I'm Frances Lamb and this is The Splendid Table from APM American Public Media, the show for curious cooks and eaters.

It is hot, it's sweaty. It's the time of year that everyone says they love, but then you

peel yourself out of a chair and you're wondering, wait, why do I like the summer?

Oh yeah, cookouts. That's why you love the summer. And that's what our show's about this week.

We're going to talk about Korean barbecue sauce with the chef Bill Kim,

the pleasures of grilling little fish with the Portuguese chef Nunu Mendezh,

and the pros at America's Test Kitchen are going to give us the whole how not to do it wrong primer.

But first, we're going

to start with maybe the best part of any cookout, besides. But Appetitie magazine had to feature

in their June-July issue on some killer make-ahead dishes. So we talked her way into their

beautiful test kitchen high up in the World Trade Center to see a few of those recipes in action.

They had a corner full of jars of fermentation projects and cooks already developing their

winter holiday recipes.

And Claire Saffitz had me pounding the table when she turned me from a hater to a believer

in a cookout classic.

So hi, Claire. Thank you so much for having us here in the

beautiful Bon Appet's Test Kitchen. My pleasure. So the first thing I want to talk to you

about is pasta salad. Yeah, I'm nervous about this part.

We don't be nervous. Okay, I'm like I feel like pasta salad, like I should I

should love pasta salad because I love pasta and I love salad.

But hey, pasta salad in my mind is like, I don't know when it hurt me the first time, but

I've never forgotten it and I've never forgiven it.

...