6 Thursday May 26 2022 | the times
the table
What’s a quick, tasty thing to cook?
For Williams it’s a beef sausage, which
you can find at most good butchers.
“At home we call these boerewors.
It’s quick on the barbecue and already
has the spices mixed in. You can cook
it slightly pink because it’s beef, so it’s
very juicy.”Brioche baps are boring. What
bread can I use instead?
Swap your baps for flatbreads. “I’ve
been watching the Turkish restaurants
close to where I live and have been
copying them at home,” says the chef
Andrew Clarke. “Buy plain flatbreads,
char them quickly for a few seconds
on each side, then lay them on top of
your meat as it cooks for five minutes.
They call it meat bread and it’s smoky
and delicious.”Help! I have a vegan coming to
my barbecue.
Fear not, says Henry Firth, one half
of the duo who wrote the bestselling
vegan cookbook BOSH!, who “loves a
barbecue session”. “Think of meat-free
burgers and sausages from companies
like Beyond and Heura in the same
way as you do meat. They can be
rubbed with spice mixes and herbs
too,” he says.
If you don’t want to buy those,
make vegan barbecue ribs by mixing
jackfruit with flour, paprika and salt,
soy sauce and oil, kneading it into aHot stuff! Barbecues, all you need
Still making rookie
grilling errors?
The top chefs who
cook with fire are
on hand to help.
By Hannah Evans
Is buying an expensive barbecue
worth the money?
In a word, no, says Patrick Williams,
a chef at the South African restaurant
Kudu Grill in south London, which
he runs with his wife, the restaurateur
Amy Corbin. “There is no need for
a barbecue with a fancy smoke lid or
extra bits of equipment. It’s meant to
be a simple grill over charcoal or
wood that you cook on.”
So what are you looking for?
Williams recommends a circular
Weber kettle barbecue, which costs
just under £90. “It’s plain and simple,
and barbecuing is a plain and simple
technique. The main thing is that you
want a grill big enough for you to
have one side that’s hotter for your
red meats and one side that’s a bit
more controlled for cooking things
slower and lower.”
Cooking right over the hot embers
to, say, sear meat or add colour to
vegetables is often described as using
direct heat; cooking in the cooler
parts of the barbecue, away from the
hot embers, is using indirect heat.
Wood, charcoal or gas?
This is a trick question, because
most chefs I’ve spoken to use a
charcoal-wood hybrid at home; one
brick-sized piece of wood nestled in
half a small bag (about 2.5kg) of
charcoal. “You want a nice heavy log
with not much moisture content, like
oak or cherry wood,” Williams says.
“Charcoal has no flavour, it only lets
off heat. Wood gives your meat a
strong smoky flavour.” Once the
charcoal is lit and burning, add the
wood and wait for the embers to glow,
then add your meat.
Should my air vent be open or shut?
Air vents are for temperature control.
When your grill is heating up you
want it open to create good air flow
and help to get it going.
Are firelighters a no-no?
No, but stay away from the paraffin.
Buy firelighters made from natural
materials such as sawdust, that are
coated in wax. You don’t want to add
extra carcinogens to your fuel.
Does it matter if I buy cheap meat?
I hate to break it to you, but yes it
does. “You’ve got to start with a
good-quality product if you want
something that tastes good,”
Williams says. If you are looking for
more-affordable cuts of meat, buy
pork chops. “These are versatile and
you can rub one in anything and it’ll
take on the flavour.” He recommends
slathering it in monkey gland sauce —
a South African barbecue-style sauce
— and putting it on the grill. “Those
sugars in the fire will caramelise and
go all sticky.” Speaking of which...What’s a marinade that makes
everything taste good?
“Mix together a good pinch of smoked
paprika, cumin and coriander, a
squeeze of lemon juice if it’s for
chicken, a good amount of olive oil or
rapeseed oil, and some apricot jam,”
Williams says. “It sounds weird, but it
tastes incredible.”What’s the difference between a
marinade and a rub?
In short, a marinade is wet and a rub
is dry. You coat your meat in a
marinade and leave it to add flavour
before putting it on the grill —
generally speaking, the longer you
leave it the more intense the flavour
becomes. A rub is a mix of salts, spices
or herbs that you pack on to meat or
veg before putting it on the grill.What can I cook instead of
vegetable skewers?
Introducing Williams’s go-to grilled
cabbage. Cut a cabbage in half and
season it with a simple rub — oil, a
good amount of salt and pepper,
coriander and a small pinch of cumin
— and lay it face down over the low
embers. Wait until you get a good
char on it, then flip it over.
At this point move your cooked
meat — steak, chicken, chops — and
put it on the flat side. Let the smoky
juices and fat seep into the leaves.
Serve with a good squeeze of lemon.Should I use a throwaway barbecue?
Never! “I wouldn’t use one,” says Neil
Campbell, the head chef at Rovi,
Yotam Ottolenghi’s central London
restaurant, where the cooking centres
on the kitchen’s huge wood-fired grill.
“They’re not great for the
environment and you can’t actually
do much good grilling on them.”
If throwaway is all you have, think
of it like a flash barbecue for reheating.
“Whatever you put on there is already
cooked. You’re just giving it that heavy
oomph and giving it a bit of colour.”What utensils do you really need?
Forget about fancy tools, griddles and
grates. “All you need is a good-quality
pair of metal tongs to move around
your meat, and a temperature probe soyou can tell when it’s cooked,”
Campbell says. “Don’t get any of
those tongs with plastic heatproof
ends. I can promise you they’ll fall off.”Help! My meat is stuck to the grill.
“Leave it! Don’t fiddle with it,” says
the chef and cookery writer Josh Katz.
The big, bold-flavoured dishes at his
three Middle Eastern-inspired
restaurants in London — Berber & Q,
Shawarma Bar and Carmel — are
cooked over the grill. “If you find that
your meat is sticking it’s because your
barbecue isn’t hot enough yet, so you
need to wait for it to heat up. The flesh
of what you’ve got on it will eventually
crisp up enough and loosen off the
griddle. That’s when you should be
turning it.”What’s the recipe for delicious
chicken on a barbecue?
Cooking chicken calls for those
all-important heat zones. “I’d sear it
hard and fast to begin with so the
skin is nice and charred, then I would
move it away from the heat source
and put the lid down, so the barbecue
acts like an oven,” Katz explains.
For Williams, it’s thighs over breasts.
“Breasts are a lean cut, and so you’re
more likely to dry them out. There’s a
good enough amount of fat on thighs
in the meat and the skin, so there’s
moisture, which means juicy chicken.”To turn or not to turn: that is
the question...
This is one of the great grill debates:
do you flip your meat just once,
halfway through cooking, or do you
flip and flip until it’s ready?
“I’m a flip-flopper,” Katz says. “If it’s
a nice piece of steak I want to get char
marks all over it.”Can you cheat and finish dishes
in the oven?
Yes, you can! Searing meat on the
barbecue then taking it inside locks
in that smoky flavour and saves time.
It’s a good shortcut for big, boneless
joints, such as a leg of lamb.
“You can cook these indirectly but
it takes a long time and you need to
make sure the barbecue stays
consistently hot,” Katz says. “Instead,
sear on the grill for 12 minutes until it
has those grill marks all over it, then
transfer to the oven (about 180C/gas 4)
and roast.”If your
meat is
sticking,
your
barbecue
isn’t hot
enough