Smokedfinefood.co.uk - the home of fine food cooked over charcoal and wood
The first thing we bought from our local butcher after the first batch of pandemic ‘lockdowns’ was a good piece of belly pork. This is something we have never really managed to find in our supermarket deliveries as they are just too thin and lean!…
Over the last couple of years we have been eating more and more aubergine based dishes. Usually Italian in style, they always seems to be made with tomatoes too. When we came across this recipe in our local supermarket’s food magazine it seemed like too…
We were very lucky to be able to go back to the restaurant La Scottiglia in Pescina near Seggiano in Tuscany. Last year, 2018, we wrote about the wonderful dish La Scottiglia that the restaurant has been named after since 1972. This year we arrived…
These pages describe some of our cooking journey using the Big Green Egg® which we first came across in 2013 and since then has completely changed our cooking habits. The Big Green Egg is one of a family of Kamado ceramic ovens and from my experience is the best I have come across. The BGEs were inspired by clay cooking vessels initially developed some 3000 years ago in China. They seem to have been embraced by the Japanese from where the term kamado (oven, fireplace) derives. The story goes that American servicemen stationed in Japan last century came across dishes prepared in the characteristic clay pot and took the clay pots back home with them to the United States to cook their favourite outdoor food! In 1974 the Big Green Egg company was founded and started to import Japanese and Chinese ‘kamados’. Over time they started to develop their own models even using some of the ceramic technological advances developed by NASA and now produced in Mexico, building on their long history of ceramics manufacture. The rest, as they say, is history!
The BGE has some real advantages for outdoor home cooking. Its heavy ceramic dual-layered construction is incredibly temperature stable. This means that although heated using charcoal it can maintain a constant temperature at least as well as an expensive kitchen oven. This is particularly useful when doing ‘low and slow’ cooking, at which the BGE excels. It is almost as useful when ever you want to use the BGE as a ‘domestic oven’ allowing you to take any of your favourite recipes into the great outdoors and add the delight of cooking over charcoal and when you want to, adding subtle flavouring from your favourite woodsmoke. Because of its thermal characteristics the BGE is very economical on fuel. I have done many 24hr ‘low and slow’ cooks and still had fuel left at the end from a single filling! If you are cooking for shorter periods, closing off the air vents means the charcoal just goes out and is left in the BGE to light up for the next cook. It is not just low and slow cooking that the BGE excels at; high temperature cooking for steaks etc at around 250-300C are a joy and high quality searing can be done with no fear of smoking out the kitchen! Pizza cooking at 400-450C – yes quite possible too! These are some of the obvious BBQ targets which are easily done on the BGE, but there is so much more too: gentle fish cookery, bread making, hot and even cold smoking – hopefully these pages will come to show you some of the many things we have done and inspire you to try these and develop and share your own cooking favourites.
We cook on our BGEs throughout the year. When it is warm enough we eat outside too, but as the temperature falls lots of the cooking is still done outside even if the eating is inside! I hope that sharing some of the cooking experiences we have enjoyed will inspire you to do something similar. The recipes here have been developed on and for the Big Green Egg but can be easily adapted for other BBQs as long as there are ways to set up and cook directly or indirectly, and indeed many of these recipes can be cooked indoors. Which ever way, we hope you find some real ideas that appeal to you and inspire you to ‘have a go’ yourself ………………….. bon appetite!
Here are some our friend’s sites. They cook some amazing things on the Big Green Egg – click here to take a look
A recent raid on our freezer turned up a 1Kg pack of pig cheeks that we had completely forgotten about. Well time to correct this omission immediately! I really think that pig cheeks are an overlooked resource so often just turned into pork mince. They…
We took quite a little time to decide what to cook on the day of the Coronation of King Charles III. Coronation Chicken entered the catering lexicon 70 years previously at the Coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953. I suspect that our Coronation Goat…
It We need to start with two small confessions. Firstly, we have not found an authentic Italian recipe for this dish (yet)! And secondly, we have taken longer to name the dish than it did to cook and eat it!! Lets start with how we…
There are no authentic ‘Venison Bourguignon’ recipes in the same way as there are no authentic ‘Vegetable Bourguignon’. In food terms Bourguignon is a classic beef dish. That has not stopped us playing with ideas for a similar tasting, but vegetarian dish. We first published…
This quintessential Roman dish is a perfect example of Roman food history. This particular recipe dates from 1887 and is an iconic dish, but one probably few people know about, and certainly very few outside Italy. In Rome, until late in the 20th century, prestigious cuts…
Summer 2016 I simply said to my wife Jackie: Do you think it would be a silly idea to take the Big Green Egg on holiday with us? – quite expecting the “yes of course it is silly!” reply. We were driving to Tuscany from the North of England for three weeks before coming back into France for a week with our French family then making our way home through northern France and Holland.
“No I think it would be a good idea” said Jackie. Well, that will teach me…
The practicalities of it now needed to be thought about. I’d need to slim down the usual things I would pack, slightly less bike gear, slightly less camera stuff actually this was going to be quite do-abIe as long as we took our smallest Egg – the Mini.
No longer available in the UK it is a little smaller than the MiniMax – but as this was a travel experiment it would be a good test without much impact on the amount of other belongings we would take!
So the Mini was cleaned and loaded with charcoal so ready to go at a moment’s notice. The Platesetter, the Cast Iron Grill and the Duel function Metal top all put inside together with a box of firelighters, some matches and the grill gripper. The Big Green Egg was wedged between our bags and was as stable as anything.
Goodbye Northumberland – hello Tuscany!
Unpacking in Tuscany was completely uneventful. Turns out this was a very easy way to transport an Egg! We later found out that when driving out for picnics etc with the Egg that a stretched cargo net over the Egg made driving with the Egg completely worry free. Two lessons learned already!
So the Big Green Egg goes on his holidays – welcome to Tuscany!
Now to decide what to cook first – let’s see what day 2 Tuscany brings …
