Barbecues? How common! We’ve all got... OUTDOOR KITCHENS
It’s the place where we de-stress from life
JO HUGHES, 52, owns an internet company with her husband Richard, 49. They live in Romsey, Hampshire, with their son Daniel, 16. Jo says: WHen we bought our house in April, it was the outdoor kitchen the previous owners had recently installed that swung it for us.
Costing around £32,000 from a specialist local company, Winchester Outdoor Kitchens, it measures three metres by ten metres and features a pizza oven, two built-in barbecues, a grill, sink area, special outdoor fridge — they need to be sturdier than an indoor equivalent — copious drawers for storage, and a gorgeous adjoining dining area with seating for 12.
It’s all built under a lovely timber roof with slats that can be opened and closed according to the British weather.
eight outdoor heaters dotted around the kitchen and dining area throw out warmth at the pull of a string, plus there’s mood lighting to ensure it’s beautifully lit after dark.
We are outdoorsy people anyway and having an alfresco kitchen has enhanced our lives on a day-to-day basis, not just on special occasions.
There have been times when Richard and I have felt fed up with work, but after as little as half an hour pottering in our outdoor kitchen, watching woodpeckers and kingfishers swoop by and Canada geese fly overhead, all feels right with the world again.
Richard adores cooking and doing so outdoors has become his antidote to life’s stresses. He won’t get up at 6am to go for a run, but he will happily rise with the lark to spend time in the outdoor kitchen marinating a joint of pork that needs to be cooked for 12 hours.
Barbecuing burgers and sausages isn’t my thing, but a proper outdoor kitchen means we can be far more adventurous.
We’ve got a rack out there containing various different sauces, herbs and spices — things we probably wouldn’t use when cooking indoors where mealtimes feel utilitarian and functional.
Preparing food outdoors feels sociable and creative.
The outdoor kitchen has transformed family mealtimes into something that reminds me of the lovely, lingering way families eat in Spain — where I used to live — and the Mediterranean in general.
It’s always been a battle to get our teenage son, Daniel, to engage with us over meals indoors where he rushes to eat and move on to the next thing.
But once we’ve coaxed him outside, he even gets into conversation with us.
His friends think the kitchen is ‘awesome’ and he loves to cook out there for them, which is when pizzas, burgers and sausages come into play.
When we’ve had friends over for dinner, they can’t take their eyes off the kitchen.
Men are generally stunned by the size of it, while women tend to comment on how lovely it must be to sit outside at night — and it really is.
We’ve used it almost every evening for the past few months and are hoping it will also transform mealtimes on dark winter nights, when we plan to flick the heaters on and fire up the grill or pizza oven.
There’s one rule: no burgers or bangers
NATASHA CONNELL, 44, is director of luxury interiors company IC Furniture alongside her husband Ilya, 46. They live in Warwickshire with their children Peter, 18, and Mia, 14. Natasha says: BeIng married to an Aussie, it was inevitable that one day we’d upgrade from a barbecue to a purpose-built outdoor kitchen.
Ilya has lived in england for over 20 years, but his passion for cooking and eating outdoors has never dwindled — he’s even been known to cook our Christmas turkey out there. We have a huge, 50-metre long garden at our threebedroom home and had the outdoor kitchen built in 2013 after Ilya sketched the design while sitting in a traffic jam on the M1 one day.
It cost around £20,000, but we’ve long since had our money’s worth out of it.
Made from granite, which is pretty indestructible and hardy to the elements, the kitchen is over four metres long and just shy of a metre deep, with an in- built barbecue — which we’re about to replace with a top- of-the-range Sub Zero Wolf grill costing £4,000 — as well as preparation areas and a tap and sink.
Although it has running water, you’re more likely to find the sink filled with ice to chill bottles of my Veuve Clicquot champagne or white wine.
There’s just one rule when it comes to cooking outdoors: we avoid burgers and sausages. That said, we did make one exception when our son, Peter, turned 18 earlier this year, knowing that’s what he and his friends would want to eat.
Ordinarily, you’ll find delicious fish on the grill or slow- cooked belly pork. We also invite chefs over occasionally to cook speciality things like Thai street food for us.
The weather doesn’t deter us and if we’ve planned to cook something in the outdoor kitchen then that’s what happens — Ilya simply holds a brolly over his head.
However, eating the food outdoors can be a different matter in poor weather and last year we managed it only a handful of times. This summer, we’ve been cooking and eating in the garden all the time, including breakfast. It’s just more sociable and fun than using our indoor kitchen.
