Cauliflower is one of my favourite vegetables, to cook and to eat. It’s incredibly versatile, takes on other flavours really well, and has a deliciously savoury, nutty, flavour when browned nicely. There is a reason that lots of steak houses offer cauliflower steak as a vegetarian option. It sears well, tastes great, and works so well with classic steak sauces (or even just butter/oil).
Lamb shoulder is another underrated cut of meat that I highly recommend adding to your BBQ rotation. Sure, lamb is often quite expensive compared to other meats, but its flavour is really something else and works so well on the BBQ. Lamb shoulder is also generally on the cheaper end of the various cuts of lamb on account of it being a fairly tough and usually fatty piece of meat.
Cheeks always seem to be a great muscle, I probably said in my beef-cheek recipes that beef cheeks are one of my favourite cuts to cook, and pork cheeks are also a great option on the BBQ. They can be a little harder to get hold of (I haven’t seen them anywhere other than butchers) but they are super easy, really delicious and pretty quick.
Given cooking is essentially one big, creative, science experiment, I figured it about time to get in to some details about the science of cooking, heat and the different techniques we use for cooking. Lots of this has been mentioned in passing elsewhere (such as when I wrote about humidity in cooking, we went through some science about braising, and when I wrote about bullet smokers we touched on convection), so this is going to be a run down across these topics.
Ok, so I have a confession. Of all the random kitchen tools and gadgets I have (BBQs, pizza ovens, sous vide, fryers etc) the items I have most enjoyed receiving, and look forward to the most, have been one of two categories: Saucepans or knives.
(dirty cooked salt-marsh lamb, on a bed of minted broccoli and pea puree served with crushed garlic baby gem potatoes)
Brisket is one of the most iconic BBQ cooks you can do. For those on the circuit, brisket is the Mt Everest of cooks - traditionally one of the longest cooks in terms of time, and with the different muscles, one of the trickiest. Just like Everest, brisket has claimed more than a few casualties when it comes to attempted cooks. And I can tell you, there are few things more disappointing then spending your hard earned cash as well as giving up large amounts of your time to have a disappointing centre piece of your meal.
If you have already read my write-up on how to low-and-slow smoke beef short ribs, then this may well all sound very familiar to you. The good news is this is not just down to lazy writing, but rather that the two cuts have an awful lot in common!
I hadn’t really made much tomato ketchup before. I have made countless BBQ sauces, but usually relying on shop bought ketchup for the base (for those BBQ sauces that rely on a tomato ketchup base, anyway). However, this summer has bought a bumper crop of tomatoes from my dad’s greenhouse so I found myself with a kilo of fresh tomatoes in the fridge and thought I’d give it a try. This recipe started out with the intentions of being a ketchup, you see. It ended up being closer to a tomato-BBQ sauce hybrid, but it still works well. Maybe it could still be considered a smokey-tomato ketchup, whatever you call it, it has certainly gone down very well as a condiment.