A guide to different types of barbecue

Small tabletop grills like hibachi and konro are hugely popular in the Far East, where skewers like yakitori are cooked over searingly high heat. These are generally used to cook smaller items of food – the food is in extremely close proximity to the heat, and the high heat helps to crisp and char the edges without drying out the insides. Fans are often used to get a high airflow over the coals and really pump up the temperature, and specific charcoal is helpful too – Japanese Binchotan, for example, is a super high grade of lumpwood charcoal that is smokeless and offers long-lasting high heat. These grills are often made from heat-retentive material such as cast iron or diatomite clay to help maintain a stable temperature. As the food is cooked, it is often marinated or brushed with sweet-savoury sauces like teriyaki, which chars and caramelises in the heat.

The UK has been somewhat of a barbecue wasteland until very recently, but it wasn’t always that way – we used to be experts in cooking over open fire. Most of our cooking was indoors in front of huge hearths, on rotisseries and spits or using huge cast iron pots and pans. This style of hearth cooking is coming back into fashion now, but it still exists as a huge part of barbecue culture in much of Europe, South Africa and South America. The basic idea of direct fire cooking is to have a wood fire producing embers. These are placed underneath a cooking grate, which can be adjusted to move your food closer to, or further away from, the direct heat. In South America these barbecues are called parillas, while in South Africa they are known as braai, but they have different names all over the world. Some are open affairs, others have hoods, but they’re all born from this same basic premise. This also includes campfire-style cooking, where rocks form a container for the fire and grates are laid over the top. You can cook pretty much anything in this fashion, from quick little grilled items right up to slow-cooked chunks of meat. Vegetables and fish are particularly wonderful cooked like this, as the heat chars and crisps the edges and intensifies the flavours. Let’s hope we continue to see more of this style of direct fire cooking reappearing here in the UK.

The best known examples of indirect barbecue come from the southern states of America. There’s incredible variation across the Deep South in terms of the meat they cook, but the methods stay largely the same – they all rely on large smokers, cooking indirectly over long periods of time, using local woods. These smokers are more elaborate than the simple grills of the Far East – a lot of the early smokers actually originate from oil workers, who utilised their welding skills to start building commercial barbecues when the bottom fell out of the American oil industry in the 1980s. The basic idea is slow and low cooking – a firebox is fed with small amounts of wood at regular intervals, and the heat and smoke then pass through into the main cooking chamber where the meat sits. Whole hog barbecue is common in the USA – particularly in the Carolinas – but whole briskets, ribs, pork shoulders and more are also smoked in these indirect barbecues, generally at around 110ºC until the meat literally falls apart. Barbecue has become a way of life in huge swathes of the USA, and it’s no surprise – you can cook an awful lot of food in this way to feed the masses!

If you don’t have a smoker, a cross or a grate, what do you do? Well, you bury your food in the ground! Pit cooking is one of the oldest forms of barbecue – not something we immediately think of as barbecue, but the same principles of fire and smoke still apply. Dig a big hole deep in the ground, line it with something to soak the heat and store it – rocks or metal both work well – then light a big fire on top and let the rocks absorb the heat. Once the fire has burnt down to embers, lay down some sacking or leafy material – in some cultures they use seaweed – to protect the food, and put your food on top in layers. Finish your barbecue with more protective layers of sacking, then cover the whole package in earth. This is serious slow-cooking – the earth insulates the heat stored in the rocks, which gently steams the food inside your subterranean parcel. We often associate this style of cooking with the Pacific Islands and New Zealand – there are hundreds of indigenous words for pit cooking among the many Pacific Islands – but this type of barbecue is practiced in many different variations all over the world. You can even give it a try in your own back garden!