Through the summer and into the early fall, I look for any excuse to not turn on my oven. My old colonial-revival style home lacks central air, and the idea of turning on my oven on a steamy, 90-degree summer day is unappealing. I’d much rather be outside, seeking shade, poking around my garden, and catching a summer breeze before the oh-so long, bleak, gray, and very snowy New England winter settles in.
In these cherished summer and fall months, my outdoor grill becomes an extension of my indoor kitchen. You can find me outside in the early evenings on most work days, throwing a simple dinner on the grill while my kids are fighting over the hose, and on weekends, leisurely grilling elaborate meals for entertaining, where everything is coming off of the grill, even dessert.
It is in these moments that I have grown to love baking on my grill. Grill-baking is the term I use to refer to this style of cooking. I define grill-baking as a cooking method that uses the grill to maintain a steady temperature range while cooking over indirect heat to bake breads and batter-based and crumble-topped desserts. In effect, replicating the cooking environment of an indoor oven.
I started baking on my grill mostly to avoid my indoor kitchen in the summer, but as I gained experience with the technique, I realized that the grill is not just a way to avoid heating up an already-hot summer kitchen but a great way to incorporate complex and unexpected flavor—namely smoke—into baked goods that isn’t as easy to achieve in an oven.
Successful grill-baking depends on having the proper setup and tools, as well as an understanding of both how to control a grill’s more unstable temperatures as well as which desserts are the most forgiving to those shifting temps. With just a little know-how, though, you can easily turn your charcoal or gas grill into an effective outdoor oven.
Baking With a Charcoal Grill versus a Gas Grill
As Kenji López-Alt points out in his article highlighting the differences between gas and charcoal grills, there are pros and cons to grilling with each. The same is true when using a grill to bake. The advantage of a charcoal grill is the smoky flavor it gives to foods baked in it, but it comes at the cost of being more difficult to manage as an “oven.” A gas grill is easier to use and will be more temperature-stable, but the trade-off is a loss of some of that fantastic smoke flavor.
The smoky flavor of charcoal is most noticeable when baking for at least 30 minutes. This is because the propane in a gas grill burns relatively cleaner than charcoal. As charcoal burns it omits smoke and a range of gaseous emissions that create that signature fresh-off-the-grill char flavor, which adds depth of flavor to savory breads and complexity to sweet desserts. This is the main reason I prefer to use a charcoal grill over a gas grill when grill-baking.
While the flavor achieved from baking with a charcoal grill is superior to that with a gas grill, the main benefit of a gas grill is that it’s easier to maintain a constant heat level. With a charcoal grill, as the coals burn down, the heat level will dwindle over time, making maintaining a steady heat level—which is crucial for properly risen and evenly cooked baked goods—harder to do. With a gas grill, your initial burst of heat is lower than with a charcoal grill, but you have the ability to adjust the burners as needed to maintain a more constant heat level. The steady flow of propane is easy to maintain with the simple twist of a knob on a gas grill, and requires less monitoring than a charcoal grill. That’s not to say it’s unachievable with a charcoal grill (as I will describe later), but it does require more attention and monitoring to bake properly on a charcoal grill.
What To Bake On The Grill
One of the most important things to know about baking on a grill is that not every type of baked good is well-suited to the task. Perfectly crusty baguettes should be left in a steam-injected indoor oven. Delicate puff pastry and croissants are best baked indoors. Layer cakes are best left to more temperature-stable cooking zones.
The Essential Techniques for Successfully Baking on Your Grill
There’s no question that baking on a grill is a larger technical challenge than baking in a standard oven. Ovens are insulated, helping them to hold a steady temperature and retain more heat than an outdoor grill. A grill, on the other hand, is mostly intended for faster cooking over a direct heat source, whether charcoal or gas. While a grill lid helps to regulate airflow and can trap heat during grilling, it offers little insulation and heat retention in comparison to an indoor oven.
Even if a grill isn’t optimized for this type of cooking, it very much can be done. The key to success is to properly build and maintain heat on the grill. After years of fine-tuning how to grill-bake varied breads and desserts, these are the general steps and best practices I have landed on for foolproof grill-baking.
Technique 1: Preheat the Grill and Set Up an Indirect Cooking Zone
When baking in a well-insulated indoor oven, the standard is to preheat the oven to the temperature at which we intend to bake. For batter-based foods, this is usually between 325 to 375°F, while doughs usually require a higher temperature range of 400 to 500°F. Preheating to the desired final temperature is logical for an insulated oven, since it’s designed to maintain the selected temperature.
When baking with a gas or charcoal grill, though, the grill needs to preheat to a higher temperature than whatever the actual baking temperature should be—we’re talking 500 to 600°F—to accommodate the anticipated heat loss during the baking process due to a lack of insulation. As soon as you uncover a preheated grill and place a cold, heavy cast iron skillet full of raw ingredients inside it, its temperature will drop rapidly; by preheating the grill to a higher temperature than the intended baking temperature, we can accommodate this heat loss.