Ever since I received a yakitori grill for my birthday last December, I’ve been more popular than I have in my entire life, even counting when I was in high school and drove a Honda Odyssey that could seat eight rambunctious teenagers. A yakitori grill, it turns out, is a magnet for hosting dinner parties: There’s an interactive nature to a yakitori party that other backyard barbecues cannot provide. Instead of having one solo chef donning a “kiss the cook” apron, everyone can participate and bring their favorite proteins, veggies, rice cakes, and even hot dogs. Who doesn’t want to live out their night market fantasies and eat caramelized pork or chewy fish cakes grilled on sticks?
Although I received my grill in December, I’ve used it pretty much every season. It’s thankfully still possible to have an outdoor dinner party during a Southern California winter — if the desert landscape gets too cold, the grill can double as a space heater. And in the summer, nothing goes better with a frosty beer than chicken thigh skewers covered in umeboshi paste or asparagus roasted over glowing coals.
The benefits of owning a yakitori grill go beyond social capital. For starters, its slim shape makes it much easier to store than massive barbecues or lumpy, unwieldy hamburger grills. The added shelf built into its legs is ideal for storing skewers, sauces, silicon barbecue brushes, and other cooking tools. So if space is an issue in your home, this is the grill to get.
It’s also easy to remove the grill net to pour in the hot coals. The extra space under the net where the coals burn doubles as an additional place to cook foil-wrapped sweet potatoes until they’re soft and custardy, so you can maximize what you’re cooking.
Clean up is relatively simple, too. Because the grill net comes off so easily, you can bring it into the kitchen for a scrub (sometimes, I just hose it off in the backyard). The body of the grill, where the coals are stored, also has holes that catch the inevitable ash. Once all the coals have disintegrated into gray dust, all you have to do is remove the steel divider that separates the coal from the ash and dump out the ash. Although this isn’t a feature of the grill, the ash has been doing wonders for my roses.
Before the yakitori grill, a dinner party or get together only happened if I initiated it. Now, I have friends shooting me text messages asking when my next yakitori hang out will be. And because the yakitori grill is so fun to use for everyone involved, I always oblige.
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