Jonas Cramby’s Korean BBQ & Japanese Grills

Now summer’s here, editor Keith Kendrick is in the mood for yakitori – a BBQ with a difference

The trouble with many cookbooks is that you have to commit. Really commit. The photographs are beautiful, the dishes look delicious, and the ingredients are easily obtainable. You whet your appetite and prepare to plunge in to the prepping, but then your heart sinks as the recipe directs you back to the chapter that you normally skip past: the chapter about equipment. Back to the spag bol, then!

But not I. The moment I set eyes on Jonas Cramby’s Korean BBQ & Japanese Grills, I knew I had to cook from it.

The section on yakitori grilling appealed most, following a visit to a Japanese restaurant where chefs turned and charred skewered cuts of meat over smouldering coals. James explains, ‘It’s social cooking, where bite-sized chunks of meat are grilled over small table grills and are enjoyed together with

loads of simple, vegetable-based side dishes and even more ice-cold beer.’

And despite their exoticsounding names, the dishes looked so simple: negima (chicken thighs with leek/spring onion); kawa (crispy skin chicken); tebasaki (chicken wings); toriniku (chicken breast); asuparagasu (grilled asparagus); uzura no tamago (grilled quails’ eggs); shishito (grilled chillies).

Plus there were only a handful of unfamiliar ingredients, such as shichimi togarashi (a Japanese spice mix); kewpie mayonnaise (an umami-packed Japanese mayo); bonito flakes (dried fish) and tare (a homemade yakitori sauce) – see recipe, right.

But – and it’s a big but – all, bar a few, need a piece of kit called a Japanese table grill that costs, at the low end, £200-plus. Now THAT’S commitment, but not one, as a dad-of-three, I’m able to afford on a whim (what if the kids don’t like it? What if it ends up in the back of a cupboard with all the other badly-advised gadgets

I’ve bought over the years?). Jonas thoughtfully acknowledges this and suggests creating a grill from a rack balanced on a couple of house bricks over embers. I didn’t have any of those to hand, either, but a challenge is a challenge, so I decided to tackle Jonas’s recipes using a £4.49 disposable barbecue I bought from my local supermarket, along with some wooden skewers (£1.49). Obviously, this isn’t something you can plonk on the dining table and set alight, so you need some outdoor space and decent weather to enjoy the experience. But once outdoors, everything else is a doddle. The sauce, the skewering, the serving to my grateful kids – it all went like a dream using my less-than-a fiver BBQ box.

I tackled the recipes using a £4.49 disposable barbecue