Built for the Method: Eight Pieces of Cooking Equipment and the Techniques They Define

A chimney starter is a metal tube with a grate that holds charcoal lumps or briquettes above a base where air can circulate, so the coals ignite before they ever reach the grill. Modern commercial models are steel cylinders about six to eight inches across and eight to twelve and a half inches tall, and most have insulated handles. It is where a charcoal fire begins.

A disposable grill packs everything needed to cook into one aluminum unit: a foil pan, a grill top, charcoal, a starter sheet and ignition fluid, with a stand sometimes included. It is built for a single use and then recycled or thrown away.

A barrel barbecue is made from a fifty five gallon drum, with vents cut in the top and bottom to control airflow and a lid to hold in heat. The length of the barrel works as its own chimney and creates the draft, so no separate chimney is needed, and short horseshoe-like legs keep it steady.

A charbroiler heats a series of grates or ribs from below, and in gas versions the burners under the cooking surface make it an under-fired broiler. Most often found in commercial kitchens, it shares its basic construction with residential grills, and the words charbroiling and grilling are frequently used for the same thing.

The kamado is a traditional Japanese wood or charcoal burning cook stove, and its name is the Japanese word for stove or cooking range. Where the earlier stops are portable or commercial grills, this one is a stove in the Japanese kitchen tradition, and a version of it is now sold abroad as a kamado-style cooker or barbecue grill.

A turkey fryer is an apparatus built to deep fry a whole turkey. Fried turkey has long been popular in the Southern United States and has spread to other parts of the country because frying takes much less time than cooking the bird in an oven or on a rotisserie.

A bamboo steamer, called zhenglong in Chinese, is a food steamer woven from bamboo and used commonly in Chinese cuisine, especially for dim sum. It usually comes in two or more layers so several foods can steam together, and it has spread to other East and Southeast Asian countries. It is the one stop here that cooks with steam instead of fire.

Coal-fired pizza is a style found in the United States, with New York style and New Haven style pizza often cooked in coal-fired ovens. Such an oven can reach about nine hundred degrees Fahrenheit and cook a pie in two to five minutes, so the oven itself defines the speed and the crust.