The Gas Grill Gourmet: Great Grilled Food for Everyday Meals and Fantastic Feasts

I also purchased other grill books, but found that the recipes were, for the most part, difficult and too "high-brow" for casual home cooking and weekend entertaining. This book does cover the more elegant dishes (Quail? Who grills quail?), and there are plenty of recipes with ethnic flavor that will inspire you, but it's main focus is on simpler recipes that won't send you scurrying to the gourmet section of the supermarket for ingredients.

If you don't agree this is the most useful grill cookbook on the market....your next steak is on me.

Why? Most importantly, nowhere in the genre have I found a better collection of excellent, accessible, unpretentious recipes. Cort Sinnes is extremely comprehensive, drawing on many culinary traditions, but he has wisely avoided the "kitchen sink" approach of offering too many recipes. This is a carefully honed, tightly edited collection with little-to-no gratuitious filler. He has taken obvious care in covering all bases with a minimum of repetition and overlap.

Yes, he embraces the indirect cooking method that forms the basis of modern outdoor gas barbecuing--but you can get this elsewhere, including the techniques and recipes that Weber packages in every owner's manual. What sets this book apart--and becomes increasingly obvious as I work my way through it--is that at its core is an extraordinary culinary sensibility. The author obviously loves food and cooking--but also has real culinary talent, a relatively rare commodity among food writers. I also get the sense that this work is an exhaustive redux, a distillation produced by an intense process of research and testing.

Implicit in his approach--and indeed the whole book concept--is the understanding that gas grilling can be a bit of a compromise flavor-wise compared to using charcoal, and that this reality justifies an emphasis on recipes and techniques that overcome or minimize the inherent deficit. We use gas grills not because they yield superior results but because the results are arguably only minimally inferior while speed and ease of use offer significant and often decisive advantages. Recognizing this, the author has wisely matched his approach to his broadest potential readership. The theme: excellence within simplicity. He has in the main limited his palette of ingredients to what can easily be found in most modern North American supermarkets. And no confusing, fancy-schmancy tricks and techniques. No complicated, time-consuming recipes. Even the physical book format reflects this approach. This is not a coffee table hybrid--no full color photos on glossy paper. In fact, no photos at all. Just a well-written, well-organized, carefully-edited cookbook with a deceptively casual, fifties kind of look to it.

There are other good grilling references out there. Many of them, like the brilliant books by Schlesinger and Willoughby, assume that no serious griller uses gas; they focus primarily on wood and charcoal as fuel. The recipes can be difficult to adapt and the results disappointingly unpredictable. Others, like Weber's slick and glossy and sometimes brilliant "Art of the Grill," reach higher and achieve less. (Like many a fancy pastry, it looks somewhat better than it tastes.) But for those of us who care about food and choose to grill with gas, it will be difficult to find a better place to start than this gem by Cort Simmes.

Bottom line: Not much flash, but lots of flavor. Very high hit rate (percentage of recipes worth repeating). Definitive book belongs on the shelf of anyone grilling outdoors with gas.