Cooking Satés

The saté is probably the most perfect morsel ever devised by a grill buff. This bite-size kebab on a small bamboo skewer is wildly popular all across Southeast Asia. Japan’s yakitori and teriyaki are kissing cousins of saté. There’s only one remotely challenging aspect to cooking a saté. Because bamboo is flammable, you must set up your grill so you can cook the meat without burning the ends of the skewers. There are three ways to accomplish this.

1. Do as they do in Southeast Asia—work on a slender grill, one just wide enough to expose the meat, but not the skewer ends, to the fire. Saté grills, long, narrow metal boxes that are quite tiny and portable, are specially designed for this purpose. Variations turn up from Jakarta to Kyoto and Kuala Lumpur. (I bought one in Jakarta that’s twelve inches long and three inches wide and was fashioned from a large tin can.)