More Than a Cookbook: Noah Galuten's Philosophy of Grilling

12 Minute read

30 Jun 2026

Journalist

The James Beard Award-winning author of Grill Time! shares how live-fire cooking, thoughtful parenting, and a love of teaching come together in his most personal cookbook yet.

Every now and then you come across a cookbook that fundamentally changes the way you approach an element of cooking. Not a coffee table cookbook (though those are lovely), but a sort of bible that helps you understand a cuisine or technique well enough to fully immerse yourself in it and go full-on geek. The sort that gets dog-eared and lovingly stained as you cook alongside it. This summer, one of those books arrives just in time for its namesake season: Grill Time! Why You Should Be Grilling for Better, Healthier, Easier, and More Delicious Meals: A Cookbook by Noah Galuten.

Galuten, the James Beard Award-winning co-author of Bludso's BBQ Cookbook and The Don't Panic Pantry, has spent years learning from some of the country's most respected cooks. Ask him about grilling and he'll happily talk about Kevin Bludso's smoking techniques, Ari Kolender's mayonnaise trick for fish, or the finer points of charcoal. Spend a little more time with him, however, and it becomes clear that Grill Time! isn't simply a masterclass in cooking over fire. It's really a book about the deeper questions of feeding people.

These days, much of Galuten's cooking life revolves around raising two young children. The questions driving his work are less about restaurant kitchens than weeknight dinners, nutrition, sustainability, and figuring out how to get good food on the table without losing your mind in the process.

"Becoming a parent, for me anyway, takes all the things that I already cared about, but makes them more important because it's how it relates to somebody else who matters more to you than yourself," he says.

That perspective shapes the entire book. Grill Time! is divided between what Galuten calls "Convenience Grilling" and "Weekend Project Grilling." One is about getting dinner on the table quickly. The other is about spending an afternoon tending charcoal and wood, dedicating yourself to a project you can master over time.

"The other side of it is the dad side, which is the weeknight grill," he says. "When you live in Los Angeles and you have a grill, especially if you have one that's hooked up to a gas line, I can turn it on, throw chicken breasts and asparagus on the grill, and have dinner on the table in 10 minutes."

The appeal isn't just about speed. It's also about the versatility the grill provides, accommodating different needs and styles of cooking.

"The ability to cook for different dietary restrictions too, to be able to have shrimp and steak and chicken and vegetables all cooking at the same time," he says. "If you had to do those with multiple pans on a stove, you would just order a pizza or blow your brains out."

Noah Galuten. Credit: Kristin Teig

For readers looking to go deeper, Galuten's barbecue education is equally present. He credits friend and mentor Kevin Bludso with teaching him techniques that continue to shape how he cooks over fire. One of his favorites involves creating a two-zone setup where smoke circulates through the grill while food cooks indirectly.

"You can cook a rack of ribs in an hour and a half instead of three that are tender and smoky, but also have that crispy edge thing that I love," he says.

The technique appears throughout the book, from smoke-grilled baby back ribs and pork belly to a Peruvian-inspired pollo a la brasa.

Galuten is quick to acknowledge the cooks who helped shape his thinking. The chefs he's worked with have left their mark on him and, inadvertently, on this book.

"I'm an academic at heart who cares about stuff and has gotten to learn from the most incredible roster of people you can imagine," he says. "I don't think there's anyone else in the world who can name Jeremy Fox and Kevin Bludso as culinary mentors."

While the grill has a reputation for being meat-centric, Grill Time! happily devotes the same curiosity and care to vegetables. Alongside backyard bacon cheeseburgers, ribeyes, and carne asada are recipes for charred cauliflower with tahini-yogurt sauce, grilled artichokes inspired by garlic knots, baba ghanoush, grilled avocado tostadas with chipotle-lime crema, blackened broccoli-cheddar split pea soup, and what Galuten calls "Perfect Grilled Potatoes."

One of the standouts is the smoked potato tacos. Galuten writes that smoke-grilling potatoes and tomatillos produces his favorite vegetarian tacos in the world, a reminder that live-fire cooking can transform vegetables just as effectively as it can steak. Giving vegetables the same attention as meat reflects Galuten's overall approach to feeding his family.

"A healthy relationship with food is a much more important thing that's going to affect them in a much longer-term, larger way," he says. "You don't want to become the overbearing dad who makes them revolt and just eat Skittles when they go to college," he says.

Instead, he tries to balance nutrition, pleasure, and exploration.

"We're always going to be a house that has lots of foods being made for just my work and my life," he says. "But trying to have balance and nutrition and think about the kind of world we're going to leave behind for them too."

Rather than hiding vegetables in meals, Galuten prefers transparency. He wants his children to understand what they're eating and where it comes from.

"They say you want to have a really healthy dialogue around what they're eating, how it works," he says. "It's better to give a young kid a whole head of cooked broccoli and let them explore it and rip at it and make a mess and learn how it works versus hiding stuff in things."

Sometimes, he says, his daughter asks for chocolate.

"I say, 'No.'"

"'Why?'"

"'Because it's not in season?'"

That's the ultimate illustration of what Grill Time! is really about. Not simply learning how to grill (though it certainly gives readers the tools to become experts), but learning how to think about food. Where it comes from, how it nourishes us, and how the small lessons shared around a table have a way of sticking long after dinner is over. Consider, for example, that American seafood is among the most tightly regulated in the world. Translation: Buy American whenever you can.

While recipes like charred garlic butter sriracha shrimp, grilled oysters with miso-ginger Calabrian chili butter, smoke-grilled miso black cod, and BBQ pork belly bossam showcase the range of what a grill can do, the carne asada chapter feels particularly meaningful to Galuten, like the culinary heart of the book. Inspired by lessons learned from Eloy Ochoa of the acclaimed Los Angeles restaurant Sonoratown, whom Galuten credits with teaching him how to make carne asada, it celebrates the communal side of cooking over fire. The two, alongside Latin food expert and writer Bill Esparza, traveled to Sonora to learn the tradition firsthand.

"Eloy is the greatest guy in the world," Galuten says. "I love that man to death."

The recipe is the sort that gets you genuinely excited to cook. The sort that takes planning and brings people together. It calls for mesquite charcoal, a nod to the traditions of Hermosillo, where mesquite remains the preferred fuel for carne asada. It's the sort of detail that reflects one of the book's recurring themes. Techniques matter, but so do the motivations and reasoning shared by the people who have it in their hearts to teach them.

"I'm always sort of trying to think ‘how do you make happier, healthier people on a happier, healthier planet,’" Galuten says. "[As a parent] what I really want to be able to do is try to help make people that I think the world should have more of; what you want to be greeted by in the world."