What do you think of when we mention the word ‘barbecue’? If you’re British, there’s a good chance you think about sausages and chicken breasts searing on an open-topped grill – but in reality, barbecue is so much more than that. The discovery that food could be cooked over fire remains a defining moment for our species, and barbecue today harks back to that primal art. In that sense, it is a representation of the origins of humanity.
Look around the world and you’ll see that ancient barbecue techniques are still a part of daily life for many cultures. In the USA, pitmasters smoke pork shoulder and beef brisket long and slow over gentle wood fires. Street food stalls across Thailand, Japan, China and the rest of Asia employ a similar tactic to the UK, cooking skewers of glazed meat over raging hot coals. South American cooks build huge bonfires and cook whole animals parilla style, moving them in and out of the fire on huge iron frames.
Second perhaps to the discovery of fire itself was the discovery that heat from a fire could be stored in other materials. A fire can be maintained perpetually with enough fuel, but the ability to retain heat opened the door to a revolution in cooking. In Egypt, they built masonry ovens out of bricks. In Mexico and Pacific Islands like Samoa and Fiji, they used superheated rocks to cook food in underground earth ovens. In ancient China some 3,000 years ago, they discovered that baked clay was an incredibly effective way to retain heat. They sculpted ceramic ovens, which became common all across Asia in the coming years – particularly in India where they evolved to become tandoors, and in Japan where they came to be called kamados, or mushikamados, and were used to steam rice.
At the end of the Second World War, lots of American troops returning home from Japan brought kamados with them as souvenirs, introducing the ceramic oven to American barbecue culture for the first time. The original Japanese kamados were versatile, but they were also prone to cracking under high temperatures. Most wrote off ceramic barbecues as fatally flawed, but two barbecue fanatics saw a diamond in the rough. Bobby Brennan and Kerry Coker saw incredible potential in the heat-retentive qualities of the kamado, but they found themselves repeatedly frustrated by its shortcomings. Undeterred, they resolved to bring kamado design into the twenty-first century, taking the best qualities of those ceramic ovens and combining them with precision engineering and modern technology to create the best ceramic cooker in the world.
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Kamado Joe: barbecue done right