It’s been good and hot of late, you might have noticed, which is nice, right?
Those of you with the affliction will have been opening up the barbecues. And quite right too. But what do you grill? What’s your go-to? I’m drawn to a barbecue toolkit drawn quite randomly from across the grilling world. However, I would love to have a sense of a more local, British barbecue identity to tap into.
Tell a Cypriot, a Jamaican, a Morrocan, an Italian, someone from Portugal or a group in Brazil, that there is a hot grill outside and you’d love some lunch, and they will instinctively reach for the things they cook with, they’ve always cooked with, their parents and grandparents, and perhaps even some coves before them cooked with over fire. These things constitute their local barbecue toolkit. As a Brit, I don’t feel I have such a thing.
So, with my tongue pressed firmly in my cheek, I would like to have a stab at arriving at something akin to a British barbecue identity.
Here’s a note on my logic:
As a nation, we Brits are pretty woeful outdoor cooks.
As a nation, we Brits have a history of being magpies when it comes to stealing nice little bits from other cultures and their cuisine.
As a nation, we hardly have our own identity or style when it comes to barbecuing (aside from being widely derided for our ineptitude.)
As a nation, we have the tools to have our own barbecue identity, we just need to give it some thought.
An important side note: This is not a gag-filled diatribe on barbecue tropes, be they British or otherwise, nor is this a love letter to grilling, a paean to a particular bbq style, culture, or tribe. This is a well-meaning (put perhaps, ultimately, ill-advised) stab at creating a British barbecue identity.
You might have noticed that barbequing, grilling, live-fire cooking, or any other combination of words suggesting preparing food over an open flame, has become big business in the UK, and that is in spite of everything said above.
No longer does a rusting Webber and a bag of petrol station charcoal make you someone who is good on a grill. Big Has, Elliot Cunningham, Tomos Parry, Mark the Log Man and Meatopia, David Carter, Ben Quinn, Helen Graves and her new book Live Fire, the team at Cue Point, et al, have all hitched their personal narrative (be it place, technique, style, or a mash-up of all three) to the back of the trend, and are riding it hard. And thank the lord they are, they’ve thrown up some of the best food cooked over open fire that you’ll ever likely sample, and we can all learn a lot from them, that is for sure.
My grilling history is pitiful. Growing up we had a long series of two-season Webbers (i.e. they were purchased, used sparingly, left to rust behind the shed, got pulled out for a second summer, were given the same treatment for a second winter, thus designating them irredeemably rusted, bent and broken for the next year; thus the circle repeated;) before moving onto a suburban gas-powered grill after the turn of the millennium. On these grills, we burnt a lot of sausages and chicken drumsticks, before settling into a tried and tested foil-wrapped lamb leg that would while away under the closed lid of the gas barbecue and be a genuine treat, albeit one that may as well have been cooked in the oven inside for the lack of any discernable flavour imparted by a gas barbecue. As an adult, aside from impromptu grills by the sea, or whilst on holiday, I have been shamefully (and sometimes deliberately) avoidant in bothering with barbecuing at home.
A gentle browse of the regional barbecue variations page on Wikipedia throws up a quite deadpan description of British barbequing as “a popular al fresco cooking and eating style in both the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. Many homes have a barbecue, usually located in the back garden.” That’s about as much as the world's largest community-sourced encyclopedia could muster for our barbecue culture. It is fair to say the listings for the rest of the world are a little more dynamic and tempting.
Anyone who has ever watched a Netflix food show, follows any of the names above on social media, or has eaten in a restaurant in the last few years that is striving to have a finger on the pulse, will know that Turkey, the Middle East, South Africa, America, the Caribean, all of Asia, much of Southern Europe, all of South America, Australia and New Zealand, and most places in between, all have discernable barbecue based-techniques, styles, flavours and dishes that have travelled the world to arrive in our Sunday supplements, in our cookbooks, on our plates, in our social media, on our televisions. And it is a joy. Wouldn’t it be nice though to have something to send back the other way? A definitive and exportable British summer grill culture.
Reading the Wikipedia entry for British barbecuing again, I’m struck that the phrase “Many homes have a barbecue, usually located in the back garden”, is about as damning a piece of information as someone could wish to include. So little is there to say about our culture of grilling that noting the location of the majority of our grills constitutes a piece of Wikipedia-worthy information. They may as well have concluded by saying, “so little used is the BBQ in the UK, many families have adopted a once-a-year ritual of scrapping the charred remains of supermarket sausage from the bars before attempting to scrub the rust from the barbecue’s bars in a pitifully small suburban sink.”
So here is my plan. I will learn (read borrow,) from cultures where grilling is excellent, and then I will apply what I’ve learned to our limited grilling cannon and see if I can’t conjure up a starting point for some barbecue dishes that are inexorably British, and of which we can be rightly proud.
Like a good boy scout, I decide to start at the beginning; the grill itself. Until recently it seemed the choice was between a Webber, a Drumbecue, or Big Green Egg. And they are all wonderful bits of kit. My issue is that they force one’s hand, by their very nature they designate the barbecue as something that can only be wheeled out for a crowd. It’s a palaver stoking up your fire on those things; plenty of waiting and wafting and tending and blowing into a smoking stack of hot coals. We all panic, we all start over coals too hot and finish over coals too cold. It’s hard to muster the spirit to fire the thing up unless for a notable occasion. I think we need something simpler. I want to feel happy barbecuing for the two of us on a weeknight, I want to be able to grill outside for a weekday lunch, I want to be able to cook and graze slowly, preparing little morsels and treats for a crowd who arrive in dribs and drabs. I want to be able to do all of this from one grill.
Contemplating this, I found myself in TK Maxx during the week staring down the barrel of a £10 barbecue box of infantile simplicity. It was little different to the diminutive style of stainless steel Turkish barbecues or clay and wood Japanese Hibachi. This little box BBQ was suggestive though, had the look of a thing that would enable me to quickly get grilling whenever I wanted; deciding to purchase it led me to my second revelation.
Skewers. Be it yakitori, kabob, tandoor, shish, satay, inihaw, souvlaki, or brochette, almost all barbecue cultures have legions of skewer-based preparations for the grill. This little box would perfectly hold eight to ten skewers of bits and pieces over the fire; and unlike a big barbecue, it would hold them relatively close to the coals, allowing for drips and drops of fat which will, in turn, kick up smoke, which will, in turn, make my grilling treats delicious. It is the knack of all ocakbasi, and is why the meat and fish from a good Turkish grill are hard to beat.
Armed with my £10 barbecue and a bag of bamboo skewers (ideally I would have found some metal skewers, but my nearest Turkish supermarket has been absolutely plundered in the good weather, so bamboo it was,) all I needed was to decide on what I would be skewering, what I would be marinading or glazing it with, and what might accompany my bounty to round out my identifiably British barbecue toolkit.
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