Cooking outdoors: Is it time to take your kitchen outside?

With many restaurants and pubs around the country having already invested in outdoor spaces during the pandemic, there's never been a better time to take those skills outside and make the most of the theatre and diverse culinary possibilities cooking over fire offers.

Take the cooking outside

"Outdoor cooking can add enormously to your bottom line because it opens up a whole new space that you weren't otherwise using," says chef and restaurateur Mike Robinson, whose restaurant group includes the Woodsman in Stratford-Upon-Avon, which features an outdoor barbecue, as well as a pub opening this summer in the Cotswolds that will focus on outdoor cooking.

"It can be as simple as installing a wood-fired oven in a garden. The great thing about that is it doesn't require any extraction because you are already in an outdoor space and, with a relatively minimal outlay and with the right marketing, it can make a huge difference."

At the Roth Bar and Grill in Somerset, executive chef Steve Horrell has taken outdoor cooking a step further, commissioning bespoke grills from a local engineer inspired by equipment featured in Mallmann's Seven Fires book, including a large-scale asado-style grill which he uses in the courtyard of the restaurant and when catering outside events.

"It's quite a large frame, not like a normal asado, so it's a little bit more dramatic. The lamb is splayed out in the air and we can rotate it forward, dip it toward the fire or pull it out – it's all done on a winch system. It's a bit of theatre when you hear the winches cranking and see the lamb is turning," he says.

London-based chef Andrew Clarke, formerly of Brunswick House and St Leonards, both in London, is known for his live fire cooking at the Meatopia barbecue festival and other events. He has asked Tom Bray of Country Fire Kitchen in Somerset to build a ‘pórtico' grill (as used by Marcus Wareing in his recent Tales of a Kitchen Garden BBC Two series) for the outdoor kitchen at his new venture, Acme Fire Cult at 40FT Brewery in Dalston, London.

"The frame itself is about three metres wide – it might be one of the largest ones Tom has made. We've got an area with its own Japanese-style grill built into it, which allows us to use skewers when cooking fish. There's plenty of room for hanging little cages to put vegetables or poultry in, and there's chains and hooks so we can hang things over the fire."

The right kit to cook outdoors

According to live fire and barbecue expert Genevieve Taylor of the Bristol Fire School, outdoor cooking doesn't always have to involve a large investment. She favours a classic Webber Kettle barbecue, but says the menu a restaurant wants to provide and how they want it to look will ultimately determine the choice of equipment. "With the big open parrilla-style Brazilian grills there's lots of flame and that adds a lot of theatre, which is amazing and spectacular, but in pure cooking terms, it's often better to have something that has a lid you can shut because you can then make the cooking so much more efficient.

"You wouldn't put a cake in your oven and expect it to cook with the door open, and it's the same with barbecue; as soon as you shut the lid, you trap the convection currents and the whole process becomes considerably more efficient, but you lose that element of theatre. However, if you are grilling steaks and chops, the lid is less important because you just want one directional heat from underneath."

Although cooking outdoors unquestionably requires some skill and knowledge on the part of the chef, Robinson says modern equipment can go a long way to helping cooks get the hang of the craft. "We have a big Traeger at the Woodsman, outside under a covered barbecue area, and that's an amazing piece of equipment. I can set that on 75ºC or 90ºC and slow-cook 20 half-shoulders of lamb overnight on a Saturday and they're immaculate and ready to go for a Sunday lunch, all literally falling off the bone, without taking up space in our combi ovens."

Taylor says the choice of fuel is just as important as the barbecue equipment and what you cook on it. "Most charcoal comes from the tropics, either south America or west Africa. It's not harvested sustainably and it's full of chemicals. Know the provenance of your fuel. Speak to the people who are making it, find out how they're making it. Google ‘British sustainable charcoal' and lots of really good people will come up. Probably kilo for kilo it costs twice as much, but if you use it thoughtfully and carefully and understand how fire works, you can make it last twice as long.

"Waiting for charcoal to be white and ashed over before you cook on it is something that was invented for crap charcoal because it's laden with chemicals which you need to burn off before you start to cook. With good, pure charcoal there's no additives that are going to impart anything unpleasant into your food, so you can just light it and get cooking within five or 10 minutes. That's one of the ways people can save money because otherwise they waste 50% of the heat."

Charcoal provides the main source of heat for barbecue and other open-fire cooking but, as Taylor explains, it's 95% inert and therefore provides no smoke, aroma or flavour, which is where wood comes in. She recommends applewood or oak for heavy smoke and varieties such as silver birch and alder for lighter smoke.

Chef Tomos Parry of Brat restaurant in London goes one step further and is particular about what woods go best with certain ingredients. "If I'm cooking with pork, I would probably use an applewood," he says. "I know it sounds obvious, but it does actually impart flavour. We use cedarwood, which is very nice with almond or trout.

You wouldn't really cook beef over cedarwood or over applewood as the flavour of oak goes with beef much better; it's a denser wood and it has a long burn with more slow smoke, which is quite nice."

