BBQ Tips and Tricks

The previous weekend saw us going for an “away-day” BBQ at Cotswold Park and Beach. Being tasked with BBQ’ing comes with enough pressure when you do it on home turf, so doing it away from home adds extra pressure.

Remembering the essentials is pretty easy, i.e. Charcoal, Meat and some BBQ Tong’s but it is all the silly BBQ gadgets and gizmo’s that make a BBQ go smoothly, so here are the iLoveMyBBQ.com Top 5 Essential Gadgets, Tips and Recipes for away BBQ’s.

Top 5 Tips

- Make sure you take matches or a lighter. The Park and beach we went to last weekend did not sell matches or lighters for Health and Safety reasons. Mad I know… luckily (given our group are all none smokers) one of our friends had a blow torch in the back of his 4×4 (I don’t know why either, you will have to ask him).

- Take a BBQ Mitt (Weber, £9.70 Amazon). When using someone else’s BBQ or an industrial BBQ you never know how it will work or what will need moving at a crucial point. Having a BBQ Mitt nearby can prevent any nasty food burns and also enable you to “work the grill” a little easier.

- Have a bottle of water nearby. This is an essential one for a number of reasons. 1, to immediately apply to any rogue burns you may endure. 2, To prevent any rogue sparks or bit of charcoal causing the nearby grassland or woods to catch alight. 3, it gets hot!

- Take a Kilner Jar with some Cajun Rub in it. Some away-day BBQ’s call on visitors and guest to bring their own meat. Whilst you should never be so rude as to just shake some of your rub onto their plain meat, you may want to encourage them to have a bit of extra flavour. BBQ’ing is about sharing remember

- Don’t forget a sharp knife. Now, I don’t really know the laws about driving around with a kitchen knife in yiour boot, but I am sure that if the police see the rest of your BBQ equipment they will apply a bit of common sense. A sharp kitchen knife is essential to make sure food is cooked and to (as funny as it sounds), cut up people’s strings of sausages! ps, a simple veg or pairing knife will do. Avoid the Crocodile Dundee knives!

Those are my Top 5 Essential Tips for BBQ Away Matches… why not share yours below in the comments section.

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Chicken Breast

Got some friends coming over next week from the Midlands and weather permitting I thought it was more than likely that we would have a BBQ and needed to think about some recipes.

I dusted off the old BBQ Recipe manifesto and decided to prepare some Cajun rub that can then be used on the meat, be it beef such as steaks, or lamb, pork, or our favourite, chicken breasts that have been butterfly trimmed.

Here are the ingredients; there should be enough to make up a small glass jam jar (wash and boil an old jar and lid to get rid of any germs and you can use as new).

Keep in mind that all ingredients are in rough amounts:

3 tsp of cayenne pepper (can be left out if you don’t like it)

1 ½ tbsp of black peppercorns

2 tbsp white peppercorns

3 tbsp paprika

2 tsp Sage (dried)

2 tsp Garlic Powder

2 tbsp Dried Thyme

2 tbsp Dried Oregano

2 tbsp Brown Sugar

You can either use a mortar and pestle to grind into a fine powder or cheat and use a coffee grinder which is what I do.

I then popped the powder into the jam jar ready to be rubbed on the meat at the weekend.

There we have it, simple Cajun rub BBQ recipe for use with beef steaks, pork, lamb or best of all chicken and it only takes a few minutes to prep.

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