Sun’s out, buns out: Barbecue is a global guide to grilling

Hugh Mangum takes barbecue seriously. His book, Barbecue: Smoked & Grilled Recipes from Across the Globe, offers up anything from spiedies to sausages, Mexican pit pork to pastrami. It’s an encyclopaedic work that also covers vegetarian barbecue dishes, sides, sauces, pickles and marinades, and desserts.

The author started grilling 14 years ago in outdoor flea markets in the US, offering up smoked brisket and spare ribs to shoppers. After consistently selling out, the husband and wife team created their own bricks and mortar restaurant, Mighty Quinn’s, in New York City’s East Village, the success of which led to seven other locations across Florida, Maryland and New Jersey.

His advice to anyone who wants to cook up a decent barbecue is to learn how to make a good fire – “if your fire is a mess, then all else will be a mess” – and to learn the difference between white smoke (“a sign of improper combustion”) and blue smoke (“which kisses the food it encounters”). There’s a guide to which wood to use; for example, peach wood works with seafood, apple wood with pork, or the best type of charcoal to select. The pictorial shorthand for each recipe (dairy-free, gluten-free, etc) also includes ‘complex’ and ‘cooking time longer than 10 hours’, which should indicate that barbecue done properly is a thoughtful undertaking.

One of the complex recipes is for La Caja China pig. La Caja China is a box barbecue, where a whole marinated pig is injected with mojo (the liquid part from the marinade, which is made up of orange and pineapple juice, herbs and spices) and is placed inside a coffin-like box of plywood, lined with aluminium and with a metal lid. Charcoal is placed on the lid every hour until the skin is crispy and the internal temperature reaches 85ºC.

The chapter on sausages involves similar labour and instructs you how to make your own using hog sausage casing, ranging from Swiss sausages made with pork shoulder and beef chuck, garlic, coriander and mace; a traditional coiled spiral of Cumberland sausage; and Argentinian chorizo, made of pork shoulder and belly mixed with cayenne pepper, red wine and paprika.

There’s also a guest chefs section, where our own Tomos Parry shines with a recipe for bavette with charred spring onion sauce alongside Caribbean chef Rawlston Williams, who cooks up spicy tamarind barbecue frogs’ legs, and Jess Pryles, an Australian chef who cooks salted beef fat caramel pie with bitter chocolate ganache.

Side dishes for your outdoor feast include dirty fries with burnt ends and lime-chilli sauce and Turkish lamb flatbread or lahmacun, topped with peppers, shallots and minced lamb. If there’s room, there’s also grilled summer peaches with smoked vanilla bean ice-cream or skillet mocha brownies to finish. An epic way to celebrate the summer.

Barbecue: Smoked & Grilled Recipes from Across the Globe by Hugh Mangum with Shana Liebman (Phaidon, £34.95) Cook Thai grilled chicken with sweet chilli sauce from the book