Master your outdoor kitchen as the weather warms up with Alex Rushmer's guide to raising your barbecue game

The fuzz of happy potential hangs in the air at this time of year. There is a full summer ahead of us and if the Met Office is to be believed, it’s destined to be a good one. Appetites are always different when doors and windows can be left open, and become even more altered when the kitchen ceases to be the central focus of either culinary output or meal times. Whilst I love spending time at the stove, for me the real excitement comes when the weather allows your garden to become an understudy kitchen for at least a few weeks – and hopefully a lot longer.

Cooking outside presents unique opportunities. There is something elemental about the lick of flame and the smokiness of wood and charcoal. It is real cooking with nowhere to hide – harsh and unforgiving – but it also yields flavours beyond anything achievable indoors.

It connects us with our ancestors, who didn’t have the luxury of thermostatically controlled ovens or adjustable induction hobs. They had to learn how to harness the raw power of flame in order to transform their ingredients into food. The whack of smoke, the unmistakable flavour of flame-charred meat or fish or vegetables – for me, these really do represent the tastes of summer.

My early experiments involved the overly optimistic use of garage forecourt disposable barbecues. The paper-thin foil containers held enough chemically-enhanced charcoal to char a packet of sausages at best, and anything more adventurous involved careful use of the oven as backup and a short visit to the coals for appearance’s sake only.

Now, there are many more ways to become a master of the outdoor kitchen that go far beyond the pathetic efforts of the past. Recent years have seen significant developments when it comes to barbecues and other outside cooking facilities, which makes it far more realistic to transform your patio or garden into an area that will rival your own kitchen.

"A pizza oven is another way of turning your outdoors into a culinary playground"

Heavy-duty ceramic barbecues such as the legendary Big Green Egg enable you to carefully control the temperature of your al fresco cooking facilities, giving a degree of versatility that rivals any oven. A chunky T-bone steak can be grilled to perfection in just a few minutes over raging hot coals or a whole chicken can be slow-cooked to deliciousness over an hour or so. Adding wood chips gives gloriously different and smoky notes and the whole thing can be transformed into a slow cooker to render a hunk of pork shoulder or beef brisket to a mass of pulled perfection overnight.

A pizza oven is another way of turning your outdoors into a culinary playground. For those who don’t have the patience, budget or engineering nous to build one for yourself, Uuni have built an ingenious stainless steel alternative that runs on wood pellets and can be up to temperature and ready to cook in under ten minutes. The furnace-like oven cooks at a ferocious 300-350° and will cook a pizza in around two and a half minutes. What’s more, you can now add a stone base to it for that super-authentic Italian experience.

With so many options available, including the trusty old traditional charcoal-fired barbecue, there really is no excuse not to get out there and flex your culinary muscles in a whole new arena at every available opportunity.

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