When Americans are polled about their favorite foods for grilling, steak always heads the list. A slab of beef is the perfect food for the grill: Its broad surface area soaks up charcoal and smoke flavors, and its relative thinness allows for quick cooking. The most common mistake made in grilling steaks is over cooking it; the second most common is undercooking. Here’s how to do it just right.

1. Pick the right kind of steak. Tender cuts like sirloin, tenderloin, porterhouse, strip steak and shell steak are the best. Fibrous steaks, like skirt and flank, also taste great grilled, provided that they are thinly sliced on the diagonal. Save tough cuts like chuck and blade steak for long, slow, moist cooking methods like braising. (You’ll find a gallery of some of the different cuts of steak on our website in the wonderful “Barbecue Bible” cookbook.)
2. Some people let the steak come to room temperature before grilling. Most professionals, myself included, don’t bother. The difference in cooking time is negligible and certainly not worth the risk of meat spoiling at room temperature.
3. Preheat the grill to high. If you are cooking a very thick steak (say T-bone that’s two inches thick), build a two-zone fire. On a gas grill, preheat one side to high, on side to medium-high.
4. Season the steaks generously with salt and pepper. Use a coarse-grained salt, like kosher or sea salt. Coarse grain salt crystals dissolve more slowly that fine table salt, so they hold up better during cooking, and steak pros all over the world use this. I always use freshly ground or freshly cracked black pepper, and I apply it generously both before and after grilling. Some people don’t add the salt until after cooking. The salt, they argue, draws out the juices. Believe me, you won’t get much juice loss in the short time it takes to cook a medium-rare steak. And besides, you can’t beat the flavor of the salt mixed with caramelized meat juices.
5. Oil the grill grate. The easiest way to do this when grilling steak is to use a piece of steak fat held by tongs or on the end of a carving fork. Rub the fat over the bars of the grate. An oiled rag or folded up paper towel works fine, too.
6. Arrange the steaks on the oiled grate so they are all lined up in the same direction. After two minutes, rotate each steak. Normally I rotate them 45 degrees. This creates an attractive diamond crosshatch of grill marks on the steaks. Sometimes I rotate them90 degrees; the produces a square crosshatch. Cook the steaks until beads of blood appear on the surface, one to two for a steak a half inch thick, three to five minutes for one that’s an inch thick, six to nine minutes for a thickness of one and a half to two inches. Turn the steaks with tongs or a spatula; never use a fork. The holes made by a fork allow the juices to escape.
7. Continue cooking the steaks on the second side, rotating them after two minutes. The steaks will need slightly less time on the second side. The best test for doneness is feel: Press the top with your index finger. A rare steak will be softly yielding; a medium steak will be firmly yielding; a well-done steak will be firm (see “Is It Done Yet? On page 30 of the informative “Barbecue Bible”). Avoid cutting into a steak to test for doneness. This, too, drains the juices.