The sun has been out and there have been evenings this week when the temperature has remained warm until late, but that’s not the only excuse one needs to enjoy dinner outdoors. Food cooked over an open fire can taste wonderful - indeed, even ordinary things cooked over charcoal will be promoted to another league of deliciousness if you know what you’re doing. And it doesn’t always have to be a case of meat sizzling on a grill - you can introduce pots, pans and woks to the flames as log as they are sturdy enough to take the heat. 

It seems reasonable to assume that we humans are hard-wired to like the flavours of food cooked over wood or charcoal, because we were doing it for almost a million years before anyone invented an electric or gas oven. Archaeologists have found evidence of what they believe to be one of the first examples of hominids cooking with fire, and the site in Isreal dates back almost 800,000 years. A long time for the species to have evolved a universal liking for that curious mixture of sweet and highly savoury which cooking over a live flame can impart. 

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Take something plain and simple - corn on the cob, say, or chicken thighs - and cook one sample under an electric grill and another over charcoal… The difference in flavour will be profound. 

But as we say, we’re not just talking about items sizzling on the bars of a grill. That might be the usual interpretation of barbecuing, but you can employ many other basic techniques, including the use of pans. This week I’ve been experimenting with hot-smoked mussels. Cooked in a shallow pan inside a barbecue with a lid they are, quite simply, a sensation! And talk about simple… Just scrub the shellfish clean, chuck ‘em in an oven-proof pan and place on a very hot grill, add a few wood-chips (visit the Devon-based https://hotsmoked.co.uk for the ideal selection) to the fire beneath and cook until the mussels open (chuck away any that don’t). 

Toast some good sourdough over the flames and you can use the buttered slices to mop up the juices. Alternatively, you can lift the shellfish out then add a glass of white wine and a large knob of butter to the pan and reduce the liquid over the heat so you end up with a highly flavoured and luxuriant sauce.  

The nation’s top barbecue expert, Marcus Bawdon, who runs his UK BBQ School (https://ukbbqschool.com/) in Devon, is a big fan of using pans over a live flame. 

“I absolutely I love cooking in pans over coals,” he told me this week. “One of my favourite examples would definitely be scallops, which can be excellent with a hard sear in a pan. Cooked in butter, garlic, lemon juice and flat-leaf parsley, they should still be quivering when they’re ready to eat.” 

One tip he is quick to add - as explained in his latest book, BBQ for All - is the use of duck fat. “Duck fat doesn’t burn at high temperatures, meaning you get a great crispness to the sear,” said Marcus.

Of course, having the right kind of pan to place in the barbecue helps too. For years I’ve used cast iron griddles, but they are often difficult to clean. My latest indulgence is a carbon steel wok made specifically for the Kamado Joe - the wonderful appliance in which I do all our outdoor cooking, even the Christmas turkey.  

Indeed, the Kamado Joe company has recently launched its first Karbon Steel™ range - a line of premium cooking surfaces made of carbon steel. As many a chef will tell you, this highly resilient metal offers superb heat distribution, greater durability and effortless cleaning up. As well as the wok, the Karbon Steel range includes a paella pan, a griddle and a half-moon shaped pan, all of which can be used on any cooker, barbecue or hob.

Anyone who has ever been to South East Asia or, indeed, to an authentic restaurant specialising in cuisine from that part of the world, will have seen chefs using woks over scary eyebrow-singeing flames. That’s the kind of heat you need to really stir-fry properly. Most domestic gas hobs are incapable of producing that super-heat - and electric hobs don’t even come close. But place an empty dry wok into a round, egg-shaped, barbecue like a Kamado Joe - in which the charcoal has been burning for a while so it’s producing plenty of heat - and the pan will soon reach proper stir-fry temperatures. 

Just make sure you have all the ingredients for your meal prepared, ready and waiting, because something like a beef, noodle, onion, garlic and red pepper stir-fry is only going to take a minute or two to cook. 

