Summer cooking is assumed to mean grilling. This assumption is everywhere — in the recipes published in June, in the marketing for outdoor entertaining, in the general cultural picture of what warm-weather food looks like. It is also, for most people in most kitchens, irrelevant. A cast iron griddle pan, a hot oven, and the willingness to serve food at room temperature will produce better results than a charcoal grill that takes forty minutes to come up to temperature and another forty to clean.
This is not a complaint about grilling. Grilling is excellent. It’s a note that summer cooking doesn’t require it.
The case for high oven heat
The oven in summer gets a bad reputation, largely because the idea of running an oven at 200°C in July feels wrong when the kitchen is already warm. The answer is to use it quickly. Twenty minutes at 220°C to roast a tray of aubergine, cherry tomatoes or fish is a different proposition from a three-hour braise. Get the oven hot, cook fast, get the food out.
A whole side of salmon roasted at 200°C for twelve minutes, served at room temperature with a good sauce over it, is a better summer dish than almost anything from a grill. Aubergines roasted at high heat until the skin blisters and the flesh collapses are the foundation for some of the best food the summer kitchen produces. A tray of cherry tomatoes slow-roasted at 180°C for forty minutes becomes something concentrated and intense — but forty minutes is a passive forty minutes, and the result keeps for three days in the fridge.
Serving at room temperature
Most summer food is better at room temperature than hot. Poached chicken sliced and served at room temperature with salsa verde over it is a different — and usually better — thing than the same chicken served straight from the pan. Warm white beans dressed in good olive oil, eaten twenty minutes after cooking, are richer and more flavourful than beans served piping hot. A grain salad needs time to absorb its dressing; served immediately it’s dry and separate.
Room temperature serving also removes the time pressure. The food is ready when it’s ready and it will be good for the next hour, which is how summer eating — relaxed, non-urgent, likely to involve a glass of wine — actually works.
Cold preparations
Some of the best summer dishes involve no heat beyond what’s already in a pan of boiling water. Blanched green beans, cooled and dressed immediately. A quick-pickled cucumber ready in twenty minutes. Raw courgette shaved with a peeler into ribbons, dressed with lemon, olive oil and parmesan shavings. Cured salmon — salt, sugar, dill, twelve hours in the fridge — that requires a knife but no stove.
The principle behind all of these is that summer produce is often at its best without much interference. A good tomato needs salt, olive oil, and time to sit, not heat.
The griddle pan
If you want the char marks and caramelised flavour of a grill without the grill, a cast iron griddle pan over the highest heat your hob can produce comes remarkably close. It requires a kitchen that can tolerate some smoke — a window open, an extractor fan running — but the result is genuinely similar: distinct char marks, caramelised exterior, still-tender interior.
Courgettes, asparagus, spring onions, thick slices of aubergine, halved peaches — all of these work on a screaming-hot griddle pan. The key is getting the pan hot before the food goes in (at least three minutes), not crowding it, and not moving anything until it releases naturally.
The grill is one method among several. Room temperature is a finishing technique. Between the hot oven and the cold sauce, summer cooking is mostly already handled.
What summer cooking actually is
Strip away the assumption that it requires outdoor equipment and summer cooking becomes something simpler: quick applications of high heat or no heat at all, good raw materials served with minimal interference, cold sauces made the morning of the day you want them. The grill, for those who have one, is a shortcut to some of this. For those who don’t, the shortcut is already in the kitchen.