It does seem to have been (fingers crossed, let’s not tempt fate) a “barbeque summer” this year so far. It’s an excellent phrase, created by someone in the Met Office media team but alas due to the seasonal forecast it was illustrating, it will naturally be associated with pouring rain and freezing winds ruining the holiday season in Britiain.
It was one of those wonderful examples of something well intentioned which turns to disaster almost straight away like the famously wobbly Millennium Bridge in London, the Ford Edsel, casting Dick Van Dyke as a chimney sweep in Mary Poppins or Gordon Brown as Prime Minister.
But this year, so far we have had plenty of chances to get the bbq out and get the meat seared. In fact, as soon as the first promising weekend forecast was given in April, we went to the shops to buy a new gas barbecue to replace the old worn out charcoal bbq we’d used in previous years.
There is also the question of the historical argument – is a gas barbecue good as or better than a charcoal bbq, and it’s a difficult one to call. Naturally with a charcoal bbq you do get the real smoky flavour in the food, but it’s also all too easy to get a trace of firelighters, meths or other combustible material used to get the charcoal bbq fire started. And then you have to keep it going, and is it likely to go out or get out of hand?
With a gas bbq of course, such things are more straightforward as it’s as easy to control as a hob in the kitchen, but the question of the correct bbq taste is the weak point. Or is it? Actually, in some ways it is not. In a kitchen, the notion of fat hitting the burners and exploding into a flaring, smoky fire is not pleasant, but in the open air it is precisely what is required. A gas barbeque can collect quite an assortment of disparate detritus on the burners which will speedily melt, burn and smoulder when the gas barbecue is ignited, and with the lid shut, build up a pleasing plume. As the fat builds up over time, the smoke flavour is intensified, but if somebody is squeamish about old fat and oil congealed on the burners, it’s an easy matter to wash them. It is true that the woody flavour is missing, but it’s a tiny price to pay for reliability.
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