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How to Barbecue Without a Kitchen: Tips for Outdoor Cooking Success

Planning Your No-Kitchen BBQ

Went to Chris’s house yesterday evening to some prototyping planning for the year ahead. After about 20 minutes of that we made Philly Cheesesteaks on the weber, had a big fire, played loads of dats and went in the sauna. An absolutely excellent evening.

Chris’s garden isn’t attached to his house so if you need anything from the kitchen, you have to walk about 100m down a dark muddy track to get it.

Over many years of enjoying extremely similar evenings to this, we’ve got prepping for these cooks down to a fine art.

This blog post will detail some of the steps we take to essentially barbecue without a kitchen, using last night as a good example of it all going smoothly. It will forever be known at Cheese Steak Night (CSN).

Strap in for some tips to help make your outdoor cooking stress-free.

ONE Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance 

We’ve learnt that this needs to start hours, sometimes days in advance to ensure a smooth transition from ‘empty stomach two can buzz’ to ‘full of tasty smokey food’. Too many times has this ended up as ‘I’m not sure that chicken is quite there but at 6 cans in, I’m willing to roll the dice’.

As soon as you decide to barbecue with no kitchen, you have to start asking some serious questions.

Do we have charcoal?

Is the grill clean?

Is there any prep we could possibly do indoors with access to all of the things commonly found in a kitchen?

Are you sure we have charcoal?

Do you want me to pick you up and beers on the way over?

What condiments will we likely want?

What will we eat off?

Are you 100% sure we have charcoal because the last time we cooked, there wasn’t much left in the bag and I really don’t want to have to go back out and buy rubbish charcoal from coop or that weird village shop that seems to sell everything but everything they sell is of slightly lower quality than a normal shop?

Those kinds of questions.

The point is, question every single step of your planned evening and write a list of things you’ll need in the actual moment of cooking.

Peppers and onions on a plancha

CSN Example:

On the way over to Chris’s I visited a local solid fuels merchant for burnables.

On arrival, the steak went in the freezer for 30 mins to make slicing it very thin much easier.

Peppers and onions were sliced and transferred to a sandwich bag.

Crisps were eaten to soften the blow of the first two or three cans.

A bag for life was packed with utensils and condiments.

Buy 50% more than you think you’ll need 

Have you ever been to some kind of function or event where someone turns up unexpectedly and you have to kind settle for a smaller than ideal portion? I have and I haven’t liked it. Completely avoidable if that extra few hundred grams of protein had been purchased in advance.

When buying beer, it’s always worth picking up a ‘just in case’ packet of stubby Euro lagers available in most medium to large supermarkets. We were glad of these when the premium beers ran dry.

It’s always nice to have leftovers.

CSN Example:

Chris’s partner expressed a very keen interest in a Philly cheesesteak. Fortunately for everyone involved, I’d bought supplementary submarine rolls so it wasn’t an issue.

Later on, Chris’s neighbour popped in during our 3rd game of darts and helped himself to a beer d’or! 

I finished on my favourite double one.

Rubber Gloves

Getting a pack of the disposable gloves are excellent for handling raw meat when you don’t have ready access to warm soapy water.

Time Management: Avoid late night hunger 

No one ever complained about eating too early but how many times have you been absolutely starving as you’re still waiting for the coals to turn ashy at 10 o’clock?

If you’ve applied the 50% rule to your fuel, you should be able to light the barbecue nice and early so it’s ready to cook on as soon as possible. It might seem a bit wasteful but this is about maximum enjoyment and barbecuing is exactly inherently sustainable so just get it lit and add coals if you need to.

Keep it Simple

Obvious one but don’t try to do too much. Limiting the number of things that can go wrong limits the things that will go wrong.

As the list of responsibilities and dependents increases, the opportunities for outdoor cooking of this nature decreases. Significantly. It’s supposed to be a way to relieve stress and have fun so don’t make too much work.

It’s all about having fun and making delicious food, not showing off. A good quality sausage with some grilled onions and ketchup is likely to be as well received as a brined and jerked heritage breed chicken that cost you 25 quid. Not saying don’t cook those things but maybe save it until you can wash your hands more easily.

Buy the best quality ingredients you can. It’s really not that hard to make it taste nice when cooking over fire.

CSN Example:

Cheese steak admittedly isn’t the most simple thing but at the end of the cook, we’re basically just eating a sandwich wrapped in tinfoil that only took about 10 minutes to actually cook. We also used this pre-made seasoning which removed a decent whack of admin.

Pre-prepped cheese steaks

Prep:

Get yourself some kind of steak. Obviously higher quality meat will ultimately make a higher quality sandwich but I would argue this is a time where less expensive steak is absolutely fine since it’s getting a lot of flavour enhancing treatment.

We used some ‘thin cut beef steaks’ from Tesco.

Give them 30 mins in the freezer to firm up then slice them as thin as you can against the grain. This is much easier to achieve straight out the freezer.

In the mean time, slice up a large onion and some red or yellow peppers.

Cut some submarine rolls down the middle.

Pack:

Two spatulas

Plancha

Your favourite pre-mixed seasoning. We used T-Boy’s cajun blend.

American Cheese

Tinfoil

Your prepped food 

T-BOYS

Cooking

Light your grill for direct cooking over medium high heat. It’s going to be a relatively quick cook so just whack a load of lit coal in the middle of the pit then put your grill and plancha on top centrally. Put the lid on and allow it to come up to temp.

Add some oil to the plancha, spread it around with a spatula then add your onions and peppers with a healthy shake of your seasoning. Two teaspoons or so. Keep them moving so they don’t burn for around 5-10 minutes. If it feels like it’s catching too much, add period splashed of beer, water or wine to deglaze and bring the plancha temp down a bit.

When you’re happy your veg is cooked, push it to one side, pour a little more oil on the plancha and slap down the beef in an even layer. Try not to touch it for the next minute or so to let it get nice and brown. Add another shake of your seasoning then mix it all together with the peppers and onions. Put your sub rolls on the side of the barbecue to heat up a bit then it’s cheese time.

Melting American cheese on a plancha

Get your pepper/beef mix laid out in a nice even layer and add two slices of American cheese per sandwich in an even layer. Lid on to melt it for a minute.

Assembly:

Grab a sheet of tinfoil big enough to wrap a sandwich and lay your open sub to one side of it. Scoop an unhealthy layer of the mix into the sandwich, close it up, then wrap the whole thing in the foil. Put it to one side of the barbecue to keep warm while you make the rest.

If you’ve got a board and knife, slice it down the middle and enjoy.

Cross section of a Philly cheesesteak

Finally

One of the most fun components of cooking outside in a camping type situation is the potential for improvisation. Finding little ways to overcome problems is an arguably the best bit as the food definately tastes better when it’s a bit harder.

I remember cooking some chicken on a spit while camping last year. We had it with butter mixed with naga chilli sauce. It was one of the best things I’ve ever eaten in my life.