‘BBQ for All: Year-Round Outdoor Cooking With Recipes for Meat, Vegetables, Fish, & Seafood’
Barbecue advice from a Brit? Sure, when it comes from Marcus Bawdon, an expert devoted to transforming the United Kingdom’s traditionally dismal backyard barbecue — “poor-quality supermarket meats, cremated on the outside and raw on the inside,” he writes — into palatable meals.
After schooling thousands of outdoor cooks via his U.K. BBQ School in Devon, the U.K. BBQ magazine and his CountryWoodSmoke.com blog, he reports great progress: “There’s a vibrant BBQ scene developing in the U.K.”
This year, Bawdon, who previously wrote “Food & Fire” and “Skewered,” is out with his third cookbook, “BBQ for All: Year-round Outdoor Cooking With Recipes for Meat, Vegetables, Fish, & Seafood” (Dog n Bone, $30). A former vegetarian for 14 years (until he craved a well-prepared steak one day), he offers a tempting lineup in the “Veg” chapter — ember-cooked baba ganoush, celery root steaks with barbecue sauce, cauliflower mustard crumble and Chimichurri Roasties among them. Pescatarians will find 19 recipes for the grill and smoker, including sea bass wrapped in leek and decadent duck fat garlic scallops. (He notes, “You can get duck fat hotter than butter without it burning, thus improving the sear and caramelization on the scallops.”)
By the way, If you’re an outdoor cook with an adventurous palate, you might want to try assembling and smoking Bawdon’s signature dish, the Dirty Meatenburg, a massive log of pork sausage and black pudding wrapped in strips of bacon. The recipe’s not in this cookbook but you’ll find it at CountryWoodSmoke.com.