It's National Barbecue Week, the perfect time to pass on inspiration and a few top tips and techniques to liven up the grill experience beyond sausages and burgers. Smoke some fish, make your own marinated lamb kebabs or even make desserts in foil parcels. Your barbecue is hugely versatile, so fire it up and get cooking.
Marinating
Marinating – it’s the perfect way to add flavour and also makes the meat tender. Marinate it as long as you can for best results.
As a general rule don't add salt to your marinade! It will draw all the moisture out of your meat and it will end up dry.
Also, if your marinade contains sugar – don’t put the meat over a high temperature otherwise the sugar will burn too quickly.
Most meats benefit from marinating. The easiest way to do it is in a large, re-useable freezer bag. Put the empty, open bag into a bowl so that you can fold back the opening of the bag around the rim of the bowl. This holds the bag steady and open for you while you put your marinade ingredients in, then your meat.
Seal the bag, squish it all around to coat the meat. Then pop it into the cool box.
Try cubes of lamb steak with garlic, lemon and coriander or cubes of pork steak with soy and ginger and oil.
Foil Parcels
This is a nifty way to make a meal. I’ve cooked lots of things in a foil parcel. The trick is to make sure you have got a least a double layer of foil, even better place three large rectangles of foil on top of each other. Put your ingredients such as fish in wine or prawns in curry paste and yoghurt in and fold it over securely like a padded envelope, before putting on the grill.
Try Rhubarb Crumble: slice three sticks of ripe rhubarb into 1cm pieces. Put them in the middle of your foil rectangle, grate a little fresh ginger over the top if you have some, a teaspoon of brown sugar for every rhubarb stick used. Fold the foil as if you were making an envelope. Lengthways fold the left side completely over the mixture, then the right over that. Fold the shorter end edges over and over to seal it in. Let the parcel cook over a barbecue for about five minutes turning over once, then check to see if the rhubarb has cooked. When it has, open the package, fold the sides into a bowl shape, and sprinkle crushed ginger biscuits over the top of the rhubarb and serve with cream or yoghurt.
Hot cheese and cider dip - place a whole Camembert cheese in the middle of a triple layer of foil. Fold up the sides, dive a knife all over the top of the cheese and pour in some cider and add a twig of rosemary. Fold up the foil securely and put in on a low heat barbecue for about 15 minutes. Open it up when its gooey and scoop up the cheese with gorgeous bread.
Potato Dauphinoise; in your foil parcel layer thinly sliced potatoes, add some butter, a little cream, cheese and salt and pepper and lie it on the medium hot grill for 20 minutes turning once.
Smoking
Smoking food with your barbecue is both fun and tasty and really easy. You can buy a ‘smoking box’ from camp shops or online but you can just as easily make your own.
Use a small aluminium tray, of the kind you get takeaway food in. In a separate bowl soak a couple of handfuls of natural (untreated) wood chips in water for 30 minutes. It stops the chips burning too quickly. (You can buy smoking chips in garden centres and hardware stores). Then put the chips into the aluminium dish, cover the top with tin foil and make lots of holes across the top to allow the smoke to come out. Put the ‘box’ in between the elements of your gas barbecue or nestled in the charcoal. Heat your barbecue up with the lid on until you notice the lovely smoky smells coming out. Quickly open the lid and put your meat or fish on the grill and put the lid down. Cook it as normal allowing it to ‘soaks up the smoke’.
For more of Ali's fabulous recipes see the Eat local section of our online magazine.