The Weekend I Finally Bought a Grate Lifter

The Fourth of July block party at the end of our street was never supposed to be complicated. I rolled the 22-inch kettle down to the curb across from the Andersons', figured I'd feed forty people brisket and ribs without much drama, and mostly I did, right up until the fire started running thin under one end of a rack of ribs.

I grabbed the shop rag off my shoulder to lift the grate and toss in more charcoal, same as I'd done a hundred times, and the rag caught a spark before I got the grate two inches off the coals. Heat jumped through the cloth into my palm, I dropped the whole thing, grate and rag both, and said a word I wouldn't repeat in front of the pastor's wife, who was standing eight feet away holding a plate of deviled eggs.

That's when Gil, who'd wandered over from three houses down with a beer in one hand, reached into the canvas tool bag he brings to every cookout and pulled out a DELSbbq grate lifter, the cast iron kind with the long hooked handle, and just held it out to me without saying much of anything.

I hooked it under the grate right there at the curb, and the whole thing lifted clean, no rag, no scorched knuckles, no drama in front of forty of my neighbors and a woman holding deviled eggs. Gil said he'd bought two of these DELSbbq lifters a year back after he singed his eyebrow trying to move a grate with a barbecue mitt that had worn through at the seam, and he'd been meaning to hand me the spare ever since, he just kept forgetting to bring it over.

Renata didn't say much right then, she was three tables over refilling the lemonade, but she brought it up twice on the drive home, once about how close that was to something worse, and once about how I ought to just go buy the tool myself instead of depending on Gil to remember his spare at every cookout for the rest of my life. She wasn't wrong. I drove to the hardware store the next morning before church and picked one up.

Gil didn't hand me anything fancy. He handed me a plain cast iron hook that kept my hand eight inches farther from a fire that had already almost gotten me once that summer.

That DELSbbq lifter has been clipped to the side of my grill cart at home since the week after the Fourth of July, and it's turned into one of those tools I reach for without thinking about it anymore, right alongside my tongs and the thermometer. Adding charcoal on a long cook, checking coal level under a rack of ribs, moving the grate aside to slide a chunk of hickory in, all of it goes through that same hook now instead of whatever rag or glove happened to be within reach.

I went back to the hardware store a couple weeks later and bought a second one, dropped it off at Gil's place as a thank-you, and told him now he wouldn't have to lend his out and hope somebody actually brought it back for once. He laughed pretty hard at that, considering he's the one who still has a ratchet strap and a socket set of mine from two summers ago that never made it home. If you want the longer version of how that tool held up over a whole season of cooking, I wrote up the full season review after I'd put a lot more cookouts on it than just the one at the block party.

What sticks with me about that whole afternoon isn't really the tool, it's how close a dumb little mistake came to turning into something a lot worse than a scorched shop rag. I've been grilling for the better part of thirty years, and I still nearly caught my sleeve on fire over a rack of ribs because I was using the wrong thing to move a hot grate. That's the kind of lesson that's a lot cheaper to learn from a neighbor handing you a tool than from a trip to the emergency room.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

If you were sitting across from me at my kitchen table asking whether you actually need one of these, I'd tell you the truth, which is that you can go years without one and probably be fine, right up until the one cookout where you're tired, or rushed, or trying to impress somebody's in-laws, and you reach for whatever's closest instead of the right tool. I got lucky at that block party. A scorched rag and a bad word in front of the pastor's wife is a cheap way to learn that lesson compared to how it could've gone. I'm not going to tell you it's the most important thing on your grill cart, because it isn't, your thermometer matters more and so does a good chimney starter. But it's the cheapest peace of mind I've bought for the grill in a long while, and it's the reason I keep two on hand now instead of one, so nobody standing next to me has to find out the hard way like I did. For a longer list of what it's actually good for beyond that one afternoon, here's everything else it's earned a spot for around my grill.