat well, but doesn’t handle water or moisture particularly well when not in use. These grills are often made for home use or placed directly on tables at yakiniku restaurants. Fire-stone grills are lighter. I use them for pop-ups and collaborations because they’re easier to move and still do the job. Fire-brick grills retain heat extremely well. That’s what I use in the restaurant.

The difference is significant. A 90-centimetre fire-brick yakitori grill can weigh around 80 kilograms. A similar fire-stone grill might weigh 20. But whatever grill you’re using, the goal is the same: understand your fire well enough to use the charcoal to its fullest. By the time you’re finished, there should be nothing left but ash.

Extra Credit

In the end, it all comes down to passion and dedication. If you love grilling, you’ll enjoy doing it. And through repetition, you’re going to get better. Every time you light the charcoal, you understand the craft a little more. If I owned the same brand of paintbrush that Picasso used, it wouldn’t mean I could paint like him. The same thing goes for grilling. It’s not the tool that creates the result. It’s the years of repetition, the sensitivity to heat, timing and instinct that come from experience. The charcoal, the grill and the knife are only instruments. What truly matters is the hands and judgment of the person using them.

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