Let’s be honest: when it comes to barbecues, we suck. In principle it all sounds so wonderful. When you receive that last-minute invitation to dine outdoors on grilled flesh stuffed into soft floury buns, cool beers and crisp salads on the side, convivial conversation late into the night, bellies, bodies and souls warmed by food, embers and friends, the promise is just so, well, promising.
The reality though is often a crushing disappointment: dried-out steaks, blackened sausages, sun-kissed salads and burgers of dubious origin, forced down by cans of warm Fosters. In these situations your best friends come in bottles labelled Heinz and the telltale ‘click-click-click’ of the sparker on the barbecue, signalling the emptying of the gas bottle, is a welcome sound.
Compare this with the finesse surrounding the cooking over coals in other nations and our rank amateurism begins to come into even sharper focus. If you were to show one of these guys the tragic sight of one of our ‘disposable barbecues’, they would snicker loudly and presume that it was merely a firelighter for something far more appropriate and actually designed for cooking meats. Properly.
The key to all this is time. Blessed with the vagaries of the weather during British Summer Time we can’t risk planning a barbecue, let alone expending considerable monies on a proper pit, charcoal, wood, meat and the necessary liquid sustenance to power us through a six-hour cooking marathon. The weather could turn at any moment, so quick, light up the highly flammable coals in that crappy little foil tray, wait four minutes for the flames to subside then grab the Wall’s sausages from the fridge and get them cooked before the rain starts and we have to grab the golfing umbrellas.
So how can we up our Q game without risking having to finish it all off in the oven, eating huddled around the kitchen table? The short answer is that we can’t. So instead I suggest we accept that we simply have to be willing to play the odds and have a punt. Shun the sausages and buy a brisket, ditch the disposable and purchase a proper pit, get settled in and make a day of it. Then, and only then, can we be ready to take on the US masters. Oh, and make sure you buy some decent beers whilst you’re at it.
