Bobby Flay's Boy Gets Grill: 125 Reasons to Light Your Fire! (Hardcover)

~ (Author), Gentl & Hyers (Author), John Dolan (Photographer), (Contributor) "The list of things you don't need in order to grill great food is a lot longer than the list of what you do need..." (more)
Key Phrases: close the grill hood, heat your grill, cup mild vegetable oil, New York, Mesa Grill, Grilled Quesadillas (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Although grilling is often synonymous with red meat, roaring flames and testosterone, Flay, star of the Food Network's Boy Meets Grill (and author of the book of the same name), shows that there is a sensitive, more elegant side of grilling. The CBS Early Show's food correspondent presents an array of impressive dishes made for grilling, from the sweet and sour Brick-Grilled Baby Squid with Tamarind-Mint Dressing to Grilled Chicken with Toasted Chiles, Coconut Milk, Lime, and Crushed Peanuts. Many of Flay's recipes feature international flavors, and he seems to have a knack for fish, shellfish and poultry. That doesn't mean, however, that the native New Yorker doesn't enjoy a hunk of beef grilled to perfection every once in a while. For those cravings, Flay offers the Pressed Cuban-Style Burger, an amalgam of "a big, fat burger oozing melted cheese and pickles" and "a big, fat Cuban sandwich oozing melted cheese and pickles," or Grilled Ribeye Steak with Cilantro-Garlic Butter, which has a "straightforward flavor punch." Flay gives a copious introduction to every recipe and often cross-references techniques (which he reviews at the book's outset) and offers suggestions for accompaniments (for example, if you're serving the divinely simple Rum-Brown Sugar-Glazed Shrimp with Lime and Cilantro, prepare grilled corn on the cob and avocado salad as sides). Most of Flay's salads, dips, pizzas and quesadillas, as well as the main dishes, are uncomplicated and draw on fresh ingredients, and novices should have no trouble following his easygoing instructions. Color and b&w photos.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

The irrepressible Flay teams with noted food writer Moskin in another of his cookbooks on the art of grilling. Flay personifies the urban griller. He uses top-quality ingredients from a vast array of ethnic cuisines to produce a panoply of flavors favored by contemporary palates. Guacamole gets a kick from the addition of grilled corn kernels. Quesadillas go over the top with a garnish of fresh thyme-scented salsa, three cheeses inside, and a dollop of ricotta on top. Grilled potatoes make a novel potato salad, especially when dressed with blue cheese. Cedar planks, so popular for grilling salmon, serve equally well for grilling lobster, which is then accompanied with roasted corn and chipotle pepper salsa. Flay's compulsion to tinker extends even to a classic sandwich, the BLT, and he adapts it for grilling by using green tomatoes and a bit of goat cheese. Flay's television shows and his fertile imagination for the pairing of smoky and sweet ingredients make this a sought-after title. Mark Knoblauch
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Scribner (May 18, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743254813
• ISBN-13: 978-0743254816
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 8.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #115,621 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in this category: (What's this?)

  #69 in

  Books > Cooking, Food & Wine > Outdoor Cooking > Barbecuing & Grilling

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

48 of 50 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars hardly as good as his others, September 25, 2004

By	A Reader (Baltimore, MD) - See all my reviews

Don't get me wrong, I have been a huge Flay fan since 1996, when I used to watch his first show on food network. Despite his recent TV saturation and subsequent swagger and attitude I think he has contributed alot to modern cooking and deserves his popularity. No, I am not a hater - the past 2 years my family has gone to Mesa Grill for my birthday, and I tape his shows every day. I am a big fan. I would be sad to see someone give it this rating, but I am giving this book 2 stars because I am comparing it to what Bobby Flay has done in the past.

If you are a viewer of his "Boy Meets Grill" show on food network, you probably recognize 80% of these dishes, and can easily get them for free on their website. I have seen him hock this Cuban burger on 3 shows as well as his own show and this book. It's a regular hamburger with a piece of swiss cheese and ham, squished with a heavy object. hardly groundbreaking. Other Flay staples are rehashed and rehashed - honey, chipotle(which he tries to disguise as "smoked chile" a few times in this book), jicama, ancho chiles, chicken thighs, the list goes on. 125 recipes? If you consider regular old guacamole and salsa, quesadillas prepared 5 similar ways, and store bought ketchup with a pureed chipotle as 8 recipes (and 8 other quickie drink recipes), then I'm sure he squeaked his way to 125. (notice this book doesn't say "NEW recipes" like 'Boy Meets Grill' did?)

Also although I am not a fool for color photos, this book is primarily black and white with no pictures (actually there are many pictures of HIM - shopping, smiling, serving a drink, lighting a grill...) until the middle 10 pages where you DO see some color, unlike his past few books, yet the price tag is the same as his others.

I will say one positive thing about the format, as it breaks down by course (appetizers, entrees, etc.), then by type of main ingredient (fish, meat, burgers) followed by menu suggestions matching recipes from each course and a loose game plan of what to prepare in advance.

Put it all together and you see a complacent celebrity cookbook author "phoning it in" - a quickie money maker using old ideas placed into another lucrative media. I can see this as exciting for someone who has just stumbled on Bobby Flay for the first time, someone who has yet to encounter the taste of a chipotle pepper or who occasionally watches his shows and is buying a cookbook for the first time. But for those of us who "know" Bobby Flay, this is one falls short, and don't say I didn't warn you. Want a better value? try Flay's BOY MEETS GRILL, Tyler Florence's 'Real Kitchen' or for grilling anything by Steven Raichlen.

