Preheat your grill
It may seem obvious to anyone who has ever held a pair of long tongs over the fire, yet starting cold is one of the most common mistakes around. Grill Chef 3.0 over there, impatient to show off his mad skillz on the barbie, dropping his beautiful strip loins on the grill moments after sparking it up, will soon be wondering why the prescribed four minutes a side for rare yields him grayish, underdone slabs of inedible beef that he has to scrape off the cast iron with a chisel. Take the time to set up right. Light up the flames, close the lid, and let the grill heat for at least 10 minutes before proceeding to the fun. Toss your burgers on too early, and you might as well just be tossing them right into the trash.

’Tis the seasoning
They have a name for people who profess to absolutely love the rank, acrid taste of a nice layer of carbon on their meat: masochists. For those of us who prefer the cleaner and more easily acquired flavour of nicely caramelized meat (known as “grill marks”), here’s how to proceed: blast furnace your barbeque for five minutes, and then scrape it down with a stiff-bristled metal brush.1 Wipe clean with an old tea towel (which you should keep handy throughout the season), and then rub down the bars with a smidge of vegetable oil. 2 Allow the oil to bake on, which will create a semi-­permanent no-stick surface that will enhance your grilling performance immensely.

You got the right temperature
While one shares your primal love of big, giant flames and vulcanizing heat, there is a reason why your Fiesta 400 has temperature knobs.3 Steaks and chops should be done at medium-high to high heat (425-450ºF for those with accurate thermometers), while hamburgers, sausages, dogs and chicken should be grilled at medium heat (375-400ºF).

You got to move it, move it
Yes, I know all about not disrupting your succulent steaks too much in order to retain as much precious, juicy goodness as possible. And in an ideal world, working with a professional-grade grill with no cold spots or pesky flare-ups, you can adhere to the mark-it-and-turn-it principle.4 For your regular Joe (or Josephine) though, who’s working with a 20-year-old cottage cast-off, more desperate measures need to be taken. This does not mean you should flip your rib-eye 16 times — you should still only turn it once. Just don’t be afraid to move your dinner away from flame licks, and try rotating your meat around so that Uncle Sam’s well-done steak isn’t ready to break bricks before cousin Jim’s blue strip has even started to sizzle.

Avoid flare-ups
It’s easier than you think. Flare-ups, those nasty, wicked shooting flames that cause backyard chefs all manner of mischief, are caused by one of two things: fat dripping down and igniting on the flames below; or the leftover remnants of last week’s (or last year’s, depending on how lazy you’ve been) drippings smouldering on the coals below. While step one (see preheating your grill) and a periodic rotation/replacement of your lava rocks or charcoal should take care of the first cause, the latter is slightly trickier to avoid. Don’t use too much oil. Veggies such as zucchini and peppers need only a light brushing of pressed olive oil — not a thick coating — to do the job. (This also goes for the marinade on tender cuts of beef: Bessy doesn’t need to be all greased up to be tasty.) And when cooking fatty items like burgers and your spicy-hot Italian bangers, move them around to avoid an accumulation of drippings in one place.

DON’T stick a can of beer up the chicken’s butt
Some things seem like they’re no-brainers, and yet every year I’m told by somebody or other how great beer-can chicken5 is. Having had the “opportunity” to try the results of this cooking process for the first time last year, I now realize these people were either lying about having tried it, or were very drunk when they did.

DO let meat come to room temperature before grilling
Health officials, with all of their fancy book-learnin’ and scientific mumbo-jumbo, warn you against this. Bacteria! Bacteria! They shout. Of course these are the same people who won’t let me buy raw milk and wish to rid the world of gorgeously runny, unpasteurized cheese. I do know that letting your meat sit for 10 or 15 minutes before cooking allows for more even cooking and a tender finish.

Avoid cross-contamination
On this, I am definitely with the science geeks. Use a separate, clean plate to put your food on after cooking, and avoid using utensils that have touched raw meat for serving the finished product.

Put your sauce on towards the end of cooking
You should really hammer this into your head. Putting your BBQ sauce on at the beginning of grilling will just result in ugly charred nastiness. Grills are not like ovens, which use indirect heat to cook softly. That flame will char anything moist. Brush the sauce on when you have a minute or two left before finishing.

Relax — it’s just BBQ
Hey, it’s not rocket science here. Leave the cookbooks inside and chill out. Kick back, suck back a cold one or two (or a glass of that full-bodied red with the hints of smoky cherry and vanilla you’ve been into lately), and have fun with it. You have the whole summer ahead of you to keep at it, after all. And if you screw it up? Well, hey, practice makes perfect. (And a full cooler has the potential to make everything taste better.)

Footnotes:

1. For those lucky enough to have porcelain infrared grill tops (like me — suckers), abrasive brushes should never be used. Pre-­season your grill in the oven at the start of the “Ugh — fire” season, and rub off the grime with your tea towel periodically.

2. Oils with low smoke points (meaning they start to burn faster), such as olive oil, should be avoided. Also, avoid no-stick sprays, which not only have low smoking temps, but also create the possibility of the old exploding-can scenario.

3. Assuming you have a propane-fired BBQ. Those with the old charcoal variety should get used to setting up early and letting the charcoal get white hot before cooking. Try to get your coals as level as possible, which will provide a nice even temp all around.

4. Creating nice criss-cross grill marks by placing steak down, letting it get “marked,” then rotating it 180 degrees to get a cross mark, and then turning it over to the other side.

5. A method of cooking the bird by first shoving an open can of beer into its cavity, and then standing it up on the barbeque so that it “self-bastes” when the beer begins to boil and bubble up into the chicken carcass. How does it taste? Think cheap de-alcoholized beer and improperly rendered fowl grease with just a hint of aluminum can and paint fumes.

6. Even, apparently, beer-can chicken.