The Grill Coach

The Grill Coach is a barbecue and outdoor-cooking podcast run by two friends, Brian and Jay, who trade the host's chair between them and open every episode with the same theme. The theme doubles as a manifesto. Smell of summer, but working year-round with a flame of propane. Sizzle is the sound. Kosher salt and pepper rubs, dry brines, reverse sear and rest time, and then the payoff: a first bite, a grin, and the line that this is the reason for all of it. Everything after the jingle is in service of that grin.

The format is loose and conversational. One host greets the other, a topic is set, and the pair work through it the way two people would over a back fence, with detours, plugs and the occasional made-up word that both of them decide to keep. There is room for a quick break, a thank-you to Patreon members whose small monthly pledge covers website hosting, and a standing invitation to sign up for the newsletter at thegrillcoach.com. One stretch of the show is set aside for recommended items; one pick was a movable stainless steel outdoor grill table.

Topics run from technique to hardware to the plate. On the technique side there is an episode titled Knife Skills Needed For BBQ, and another called What to Grill and Smoke on the Rotisserie, in which the hosts talk through a rotisserie kit, including a version with a pizza peel adaptation that its owner has not yet tried on an actual pizza. On the hardware side, Andrew Rog from ChefsTemp joins for a conversation built around a digital pit gauge that swaps a smoker's analog dial for a display large enough to read from indoors, freeing a cook to run out for tinfoil in the window after a log goes on. On the plate side, Chris’s Al Pastor Sauce is a walk-through of a homemade sauce: soften the peppers, add spices and a seed-based paste from the international aisle, blend hard for a full minute, then put the result on scrambled eggs or nearly anything else.

The most unexpected turn in the run is BBQ & Diabetes with Dr. Cory Jenks, which brings the cook's own health to the table. The conversation covers the quiet warning signs of type 2 diabetes, from low energy and poor sleep to skin tags and a widening waist, and then the lab numbers a doctor would watch: fasting blood sugar, the hemoglobin A1C three-month average and elevated triglycerides. It is not the usual barbecue-podcast territory.

For a first listen, the rotisserie episode is a fair sample: two cooks comparing notes on a piece of kit they are still learning, one of them admitting on air to only a couple of cooks with it so far. The hosts put learning on the same footing as teaching, and the theme says as much. Its pitch is that outdoor cooking is a skill anyone can level up, one cook at a time, and that the best evidence of progress is the face of the person holding the fork.