36 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Highly Recommended for Grillers. Broad Range of Recipes, June 6, 2004

By	B. Marold "Bruce W. Marold" (Bethlehem, PA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This is the first of Bobby Flay's books I have reviewed and I approached it with the expectation that it will either deflate the hype of Flay's celebrity or show that, as I have seen with Jamie Oliver, there is real substance behind the smoke.

My first observation is that aside from a few nice frills, the book is all about the recipes and all about Bobby Flay. To get them out of the way, the nice frills are the complete list of recipes at the beginning of the book, the list of internet sources at the end of the book, and the last chapter on menus. For a book with only 125 recipes, the complete listing of recipe titles in the table of contents is a natural feature. It should be a feature in every cookbook. The list of internet sites is becoming another expected feature of cookbooks. The list of menus is a very nice touch and shows up what I think is the book's strongest feature. I must say the few color photographs of plated dishes are very good. The many black and white photos of Bobby doing this and that are boring.

I was very pleased to see that Flay's choice of recipes was not at all limited by the cuisine of his two restaurants. In addition to Southwestern and Spanish cuisine, Flay covers other Latin tastes such as Cuban, Caribbean and Argentinean plus Greek, East Indian, Chinese, Thai, and Italian. He has enough recipes to fill out complete menus for each of these cuisines.

Even when you just look at his core cuisines, you can see that Flay is giving us original recipes. They may not be all of his own invention, but they are certainly uncommon. For example, he presents six quesadilla recipes, none of which contain black beans, which is a staple in the four quesadilla recipes in Steve Raichlen's encyclopedic 'BBQ USA'.

It is surprising, in fact to see Flay make heavy use of Greek ingredients. Feta cheese seems to be one of his favorite ingredients and he uses it and blue cheese almost as often as he uses cheddar and Monterey Jack. In fact, he says he loves the Greek cuisine since it is rooted almost entirely on grilling. This brings up a basic culinary issue of 'fusion' food versus an interest to not violate cuisine or 'terroir' boundaries in the composition of recipes. I cannot say Flay never crosses boundaries in his combinations, but it seems he respects them a lot more than he crosses them. Feta is most commonly pared with other typically Greek ingredients such as olives, spinach, and lemons. Blue cheese, on the other hand, has become an ingredient that is pervasive throughout western cooking, as there are French, Italian, Spanish, English, and American native blue cheese products. So, as long as you don't go pairing it with raw tuna, you are pretty safe with just about any blue cheese use.

The chapters of food categories are a bit mixed. They are:

Cool Drinks, largely alcoholic.
Dips, Pizza, Flatbreads, and Quesadillas
Vegetable Appetizers, Salads, and Sides
Big Parties with Fish Tacos, Burgers, and Skewers. This is one of the more valuable chapters in the book.
Fish and Shellfish - Surprisingly large selection of recipes for grilling fish.
Chicken, Duck, and other Birds
Beef, Lamb, Pork, and Sausages
Simple Desserts - Not all of these recipes involve grilling fruits.

One of my favorite aspects of these recipes is that they give so many techniques for inexpensive meats or cuts that have become difficult to cook. There is a very simple and effective method, for example, for grilling thin pork chops with nectarine ginger chutney. Another aspect of almost all the recipes is their simplicity, as long as you get past the steep setup time required preparing to use a gas or charcoal grill. Flay says he uses both and offers few opinions or instructions about using one or the other.

This is an important consideration when buying this book. Flay gives some few tips about equipment and heat control at the beginning of the book, but there is virtually no other advice about finding your way around the grill. I think I would not want to start grilling from recipes in this book. If you are a novice, start with one of Steve Raichlen's books and assimilate his lessons on working with grills before tackling Flay's recipes. In a similar vein, Flay gives very little guidance on basic culinary techniques. I sensed that he was assuming a fair amount of knowledge on the part of his readers when he gives no clue to the fact that fava beans require a double pealing. He and his cowriter only mention a single pealing. On the other side of the coin, Flay and co-author Julia Moskin are very careful and thorough in specifying what can and what cannot be prepared ahead. They are as careful about warning us about what must be served immediately as they are about what can be refrigerated.

These recipes show the great natural culinary talent with which Flay has been credited. If you are a devoted griller or you are a devoted Bobby Flay fan, get the book. If you are a foodie or simply an avid cookbook reader, you may wish to use the money to fill out your M.F.K. Fisher collection. My biggest criticism may be that Flay has not given any guidance to people who do not wish to invest in grilling hardware and prefer to stay with their modest indoor grill pans.

Highly recommended for grillheads. Simple, innovative recipes if you have well-developed grill skills.

15 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A great B-Day or Father's Day gift, January 8, 2005

By	Allan M. Gathercoal "fdoamerica" (Norcross, GA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Bobby Flay's B-B-Q book has little to do with the standard B-B-Q sauces, and much to do about international flavors, fish, shellfish and poultry.

Yes, the book has the standard red meat, roaring flames and testosterone section, but `Boy Gets Grill' is really for those who what to go beyond the seared steak and try something new, like: Baby Squid with Tamarind-Mint Dressing, or Grilled Chicken with Toasted Chiles, Coconut Milk, Lime, and Crushed Peanuts. HMMM!

Surprising were his excellent "other" chapters in the book. All the recipes I tried were fast, innovative and very good. In his `Cool Drinks' section try the Pineapple-Mint Tequila Fizz. In his `Salads and Sides' try his Coconut-Cashew Basmati Rice Salad. And, for a `Simple Desert' try the Blueberry Cobbler.

The book is skimpy with photos, but besides that this book is strongly recommended for any griller or it would be a great B-Day or Father's Day gift. 4.5 stars.