How to make the most of your barbecue

One of the great advantages of a ceramic barbecue with a lid is that it allows you to hot-smoke your food. Once your barbecue is up and running and your coals are white, you can add wood to the embers – these will catch fire and create plumes of smoke, which rise and imbue your food with an amazing smoky flavour.

Different types of wood give you different flavours, too. Fruit woods like apple and cherry tend to be more delicate, whilst the likes of hardwood and hickory are more robust – perfect for smoking red meat. If you have good access to wood, go for freshly cut chunks – wood dries out after it has been chopped, and the higher moisture content in freshly chopped wood will help to keep your food moist.

The key to good smoking is low temperature – if you smoke above 120ºC, the smoke will be acrid rather than aromatic, and you’ll end up with an unpleasant bitter flavour in your food. Smoking is all about low and slow cooking – the barbecue essentially becomes a smoke oven – so set aside a day to enjoy the process. Try this classic Texas-style smoked brisket for starters, or if you want something a little quicker, this artichoke with smoked garlic mayonnaise is a simple crowdpleaser.

Because we associate barbecue with searing and grilling at high heat, we often worry about the idea of roasting food in a barbecue, thinking that it’ll overcook, burn and dry out. Fundamentally, barbecue is all about temperature control – good ceramic barbecues allow you to maintain a consistent temperature over a long period of time. By creating an indirect cooking zone, using a thermometer (ideally built-in) and closing the lid, you're effectively creating an oven – just one that uses charcoal rather than gas or electricity.

Indirect cooking on a barbecue opens so many doors to cooking a vast array of dishes. We like to leave a tray on top of the heat deflectors to catch any drips from whatever we’re roasting – you can also leave some water in the tray to make the barbecue into more of a steam oven.

A rotisserie attachment can turn your barbecue into something seriously swish – this take joints of meat and poultry to the next level, partly by ensuring a consistent caramelisation across the whole surface of the joint, but also by keeping the meat moist. As the meat rotates, the internal fat renders and melts through the meat, rather than simply dripping into the bottom of the roasting tray. Our rotisserie chicken with apricot, pine nut and freekeh stuffing is one of the most delicious roasts we’ve ever eaten, largely because of the transformative powers of the extra smoke and the consistency of the rotisserie.

You can also roast things directly in the coals if you like – it gives you more space to work with on the cooking grates above and lends extra smokiness to your food. It’s one of the best ways to cook aubergines, for example, but it also brings an amazing flavour to the smoked apple purée in this barbecued pork shoulder steaks recipe.

If you can turn your barbecue into an oven, it makes sense that you can also bake things in it! Jacket potatoes are an easy starting point – you can just wrap them in foil and bake them as you would on a bonfire, nestled in among the coals until they’re fluffy and tender. Even better, why not make a salt crust out of salt and egg white and salt-bake your potatoes! It’s an easy, delicious way to feed a crowd, and doubly impressive when you break open the salt crust to reveal the perfectly cooked and seasoned potatoes within.

If you want to take things a step further, ceramic barbecues really come into their own when you start using them to make flatbreads and pizzas. The main hurdle between you and delicious Neapolitan-style pizza is oven temperature – most wood-fired pizza ovens are around the 400ºC mark, far beyond the outer limits of your average home oven. A good ceramic barbecue, however, can easily reach such a high heat. Pop a pizza stone in there, wait a few minutes for it to heat up and you have a pizza oven in your own back garden.

The key is to roll your dough thin and go fairly light on the toppings – this allows the heat to penetrate quickly and keeps the oven hot, letting you cook your pizzas and flatbreads in just a few minutes. Keep it classic with a tomato passata and some good mozzarella, or experiment – try our baba ganoush and brussels sprouts flatbread, or this gorgeous cauliflower shawarma wrap!