Slate Magazine73%
The best summer grilling technique is not marinade or rub. It’s something much stranger. 54%
By Danny Palumbo74%
7/11/2026, 9:50:00 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 22 faulty reasoning types, including Hasty Generalization, Confirmation Bias, and Appeal to Authority, with Overconfidence Bias as the most egregious example at 11.6% saturation with 235 hits. Analysis detected 1,499 faulty-reasoning hits from 2,018 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 53.8% and a BS Rank of 54% (6,737 of 14,612 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 53.90% of the article peer group.
Recipe for Disaster is Slate’s column about the things recipes get wrong—and how to fix them.
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We’re smack-dab in the middle of summer, which means someone out there is peddling you snake oil in the form of grilling hacks.
Dads wearing sandals and socks will swear by smushing their burgers with a spatula—though this only releases the juices out of the burger and into the depths of your Weber grill.
Then there are extremely unreliable websites imploring you to add things like ice cubes to patties for maximum juiciness—though all this does is dilute the burger’s natural juices and dull its flavor.
For chicken, pork, and fish, intricate marinades, as we’ve proved in this column, do very little in terms of imparting texture and flavor.
However, there’s one grilling suggestion floating throughout cyberspace that may seem fundamentally wrong, gross even, but it actually may save your summer barbecue.
It’s a controversial condiment, and it’s terrible news for the Jimmy Fallons of the world, because the secret to better grilling appears to be: mayonnaise.
That’s right.
If you want to up your grilling game, chefs and food influencers are suggesting you start slathering your proteins—from salmon to swordfish, snapper, and shrimp to turkey burgers, and yes, even steak —with mayo.
Before you close the tab, let me hasten to add that we will not be messing with steak in this venue—it so rarely needs any help.
But there’s one protein that almost always needs emergency intervention on the grill: abhorrently dry, offensively flavorless chicken breast.
Friends, I can now testify that France’s great eggy emulsion might well be part of the answer.
Hold your jar of Hellmann’s tightly, because this goopy journey might be the most enlightening Recipe for Disaster yet.
The first time I heard about grilling with mayonnaise was in 2017, when the Los Angeles Times implored readers to break out their jars and brushes .
Since then, every so often, mayonnaise has made food-media headlines.
And every single time, people appear stunned by mayo’s presence in a roasting or grilling recipe, which tells me that no matter how many articles or recipes get written, mayonnaise as a cooking tool is still quite slept on.
I remember in 2024 when Kenji López-Alt’s mayo-roasted Thanksgiving turkey recipe dropped for the New York Times.
I was at McCall’s Meat & Fish Co. (a bougie butcher shop in Los Feliz) during the holiday, and I overheard two different customers mention the recipe to their butcher.
An important note about the recipe: López-Alt says that despite other recipe developers’ promises, mayonnaise won’t produce a juicier turkey.
What he does promise, however, is a golden, burnished skin—every bit of surface area glossy and polished—with an even-Steven distribution of herbs.
This is a lesson to take with us from the oven into the backyard: Mayonnaise affects the protein’s surface area, and to a great degree.
One evangelist of the sandwich spread is Noah Galuten , a chef and author here in Los Angeles.
“Mayonnaise is the secret to better grilling,” Galuten says in an Instagram video .
“Painting the thinnest veil of mayonnaise on a piece of fish, or a whole fish, whether it’s skin-on or skinless, allows it to become virtually nonstick on the grill.
It also allows you to get seasonings to adhere perfectly to it.
And it makes it brown better.”
Galuten echoes essentially the same sentiments as López-Alt: Whether you’re grilling or oven roasting, use mayo for more even seasoning and better browning.
The two seem to disagree, however, on whether or not mayo makes a moister interior.
As I reminded you above, marinades—which are sold as imbuing meat with moisture and flavor—are mostly a waste of time .
Really, marinades only affect a protein’s exterior by adding caramelization and flavor to the outside .
But what if I told you that a quick slather of mayonnaise actually carries all the same benefits as a marinade, and then some?
Mayonnaise alters the surface area of protein both in terms of flavor and texture.
The flavor comes from the mayonnaise itself, which adds a bit of richness, and the goopy, viscous quality of the sauce that so many people loathe actually holds dried herbs and spices particularly well.
They cling to the mayonnaise for dear life.
Meanwhile, previous tests—my own and others from recipe developers like Tim Chin at Serious Eats—have shown that adding garlic and herbs to a wet marinade does virtually nothing in terms of imbuing flavor.
So forget letting a hunk of chicken breast wade in a Ziploc bag for 12 hours; a quick slathering of mayonnaise and a dousing of herbs is almost certainly the better approach for what you’re trying to achieve.
Now, not everyone has bought into all this wild mayonnaisation.
On a recent trip to Detroit, I had drinks with Argentine chef Javier Bardauil , a Buenos Aires native who is a master of all things live fire.
He told me (and I’m paraphrasing here because, ya know, drinks) that he’s only tried the mayonnaise grilling method on chicken breasts.
While he agreed that it gets good browning, he expressed caution because he feels that the chicken can burn easily.
Though the night got hazy from there, I do remember Bardauil calling grilling with mayo “ cheating” with a sort of dismissive shrug.
This body language gave off the impression that he doesn’t view it as a serious grilling technique.
Of course, Baraduil comes from a country that embraces the purity of live fire, wood, and beef.
