Gas versus wood

We are having friends over for dinner tomorrow after a crawl of the local wineries and we thought to have a barbecue, which got me going again about how we should get a gas barbecue - most particularly for the summer. So with a bit of muttering, and, I gather, a lot of searching, my husband bought a new gas-fired barbecue from Bunnings and we have spent the morning assembling it. Not that easy, but success in the end. It was tested with bacon and croissant for David's lunch. he probably felt a bit like Jamie Oliver's dad!

"My first outdoor cooking memories are full of erratic British summers, Dad swearing at a barbecue that he couldn't put together, and eventually eating charred sausages, feeling brilliant." Jamie Oliver

This is what we now have (below - only in black) and above is our home-made wood-fired barbecue:

I should say that we also have a Weber thing, though it's not a Weber - which is a wood or charcoal, or heat beads fired barbecue with a lid, designed for larger pieces of meat.

Our new gas-fired version is a portable one of course, not one of those grand things that are plumbed in and which seem so essential for modern living. The smaller the gardens get, it seems to me, the bigger the outdoor kitchen. You can get pizza ovens too these days.

When we lived in Adelaide - up in the hills - you were not even allowed a gas-fired barbecue because of the fire danger. Electric only. As David said - and he is probably right, and it applies to gas-fired ones as well - it's not really barbecuing, it's just cooking outside. And all those barbecues in Australian parks are most likely electric fired - or maybe gas I suppose. Our English friends were most impressed by their availability everywhere.

So why did we get a gas-fired one, when we have such a beautiful rustic looking wood-fired one in our garden? Well my reasons are two-fold, the first being the one I mentioned earlier - a wood-fired one is dangerous in the summer. And there's really no more to say about that. The flames shoot high in the air when the wood is first ignited. It's dangerous.

The second one though is that I think it takes a good deal more skill to cook food on a wood-fired barbecue successfully. You have to get the amount of wood just right, and you have to get the temperature just right. According to Robert Carrier, in the daytime the coals should be grey and at night they should glow red. But this is tricky if you want a long cooking time. The other tricky thing is that fat dripping from the food ignites the fire more and causes it to flame - thus charring the food. A tip for this is to have a spray bottle of water at hand to spray the flames. Now some would say that this is the point - the charring I mean - but you can certainly have too much of a good thing. I get very peeved sometimes when I have spent some time and imagination in creating a marinade only to have everything burnt to a crisp. So I sort of hope that the gas barbecue will prevent this charring - but then it will lose the smoky taste I guess. Not sure you can win on this one.

And then why is it that barbecuing is a man's domain? One quote I found suggested that men were really closet pyromaniacs and that it satisfied their obsession with fire. Which seems a bit extreme. Curtis Stone puts it well:

"I love how the men stand around cooking the barbie while the women have done all the work beforehand doing the marinade and making the salads and then everybody says, 'what a great barbie' to the guy cooking. A barbecue is just the ultimate blokes' pastime, isn't it?" Curtis Stone

Yet another example of men getting the praise for women's work I think.

So I'm not a huge fan of the barbecue. Although I do have nostalgic and romantic memories of sausages and cevapcipi being cooked on outside barbecues in cafés in Yugoslavia all those years ago. Fish too. And a webered roast can be absolutely delicious. As can a whole animal on a spit. Which I am considering as a golden wedding anniversary thing. But done by experts with their own professional equipment.

We'll keep trying though. Because when it's done well it is something special. Well done David. And thank you.