One of my favourite styles, or rather
techniques I use in my cooking is barbeque.
Barbeque is one of the most popular
cooking styles globally and is preferred for many reasons, and I think the main
one is the opportunity to be outdoors surrounded by friends sipping cool
beverages, while cooking yummy smoked foods live, or at least that’s what it
should be. For me, barbeque is hours of prep work, marinating, skewering,
dressing and the cooking of meats and vegetables over hot smouldering charcoal,
all the while sweating and coughing out smoke. The end result is worth all the
blisters, singed hair and burnt clothes and I love it.
If you enjoyed reading this article, you can help support our journalism by adding OHeraldo as a preferred source.
Barbeque as I can imagine first started
with the discovery of fire and the subsequent discovery that the application of
said fire to meat, which was normally eaten raw by early man, actually made the
meat much more palatable. The earliest known usage of the word though, comes
from the Caribbean and as usual, taken by the Spaniards to the rest of the
world.
From barbeque, came other methods and
techniques that allowed for different cooking times, flavours and textures.
Each country has its own variations and names and much like everything else
including the English language, means something somewhere and the opposite
elsewhere, totally confusing most people. What is barbequing in England is
grilling in the US, cooking on a direct flame at high heat, and grilling in the
UK is called broiling in the US, cooking under a source of high heat. Then
there are two types of smoking; one is a dry cold smoke and the other a hot
smoke. The difference being, the formers imparts flavor and the latter does
some amount of cooking in the process. There are so many good foods that are
just elevated into greatness just by the infusion of smoke, like salmon,
oysters, chicken, ham and even cheeses and bacon.
Cooking on a barbeque is delicious yet
tricky, as the temperatures are so important. Too high and the meat will char
on the outside and remain uncooked inside, too low and you will have dried out
meat for dinner when it was meant for lunch. With my years of experience, my
simple method is hold your hand a foot from the top of the barbeque, if I can’t
hold it there for a few seconds then it’s too hot, if I can hold it for about 5
seconds then it’s just right. The meats also should be cut in manageable sizes
so that it cooks well, more importantly, and also is easy to eat. There are
many secrets to great barbeque, but I can’t tell you because there are too many
readers to kill.
No matter if its called a Barbeque, a
Braai, a Barbie or a Churasco, meat tastes better on it. Barbeque ribs,
succulent chicken thighs, marbled steaks, pork chops and even vegetables taste
better on a barbeque because of that characteristic char, delicious
caramelisation and heavenly smoked flavour.
