22-05-2025
Memorial Day grilling: Our best recipes, tips and advice for 2025
While the calendar marks summer as officially starting in June, this weekend's Memorial Day is its unofficial start.
It's also the unofficial start to the summer grilling season. While grilling takes place year-round for many of us, summertime is when grilling is easy.
For the kick-off of grilling season, we dug into our archives to find favorite, crowd-pleasing recipes for juicy burgers, smoky ribs and barbecue chicken. These are sure-fire bets and crowd-pleasers to salute the start of the season.
Pairing with those dishes are our best tips, techniques and advice to keep your Memorial Day cookout safe.
And we tossed in a few trends to look out for this season, from barbecue and grilling expert Steven Raichlen. Raichlen authored 32 books, including the popular The Barbecue Bible and Planet Barbecue. He's also a journalist and TV Host widely known for his shows, including Barbecue University and the website His latest cookbook, released in April, is "Project Griddle: The Versatile Art of Grilling on a Flattop," (Workman, $30).
Raichlen's 2025 trends from the include:
Bone marrow everywhere: "Today, roasted marrow bones are a big ticket item, turning up at high-end restaurants across the country."
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Cowboy butter everywhere: This is a blend of butter, minced garlic or shallot (or both), parsley or other fresh herbs, paprika, cayenne or hot pepper flakes. Use it, Raichlen writes, melted for basting, creamed for dipping and dolloping, and frozen, then sliced for adding to and melting atop grilled steaks.
Picanha everywhere: A "thin, oval roast (taken from the top sirloin), with its thick, snowy layer of fat, is one of the world's most flavorful cuts of beef." Picanha can be grilled like a steak, Raichlen writes.
Tomahawks everywhere: An "oversized rib steak with long rib bone attached, is turning up at steakhouses and high-end restaurants everywhere."
Griddles stand up: Riachlen writes that these "stand-up, propane-fired outdoor griddles (they look like gas grills) continue to skyrocket." The griddles are used for cooking everything from breakfast items like pancakes, Reuben sandwiches for lunch, and cooking a steak.
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Personal pizza ovens: "All produce exemplary pies with push button, turn of the knob convenience, generally in less than 15 minutes." And they are not just for pizza. Raichlen says the ovens also can be used for roasting steaks.
And so, cheers to these tasty ways to kick off the unofficial start of the grilling and summer seasons.
Contact Detroit Free Press food and restaurant writer Susan Selasky and send food and restaurant news and tips to: sselasky@ Follow @SusanMariecooks on Twitter.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Memorial Day 2025: Top 6 tips for grilling this year