My tip for an enjoyable summer evening supper is to go small on individual dishes and have two or three separate courses lined up ready to put in the wok. There is a great temptation (and I did this for years) to bung everything in and blast away in the vague belief that, because it’s so hot, the wok will cope. It won’t, if it’s overloaded and you’ll either end up with some items being undercooked or something that resembles a stew.  

Better, instead, to devise a couple of totally separate dishes that are small in quantity, but fast and simple. Then you can serve, wipe the wok clean, and start heating it up again over the flame in readiness for the next course. Strips of grass-fed beefsteak with onion, red and green pepper and garlic would be a case in point, as would prawn, cashew and spring onions or scallops with asparagus.

One tip is to cook meat or fish first, then it take out and keep warm while you go on to rapidly cook any vegetables separately. Combine just before serving, which is when you add any liquid ingredients like soy sauce or flavouring oils such as sesame. Don’t overdo it - choose just one or two vegetables, not half a dozen.

Keeping things simple and fairly minimal is the order of the day, as long as you’ve got that super-heat blasting away underneath your pan. Try cooking with the high temperatures directly over hot coals and you will discover that even the plainest of stir-fries will be like the barbecued corn-on-the-cob or chicken mentioned above. In other words, the intense heat will have taken it into a different league. 

CHOOSE YOUR CHARCOAL 

A train-driver once told me that there was coal, and there was coal. He said his magnificent steam locomotive performed quite differently depending on the quality of the coal his railway bosses managed to purchase. The same goes for the charcoal in your barbecue. 

In fact, if you are lucky enough to own a high-performance appliance like a Kamado Joe (there are other makes - kamado is basically Japanese for ‘clay-lined oven'), the choice is crucial. The ubiquitous cheap easy-to-light stuff should be avoided. 

For a start, it’s a false economy. My kamado will continue cooking for three or four times longer with the high quality locally-made charcoal that I use. 

Woodland manager Chris Silverwood’s Fat Raven Charcoal business is really just a sideline for the work he does in the forest here in West Somerset. The charcoal really is Rolls Royce stuff, and it should be - Chris has been carbonising lumps of English hardwood for over 30 years. 

“Basically you’ll find that most British charcoal is a lot higher grade than the imported stuff, partly because it comes from hardwood grown in properly managed woodlands,” Chris told me as I was purchasing half a dozen bags recently. 

“I use a variety of timber, depending on what I’ve been coppicing or thinning out. So there’s oak, ash, silver birch, and beech. At the moment I’m using a lot of sweet chestnut. I’m splitting out fencing stakes with a lot of it, but the stuff I can’t use gets turned into charcoal. Otherwise it would just be wasted. And it does make good charcoal - it burns really hot. 

“But, as I say, most of the English wood is good. The burning times vary depending on the species - some burn fast, while oak charcoal is slower, being a bit more dense. I think it’s best to have a mixture of different woods.”

Chris’s Fat Raven Charcoal includes different sized pieces, which is useful because you can use the smaller bits to help you get up to speed faster, while the big lumps will allow to cook low and slow for many hours. 

Chris uses a metal kiln for his day-today charcoal-making, but for demonstration purposes he will also occasionally build an old-fashioned earthen mound, as used historically in places like the Quantocks or on Exmoor in times of yore.

“That’s a very smoky sort of business,” smiles Chris. “You’ve got to keep an eye on the traditional earth burns all through the night, as well as day, because the wood can easily catch light and burn away. The phrase ‘charcoal burning’ is a misconception. Actually what we’re doing is using just some of the wood to create enough heat to cook the impurities out of the rest of the wood. You are creating a pure carbon source of fuel.

“With the modern metal kilns, we no longer have to sit up all night. In the old days they were terrified of sudden flare up. They could easily lose the lot. I don’t know if it’s a myth, or what, but they reckon the old charcoal-burners used to sit on a one-legged stool all night so if they fell asleep, they’d fall off and wake themselves up!”

Chris runs a small business in the West Somerset area - to find out more visit his Facebook page Fat Raven Charcoal or email fatravencharcoal@gmail.com