Jeff Ford, Indiana chef and restaurateur, is in my backyard, standing over my Weber gas grill.

The grill was an upgrade for me over the Walmart special I had bought myself 10 years earlier, before graduate school and some contingent jobs and a baby. When I moved to Terre Haute, Indiana two years ago, I was settled, and I was buying a Weber. I had heard they made quality grills, and I went with the smallest and cheapest one, the one I could afford.

Suddenly, though, I felt ashamed of my grill. Here was the guy who has cooked the four best steaks I’ve ever eaten — and yes, I know exactly how many times I’ve been privileged enough to dine at J. Ford’s Black Angus in Terre Haute — and he’s standing over this $300 grill that I thought was pretty nice but now seems open for ridicule.

He’s made more than a Weber grill off of me in the four times I’ve eaten in his restaurant. I called Jeff — and Chef Kris Kraut, too, but we’ll get to him in a moment — because the whole grilling thing has been suspiciously easy for me. Buy meat, light grill, burn meat — but just a bit. I wanted to hear, straight from the professionals, what I could be doing better.

“You need better tongs, man,” Jeff says, crunching on the ice from the drink he brought from his restaurant. “Unless your hands are giant,” he said, pausing to check and confirm that my hands are nothing to take notice of, “these things suck.”

It’s true, my tongs suck. I was hoping for a different style of pointer — maybe how to season a steak or a trick to know when it’s medium rare — but tongs (tongs!) are what Jeff Ford wants to rake me over the coals on. I kind of hated my tongs anyway, because they were a gift from the guy who was at one point going to be my brother-in-law, but now is very much a stranger to my wife’s sister.

“Tongs,” I state while making a show of writing a note in my notebook. “Consider them trashed, Jeff.”

I’m telling you here about tongs because here is what I learned about grilling the perfect steak in one’s own backyard from the two best chefs in my town: It’s your backyard. It’s your grill. It’s your Sunday afternoon, and it’s your family gathered around the table waiting for you to bring the sirloins inside. Your mother is not going to upload a middling Yelp review if you give her medium well instead of medium. In the two hours Jeff Ford and Kris Kraut spent at my house, this is what I learned. If you want to make food from a formula, you better start baking. Cooking is done from the heart. So those tongs that were tough for me to handle but looked so darn classic with their over-sized wood features? They should have been in the trash sooner. They didn’t bring my hands joy; they were just what I thought grilling tongs should look like.

That said, one of the greatest joys in my life has come from eating food produced by talented people like Kris and Jeff. And, thanks to them, I feel like I can grill a better steak than I could a month ago. Summer is slipping away. Here are nine tips from Jeff Ford of J. Ford’s Black Angus and Kris Kraut of The Butler’s Pantry to help you make the most of the remaining grilling season with better steak.

1. Get scientific

“Kris is making you a science steak,” Jeff grumbled as Kris Kraut took my stock pot out of my cabinet and placed it in my sink. Kris, in the preparations for the day, had been the most specific about his shopping list. He asked me to buy one well-marbled dry-aged ribeye, an inch-and-a-half thick. He wanted it at room temperature when he arrived.

At first, I thought Kris was being a bit silly. But now, as he was preparing a makeshift sous vide setup in my kitchen, I understood why he wanted what he wanted.

Sous vide is one of the latest in the long line of food fads that I had dismissed as too expensive or fussy for my tastes. Sous vide setups can cost nearly $1,000, for which I’m far too cheap. Here’s how it works: If you can slowly cook meat in water and bring it up to medium rare, then you can be guaranteed an evenly cooked piece of meat in which the connective tissue has slowly been broken down. Sous vide steaks are tender and perfectly cooked. And I could have been doing it all along.

Here’s how: Grab a digital thermometer and heat water on the stove until it’s 140 degrees. Pour the water into a cooler — even a cheap one like mine. Then, take your steak and put it in a heavy-duty plastic baggie with some olive oil. In 45 minutes or so, you’ll have a medium-rare steak ready to put on the grill for a minute or so each side, to get that brown crust. Think about it—the sides you make for a steak dinner will take 45 minutes of preparation. Sous vide a steak and make the veggies while you wait. By my count, a cooler, some baggies and a digital thermometer could cost you as little as $20.

2. Or don’t

Kris used sous vide because he doesn’t get to work with steak so often in his catering business. So, if he’s doing a big batch or working with a cut of steak he doesn’t usually get to work with, he prefers sous vide to control the quality. Jeff? He works with New York strips every day.

So, he got my grill really hot, threw a few on and grilled them for about 10 minutes total for medium rare.

