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When people think of BBQing they visualise bearded men smoking meat in the Texan sunshine, tanned Aussies firing up their grills under a blue sky - they don’t often think of people in Scotland cooking outdoors year round in snow, hail, sideways rain and blustery gales; but that is what I do.
I fell in love with outdoor cooking at my first ever Grillstock Festival in Bristol back in 2013 - another rainy weekend funnily enough! It fired up my passion (excuse the pun) for good food cooked with fire and made me buy my first “proper” grill and smoker - I have never looked back. This is my story of becoming a BBQ enthusiast in Scotland.
When I first bought my Weber gear (the 57cm Kettle grill and the Smokey Mountain) I cooked the usual suspects people start off with - grilling burgers, sausages and chicken; ribs and pulled pork on the smoker. I always enjoyed the food and wanted to cook more often than I managed, but I also needed to justify the money spent on the kit!
To help me forward plan my cooks, I picked one day a week where I would light up the BBQ, a day where other stuff shouldn’t get in the way. This worked quite well as it gave me a week to choose what to cook, source the ingredients and do any preparation work in advance. Over time the number of days I was cooking increased as I got into a better routine.
I went through a bit of a loop cooking the traditional American recipes which friends and family always enjoyed but after a while my wife was getting a bit tired of “big lumps of meat for dinner” and the freezer was always full to the brim with leftovers waiting to be rehashed.
What to cook next though? The biggest thing that helped me was to go through my cookbooks and make a list of everything I wanted to cook from each book (I may have a problem here, my wife counted the other day and there were 153 books, oops!). I put this in a Google doc so I had access to it on all my devices but also so I could search for keywords or meat types/cuts (handy if you have something in the freezer you want to cook with as you can quickly go through the list).
The list was long and I slowly started going through it last year. I had a ball working on different cooking styles, unusual types of meat, less common cuts and playing with new bits of kit - I learnt so much from every cook. I was cooking with flames 3, 4 or 5 times a week at this point but I was starting to miss the flavours of the Indian, Asian, Mexican and Greek food that I enjoyed cooking indoors so much.
Someone once said to me (and I apologise as I can’t remember who!) “everything you can cook in your kitchen you can cook outside”. Those words came back to me recently and I decided to adapt the recipes I normally cooked inside so I could cook them outside. Looking round the kitchen I discovered it was all possible: grilling (direct), roasting (indirect), toasting (direct), pan frying (plancha), deep frying (vortex), slow cooking (smoker), boiling (pan on the grill) and stir frying (wok on the grill). It was time to update the cook list; but this time by going through all my other cook books that weren’t traditional BBQ recipes.
This year I have been working through that list and I have really enjoyed cooking all the dishes so far. Every day is a school day, not just learning how to cook the meals but also discovering different ingredients used, new flavour combinations, preparation techniques as well as how to use new equipment. Have a look on my blog (kungfubbq.co.uk) and you can see the journey I have been on, hopefully you will see some dishes you fancy cooking too! Tag me if you do:
Twitter: @kungfubbq
Instagram: @kungfubbq_
Kung Fu BBQ
Every Issue of UK BBQ Mag we look to get word out on anyone we think is doing awesome things with their outdoor cooking, then shining stars of the UK BBQ Scene. Those BBQ'ers who push boundaries and are inspiring many others with the food they cook. This Issue we have Nathan King from KungFu BBQ talking about BBQ Inspiration.