Even rain and hail don’t put us off
EMILY HAWKINS, 41, lives near St Albans with her husband Ben, 39, who co-owns a landscaping and manufacturing company, and their children Sophia, four, and Samuel, two. She works part-time doing social media marketing and photography. Emily says: THe British weather never dims my and Ben’s love of cooking and entertaining outdoors. We recently cooked in our outdoor kitchen through sunshine, rain and hail all in one day. We moved into our home two years ago and are slowly renovating and extending it.
But having an alfresco kitchen and eating area was a top priority and we’ve barely cooked in the house since installing our gorgeous Dutch WWOO outdoor kitchen.
It’s three metres long, made from a combination of concrete, wood and steel, and cost £6,300 — proof you don’t need to blow the budget
to have something so on-trend in your garden.
Star of the show is a large version of the Big Green Egg cooker — a ceramic cooker based on a Japanese ‘kamado’, or stove, which can be used as an oven, grill or smoker. It added up to around £3,000 of the total price and is built into the concrete work surfaces.
It’s popular with well- known chefs as it’s perfect for cooking for a crowd — we’ll really put it to the test for Ben’s 40th birthday party at the end of August when we have 40 guests coming to celebrate.
Alongside it is a beautiful butler sink with cold water plumbed in, which is ideal for rinsing off utensils and plates rather than having to keep traipsing into the house with them. We’re also about to add an outdoor wine fridge and have a sail put up over the area so that we can dine outside even when it’s pouring with rain.
Since having our children, we’ve felt a little out of touch with our friends, and don’t generally invite lots of people round to the house as it takes so much time to get things ship-shape inside and then tidy up after everyone has gone. But now I’m excited about being able to have friends and family round to enjoy the garden instead.
The kids can all play safely while Ben and I can be sociable with the grown-ups as we prepare and cook the food. Ben’s a fantastic cook and I’m quite happy to be his commis chef and chief cocktail maker.
We like to go to town with food and presentation and particularly love cooking Asian and South American foods, influenced by the eight months we spent travelling the world before we got married in 2012. During the recent heatwave, we were outside every night for what felt like weeks experimenting in the kitchen.
But we’re also fairly hardy, so I’m looking forward to cooking risottos, soups and stews out there in the autumn, as well as mulled wine in the winter when we can wrap up in blankets around the fire pit.
We use the Belfast sink to chill the rosé
Lauren OLLerenshaw, 37, is a company director and lives in stratford-upon-avon with husband steve, 47, a lawyer, and their two children, Thomas, six, and scarlett, four. Lauren says: SIncE installing the outdoor kitchen in our garden about eight years ago, we have used it year- round, including every Halloween and christmas Eve, both of which have become family traditions.
On christmas Eve, we always cook wild boar sausages, big hunks of lamb and tacos and then decamp to the warmth of the outbuilding behind it to eat.
The kitchen and patio area cost around £ 20,000, including landscaping, and it features an Argentinian style grill as the centrepiece, plus a Belfast sink with a stainless steel tap.
The grill and sink are flanked on either side by work surfaces made from chunky scaffolding boards which double as a brilliant food preparation area and a quirky cocktail bar.
Steve and I adore cooking. We were inspired to have an Ox Grill after holidaying in Argentina where everyone cooks on a parrilla over embers.
I vividly remember the first time I tasted the incredible flavour of meat cooked over wood, versus that done on the bog- standard gas barbecue.
Our grill cost over £3,000 and has a fire basket — known as a brasero — where the wood burns down to embers which are then the perfect cooking temperature.
We simply pull them up through to the grill as we need them and once it’s full, it retains heat for several hours.
A wheel at the side allows us to alter the intensity for foods that need less heat, such as fish, vegetables or even whole chickens or shoulders of lamb that need to be cooked slowly.
Meanwhile, the sink, which cost about £1,000 including fitting, is as useful for chilling my favourite summer rosé as it is for rinsing plates or keeping fish and scallops on ice until we’re ready to cook them.
We use our outdoor kitchen for everything from ordinary family mealtimes to birthday parties and special occasions such as the christening celebrations for both of our children, and we entertain groups of ten to 12 friends plus their kids every other weekend throughout the summer.
The biggest difference between having a barbecue on the patio and a purpose- built outdoor kitchen is the flexibility to prepare and cook meals for much larger groups without having to run back and forth to the kitchen in the house.
It also looks the part. A barbecue may do the job, but it won’t look good year after year, whereas our kitchen has been built to withstand the elements and looks as great now as it did when we built it eight years ago.