3. Season simply

Both Jeff and Kris prepared their steaks for the grill in the same way: fresh ground black pepper and plenty of kosher salt. Put the steaks on a plate or pan and grind the pepper over them. Flip, and pepper the other side. Pour a bunch of kosher salt — favored by Jeff and Kris because it’s easier to feel in their hand to know how much they’re putting on — in your hand and sprinkle the salt on each side of the steak.

Be liberal: Steak is not a processed food with a lot of hidden sodium. This is not the kind of sodium that will make your cardiologist blush. Slap both sides of the steak a couple of times to make sure the stuff sticks.

4. Or, get fancy

Kris is a caterer, and so he couldn’t resist making a fresh chimichurri sauce.

As Kris got the water going for the sous vide, Jeff served as sous chef (sorry, Jeff, but you did. Verbatim: “Do you need some herbs pulled for your fancy sauce?”), tearing fresh cilantro leaves from the stem.

Chop up some cilantro, corn, red onion, jalapeno and garlic and add lime juice, and you’ll look like you know what you’re doing.

5. Don’t play with your food

A lot of grilling think pieces will tell you to flip your steak only once, to retain the natural juices (see tip No. 6, next).

Both Kris and Jeff think that’s overkill, but the idea is right. You’ve chosen to grill the steak because it’s a fast way to cook it. Keep it on the flames.

If you need to fidget, sip on a beer. After you pull the steak from the grill, let it rest longer than you think it should. It’ll still be warm. Heat up the plate in the oven if you’re worried.

6. Forget juicy

Every grilling tip article I’ve ever read has been obsessed with the “j” word. Kris and Jeff don’t buy it. “Juicy is really a chicken word,” Jeff says. Kris agrees: “The stuff that spills out of your steak isn’t juice as much as it is water.” Counterintuitively, both agreed that you don’t actually want moisture in a good steak; what you’re looking for is tenderness. Tenderness — and more on dry-aging in a bit — actually comes from the absence of moisture. So anything that tells you how to get the juiciest steak? Jeff and Kris think you can ignore it.

7. Know your butcher

This is the most important part of grilling a good steak: the meat itself. Both Jeff and Kris recommend splurging for a cut-to-order steak — they have ribeye and strips — from  the dry-aged cabinet at Baesler’s. Dry aging allows bacteria to break down the toughness of the steak and it pulls water out — making the meat more tender. Jeff actually made me smell the raw meat — one normal strip, one dry-aged — and the dry-aged had a nutty, concentrated smell.

It’s just more flavorful.

Beyond choosing dry-aged, Jeff always recommends that you get a custom-trimmed steak from the butcher themselves. “The butchers around town are going to kill me for saying it,” he says, “but it’s the game they invented.” You’re going to pay $15.99 per pound or whatever the price no matter if the steak is backstrapping or center cut. So, try to get the best steak possible for the weight. Jeff recommends making sure that you’re not getting a vein steak — where the major vein of the loin is a part of the steak — and removing the backstrapping. You’re looking for a steak that you can eat end-to-end, so no white around any of the edges. (Not all butchers will do this for you for free — they might weigh the stuff they cut off and include it in your price.)

8. Invest in some simple tools

Beyond simple, comfortable tongs, you want to get a couple of things to make your life easier. Get a good knife, because you’ll need to clean up your steak before you grill it. Because medium rare is the paragon of tenderness, and because every gimmick to know when a steak is medium rare is just that, you’ll want a digital thermometer to know when you’re at 140 degrees.

9. Know your grill

A grill is essentially a convection system in which hot air is constantly circulating around your food. That makes it easy to overcook steak with the lid on, so while you can get the grill hot with the lid closed, leave the lid open. Your mileage might vary though — if you know your grill is a bit weaker, you might need the lid open. Every grill has a hot spot and a cold spot, know where those are to cycle the steaks through. Don’t freak out over flames — keep your grates clean to avoid them in the first place, but you can move your steaks a bit between those hot and cool spots to dance around the flames.

After my crash course on grilling, Kris, Jeff and I were sitting around my kitchen table, eating expertly grilled red meat at 11 in the morning. My dog, Bruce, nudged Jeff again, asking for another handout. In that moment, I felt joy.

I didn’t get a silver bullet from Kris or Jeff about how to up my grill game to expert — just a set of rules to confirm that I was doing a good job, but I probably needed to invest in better meat. The most important tip wasn’t to build an elaborate foil tent for the meat to rest in or to gently massage obscure spices into the meat exactly 40 minutes before it hit the grill. The most important thing, according to the two men who have cooked me some of the best food I’ve ever eaten, is to keep things simple and to find joy in cooking food for the people you love. And, perhaps more importantly, to throw away the bulky tongs given to you by your sister-in-law’s ex.