Cooking on an open flame

Cooking outdoors affords the opportunity to draw on the culture and heritage of live-fire cooking from all over the world.

Michelle Miah, co-founder of the London-based Rudie's Jerk Shack, replicates the authentic taste of Jamaican jerk cooking by grilling food traditionally over pimento wood using a steel drum barbecue, which she sources from Original Barbecue or Authentic Jerkpan Company (both in London). She dresses the charcoal with bay leaves, fresh pimento berries and a sprinkling of sugar and vinegar solution.

"You brine the chicken first for between five and eight hours in a salt and sugar brine. It then has a wet and a dry rub, which include scotch bonnet chillies, thyme and allspice, which are left for another 24 hours. It really does impart a lot of flavour and there's a lot of juice when it's cooked on the steel pan," she says.

At Akoko in Fitzrovia, London, Nigerian-born chef Aji Akokomi serves a version of the popular West African barbecued street food suya, traditionally made with thin slices of a fatty cut of beef known as ‘torso', but which Akokomi substitutes with hogget belly.

"For the rub, we use a peanut butter that the oils have been totally removed from, which is then dried and made into a powder.

I then add bouillon powder for umami and various spices, including ginger, grains of selim, grains of paradise and, most importantly, yellow scotch bonnets, dehydrated with the seeds to give it that fire, and then powdered. You rub it abundantly over the meat and then you just cook the meat on skewers over fire. It's served with sliced red onions and tomatoes."

How to cook meat on a flame

When it comes to deciding on cuts of meat to serve, it's not what you choose, but how you cook it. "There are no bits of meat that I wouldn't barbecue. It's not really a question of the best cut for barbecuing, it's what you want to serve that dictates how you cook it," says Taylor.

But outdoor cooking doesn't just have to be about meat. At Acme Fire Cult, rare and native breed cuts from regenerative farms and dayboat fish will play a supporting role to vegetables. "The challenge is to just make vegetables taste as amazing as possible," says Clarke.

"We use a lot of the byproducts from the brewing process to bring umami flavour profiles to the vegetables. One of the things we've been doing is based on a Japanese style of pickle called nukazuke. We also use the spent rye grain from the first runnings of the mash and bury things like celeriac in it to ferment for a week, so they're tangy but not super-sharp. We then bury the celeriac in the coals to cook.

"We take the leftover brewer's yeast and reduce it down as you would for marmite, and we add our own flavourings, like ancho chilli peppers, and we sometimes put a little bit of beetroot juice in there to help the colour. We paint the outside of the cooked vegetable with the marmite and, while they're on display, all the smoke comes up and ‘sticks' to it."

Outdoor cooking in the UK presents the obvious challenge of unpredictable weather conditions, but Clarke is dismissive of the idea that barbecue is only for when the sun is shining. "The only thing that makes it problematic is rain or really heavy wind, but otherwise, light up the grill, get outside and enjoy it."

Hot tips from the experts

Make sure you can light a fire

"Check emissions controls for your area. You might be in a clean air zone that doesn't allow outdoor cooking. Get an environmental health officer around to check that they're happy with what you're doing before you do it. And be aware of prevailing winds. Don't site a grill where the smoke will blow straight into your restaurant if you're half-indoors, half-outdoors." Mike Robinson

Choose your charcoal carefully

"Without doubt the best charcoal makers in Britain are Whittle and Flame, based in Oxfordshire. They make single wood charcoal, but they also make hexagonal briquettes from pressed charcoal dust. They burn for hours and give off a very consistent heat. One of the mistakes people make is cooking everything hot, fast and directly. In fire cooking, we talk about cooking your food either directly or indirectly. Direct means over a lit fire; indirectly is off to the side of a fire. Most of the time you are better off cooking food a little bit more indirectly; cooking it slower for a little bit longer. The results are going to be juicier, tastier and better cooked." Genevieve Taylor

Fat plus fire equals flavour

"Outdoors, logs become a little bit more damp and give off a lot more smoke, so be careful about what kind of wood you use. The fattier the fish the better: hake, halibut, lemon sole, Dover sole, turbot and brill work well. You can cook them very slowly and the collagen will melt. Baste with a vinaigrette made of fish stock, Chardonnay vinegar, lemon juice and salt. As you rest the fish, the cooking juices and the vinaigrette will create a lovely sauce." Tomos Parry

Super-fast shellfish

"Shuck some oysters and wash the shells. Put the meat back in the shells and drop in the middle of the coals for less than a minute. Top it with a Gambian stew made with onions, red bell peppers, a little bit of scotch bonnet, tomatoes and dehydrated oyster sauce." Aji Akokomi

Safety first

"We always have ropes and pick sticks to cordon off the cooking area, and we always have a chef out there or a waiter or a waitress nearby. There's an unwritten rule that we always make sure someone's got an eye on the fire." Steve Horrell

Follow the laws

"Work with safety and compliance companies such as Food Alert (www.foodalert.com) or Five Star Compliance (www.fivestarcompliance.co.uk) before you spend a lot of money on new barbecue kit. They can tell you what's right and what's wrong and what you can and can't do." Andrew Clarke