Tired of Ruining Food on the Grill? This Simple Fix Changes Everything

Sliding a basic carving fork between the grill grate lets you gently test and lift grilled food without mangling it—no fancy gear required.

Keeping a carving fork by the grill might seem obvious—you’ll need it when it’s time to carve, right? But it’s far more useful during grilling than after. In fact, it might be the most underrated grill tool out there. That’s because a carving fork solves a major grilling problem: Freeing stuck food, especially delicate food, without tearing it to shreds.

I learned this trick from the chef Dave Pasternack many years ago while working on a story about grilling fish. Pasternack showed me how you can insert the long tines of a carving fork down between the bars of a grill grate to get below the food (in this case, he was cooking a whole fish), and then lift gently from below to flip it to the other side.

Serious Eats / Vicky Wasik.

Lifting the food from below with a carving fork accomplishes a couple of key things that can otherwise be difficult to do with standard grilling gear:

First, it lets you test whether food is truly stuck or ready to release. Jamming a spatula under something that’s still fused to the grate usually ends in disaster. “Oops, guess I shouldn’t have done that,” isn’t a great strategy for arriving at a conclusion. If it’s stuck, give it another minute—it likely just needs more time to naturally release (assuming you’ve properly cleaned and oiled the grill grate and prepped your food for grilling by drying its surface sufficiently). The carving fork helps you determine if this is the case.
Second, if it is stuck, the carving fork lets you gently coax it free from below. This gentle upward pressure is almost always more effective—and less destructive—than trying to scrape it loose by forcing a spatula underneath. Once it releases, you can use the fork to flip it over smoothly, with help from a spatula or tongs if needed.

I’ve written about this technique before in my whole grilled fish recipe, but it’s just as useful for skin-on chicken, tofu, eggplant, or tomatoes—anything that might tear or crumble when stuck. So this grilling season, don’t wait until carving time to reach for the fork: Use it from the start.