At his restaurant, Barda, proteins are all simply prepared with dry seasonings and rubs.
Still, I found his opinion interesting.
Is it cheating?
Do proteins taste like mayonnaise when grilled?
Will a chicken breast brown or burn?
Is the sticky seasoning action worth the fuss?
I decided to put it all to the test.
I tried the mayonnaise grilling method on the most maligned of backyard barbecue proteins—the chicken breast—as well as one of the more sensitive regulars: jumbo shrimp.
I’m willing to wager that virtually every American has experienced a bone-dry chicken breast at a barbecue.
You know the kind—a massive, hulking white meat slab with the faintest notion of barbecue sauce unable to hide its desiccated interior.
Could mayonnaise really save us from this?
Well, it’s part of the equation, that’s for sure.
I won’t bury the lede any longer—this was the best grilled chicken breast I’ve ever had in my life.
Here’s how I did it.
When I wrote about marinades last year, I learned that chef Jesse Griffiths of Dai Due in Austin, Texas, liked to brine and marinate pork chops.
So I tried that: I brined two thick chicken breasts in a salt, sugar, and lemon solution for 24 hours.
The next day, I drained them in a strainer, then dried them well with paper towels.
Next, I sliced one of the chicken breasts through the middle to decrease its thickness by half.
By slicing it through the middle, I made two smaller chicken breasts that would cook faster on high heat (the other breast I left whole to see how its moisture stood up to longer grilling).
At this point, I applied the mayonnaise, specifically Duke’s, which has a more tangy, lemony flavor than other brands.
(I’d be curious to try other mayonnaises based on their flavor profiles to see what else works—Hellmann’s for its richness, Kewpie for sweetness and egg flavor, and McCormick for its lime taste.)
I lathered about half a tablespoon on both sides of each breast with a butter knife and the gloop stuck to the chicken like drywall plaster.
Next, I applied seasonings to see how they would stick—chipotle powder and a blend of Italian dried herbs in this case.
As I showered them onto each breast, the morsels of seasoning submerged themselves in the mayo like sprinkles clinging to warm frosting on a cookie.
Immediately, I recognized how much better a solution mayonnaise was for holding seasoning than oil.
You know how when you season a piece of oil-slicked meat, some of the seasoning falls off onto the plate when you pick it up?
None of that here.
Not a single atom of seasoning fell to the ground.
The seasoning was essentially painted onto each breast.
It was like looking at a spicy oil canvas.
I grilled each breast on a gas grill over moderate heat (450 to 500 degrees), and I noticed that the chicken rapidly developed an appetizing golden-brown char.
The platonic ideal of Maillard-induced color , I thought.
The final product?
Look, I know we live in a world of hyperbole—everything is the best and it’s amazing — but no joke, this was the most astounding chicken breast I’ve ever tasted.
The mayonnaise gave the chicken a deeply charred, well-seasoned crust; meanwhile, the brine broke down the muscle structure to such a degree that I thought I was slicing rib-eye steak on a Boos Block .
Each bite of chicken popped with an abundance of complex flavor.
If that weren’t enough, there’s even more to glean here, because I actually found myself disagreeing with some points made by other chefs about mayo-grilling.
For starters, chef Bardauil says that the mayonnaise burns rather easily, but this proved false.
I experienced no issues with the mayo burning before the chicken was cooked through (with either the thick or the halved breasts, though I think the latter is a more appealing preparation).
Second, Galuten says that when grilling with mayonnaise, you don’t get any of the mayo flavor, but I found this to also be false—in a good way.
There was a slight mayonnaise flavor to both the chicken and the shrimp, but none of the off-putting (to some) texture.
No stiff peaks of aioli protruded from the proteins’ surfaces.
But what did happen was that both the chicken and shrimp had a little bit of extra imparted richness from the mayo, and I found it to be wonderful.
If the chicken breast was a revelation, the shrimp got a clear upgrade as well.
In this video where Galuten grills four different proteins with mayonnaise, he suggests adding some mayo and Sriracha together in a bowl with shrimp.
The mayo-y shrimp mixture just goes directly on the grill, and, in my test, it cooked wonderfully.
The end result produces a flavor that tastes a lot like a grilled shrimp salad.
It’s definitely richer than dry-grilled shrimp, and I have to say, the mayonnaise flavor is definitely there.
But it’s an awesome, smoky version, tied to a properly browned exterior and a perfectly seasoned protein.
There’s quite literally no downside to it.
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but mayonnaise has changed the way I’ll be grilling forever (except for steaks; chef Bardauil might kill me if I put mayonnaise on a steak).
I was giddy with delight that the chicken breast turned out the way it did, because now I get to tell you about it, too.
What’s more, I’m excited because the experience confirms that this Recipe for Disaster column actually works!
Interviewing chefs, testing methods, and using my own culinary know-how has produced worthwhile cooking methods while successfully debunking others.
And it’s something that you can actually put into practice.
After testing and ultimately tossing away marinades last summer, I remembered that brining was the only true way to affect a protein’s interior flavor and texture.
This year, I learned that mayonnaise makes for the best surface-area grilling.
Combine both, and you have something truly special.
Mayo haters, take note: You can ban it from your sandwiches, but you need it at your barbecue.
That is, unless you don’t want to turn into grill-dad royalty like the rest of us?
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