Cooking on Fire

It takes skill and experience to cook on a fire effectively and consistently. Often confused with a BBQ, fires are not the same.  Let me explain the difference.  

The typical barbecue is fuelled by charcoal.  You light the charcoal, preferably not with those awful spirit-based firelighters (or worse, charcoal infused with lighter fluid), but with a sustainable firelighter like birch bark.  You wait for any flames or smoke to subside and for the coals to turn white.  Then you throw on your marinated aubergine or your Boerewors and cook, stress free, with an even, long-lasting heat.  

There are few woods in the UK that produce good enough coals to mimic charcoal for its even, flameless glow that endures - oak, beech or fruit woods such as cherry to name a few.  But wood coals are not the same as proper charcoal.  Charcoal is wood heated in the absence of oxygen to produce an impure form of carbon.  Its glows hot and long and produces less ash.  Wood coals are what is left when you burn wood and most of the gas has been driven off.  Wood coals behave differently - they are less enduring, need more fettling and take longer to get to the 'coal stage'.  

In my experience, a lot of people think when cooking on fires that if they burn a tonne of wood, they will achieve a great big pile of long-sustaining charcoal which will behave like charcoal.  They are surprised when they load up the grill and watch the heat drain out of the coals quickly while their sausages become a lukewarm grey colour.  They panic and think the remedy is to throw more wood on the fire.  This compounds the issue as any remaining heat is sucked from the ember bed while the coals try to heat up the new fuel to combustion point.  The dreaded 'lull' has arrived.

A great way to cook on a fire is to have a constant ember generation area.  Basically, keep an area of the fire burning with a flame.  Feed this area and as the coals are produced, rake them out into your ember area, above which you can cook.  You now have a constant supply of short-lived embers with the bonus of a flamed area where you can either cook in the radiant heat or in the thermal column above.  This needs constant management, but cooking on a fire always does - the greatest thing I learned about cooking on fires is never to leave the fire once you've started cooking.  Almost all catastrophes can be avoided by this simple mantra.    

Success will be greatly improved if you know how to identify different woods and can evaluate them for quality.  As always, put the time in and get the details right.   

Go on, get out in the winter air and cook a banger.