NEW YORK - Consider the gas grill, the preferred appliance for six out of 10 Americans who grill.

Clean-burning and convenient, ever willing to belch blue flames at the touch of a button, it's ready for duty in the few minutes it takes to walk to the fridge and retrieve some steaks.

That is precisely why Al Roker, the sunny storm tracker on NBC's Today show, stopped using one.

"My feeling is that we rush so many things today, we don't take time to enjoy the simple pleasures of life," he writes in the introduction to Al Roker's Big Bad Book of Barbecue: 100 Easy Recipes for Backyard Barbecue and Grilling (Scribner, $27.95).

The new cookbook, written with syndicated food columnist Marialisa Calta, draws upon Roker's fervor for fire cooking and his travels to barbecue festivals around the country.

Roker champions charcoal grilling because it invites relaxation. Done right, it can't be hurried, allowing ample time for socializing with friends.

"Ribs are an all-day thing," explained Roker, 47, who prefers his "dry," with a seasoned rub and no sauce. "You put them on, you get in the pool, you hang out, you add a few more coals, you take a nap, you go back to check on them, you get another drink... "

Many of us will do just that tomorrow. The Fourth of July is the most popular day of the year for grilling, according to the Hearth, Patio and Barbecue Association, an Arlington, Va.-based trade group.

That is, unless we're among the impatient majority of pyrochefs who use gas.

"With gas, the taste isn't the same," chided Roker, who keeps three charcoal grills at his country home about two hours north of Manhattan, in Columbia County, N.Y., and one behind his brownstone on New York City's Upper East Side.

When Roker was growing up in the St. Albans section of Queens, N.Y., July Fourth meant rounding up immediate and extended family and setting off in a caravan of station wagons for one of New York's state parks.

"We'd get there early to get the barbecue grills closest to the parking lot," he said. "Back then, it wasn't unusual for families to have five, six kids. I'm the oldest of six. You could easily have 25 or 30 people, and all these kids running around."

Roker's mother, Isabel, "would be there with a stopwatch to time how long the potato salad had been out," he joked, referring to her obsession with food safety.

Noticeably thinner, which he attributes to diet and exercise, Roker plans to cook plenty of fish this summer. But he says he won't deny himself pulled pork, potato salad, blue cheese crumbled over ripe beefsteak tomatoes, or his favorite cut of beef, well-marbled Delmonico steak.

"You can eat anything. It's just how much do you eat," he said. "I'm eating less and exercising more. Instead of eating the whole hog, I just eat an ear's worth."

He also cooks to please his family. Wife Deborah Roberts, a correspondent for ABC's 20/20, who is due to deliver a son in mid-July, usually requests chicken, fish or shrimp. Their 3-year-old daughter, Leila, asks for marshmallows. Fifteen-year-old Courtney, Roker's daughter from a previous marriage, follows a largely vegetarian diet.

Roker's attachment to charcoal is rooted in the memory of watching his late father, Al Roker Sr., unwind from his job as a city bus driver by presiding over a simple saucer-shaped grill outside their home. Plenty of hot dogs and hamburgers were dispatched.

"When it came to the manly art of fire building, Dad's theory was that if a little charcoal lighter fluid was good, then a lot was great," Roker writes in his book. "When the briquettes were soaked to his satisfaction, Dad would back up about 20 feet, toss a lighted match in the general direction of the grill, and WHOOOOOOMPPP!!!! A fireball visible to the Apollo astronauts would rise from our backyard."

On a recent weekday afternoon, Roker showed considerably more restraint as he touched a match to a shard of torn paper bag to ignite a neat pyramid of briquettes piled in a kettle-style Weber grill.

Twenty minutes later, when the briquettes had acquired a silvery patina of ash, he picked up his tongs and slapped down a formidable pair of porterhouse steaks - $65 worth of prime beef, just under 2 inches thick and weighing in at nearly 4 pounds.

The steaks received no enhancement other than a quick rubdown with Colavita extra-virgin olive oil, a sprinkling of coarse French sea salt, and a generous grinding of black, white and pink peppercorns.

"I don't like to use briquettes because they have a petroleum smell, but hardwood charcoal is hard to find in the city," Roker said, his tone apologetic.

Then, another confession: Before his recent move to the brownstone, which gave him more open space for grilling, he had been using a gas grill so his neighbors wouldn't complain about excessive smoke. That grill, now shunted off to one side, will soon be donated to charity.

Roberts lets her husband handle not only the grilling, but all the day-to-day cooking as well. He arrives home from work much earlier than she does, usually by 3:30 p.m. With takeout and dining-out meals factored in, Roker estimates that he makes dinner five nights a week.

"He just enjoys it so much," Roberts said, "and he's also a control freak. If I'm cooking, he's telling me, 'Why are you doing it like that?' or 'You're not tearing that lettuce just right.'

"So I say, 'Oh, honey, just you do it.' "