Western Daily Press (Saturday)
Outdoor cooking – it’s not just for summer
Martin Hesp gets all fired up with some hot tips from barbecue king Marcus Bawdon
One of life’s many natural laws states that if some job or action is very simple in principle, then there will be layers of nuance and complexity lying just under the surface waiting to ensnare the unwary and turn the whole thing into a dog’s dinner. Barbecue is a case in point where, indeed, all too many burnt offerings really can end up in a dog bowl. But the basic principle is as simple as it gets: light a flame and cook something over it.
Simple. And yet all too many barbecues end up – if not in absolute failure – then at least with some degree of disappointment. Cooking over a live flame has a romance about it and done right it looks fantastic, smells amazing and tastes heavenly. But it is very much not a case of flicking a switch to make the magic happen. Because of its simplicity, it is a job that requires the human element to rule the roost – which means there are skills to be honed, a craft to be learned…
Enter: a large and jolly West Countryman called Marcus Bawdon from Somerset. For those of you who haven’t heard of him, Marcus is a kind of Cristiano Ronaldo of the British barbecue world – by which I mean, he is premiership royalty when it comes to the art of searing edible items over live flames.
The 47-year-old oil-industry geologist has written books on BBQ – he has founded a successful magazine which talks of nothing but BBQ – and now he has opened the UK BBQ School in the South West.
It was an idea waiting to happen and ever since he set up shop earlier this year just a mile off the M5 near Cullompton at the well-known Fordmore Farm Shop, Marcus has been busy to the bone marrow – I mention that as the BBQ King uses a lot of that delicious substance.
There are only a couple of other barbecue schools in the UK and Marcus really did hit the ground running with his because it’s a well-known fact that the pandemic lockdowns inspired a huge interest in cooking at home. Or, to be precise, the art of cooking well at home.
We can all chuck a few sausages onto a 30 quid BBQ but, do that a few times and if you’ve been bitten by the outdoor cooking bug, you’ll want to create bigger and better.
Why not, for example, cook the family Sunday roast outdoors and enjoy all those complex smoky seared flavours which only barbecue can produce?
Why not indeed, says Marcus – who will happily show you how to do that very thing at his new school. I can vouch for this because he produced such a lunch for me only recently. And a very delicious repast it was too.
The school is in a purpose-built facility created by the owners of the Fordmore Farm Shop for Marcus – a large, airy, open-sided structure where the king of charcoal keeps and lights numerous barbecue appliances of all different shapes and sizes.
Several of these will be in action long before you arrive at the school, so that you immediately realise why the structure is open-sided. And if the heavens open there’s a cleverly designed roof which will keep you dry while the smoke escapes.
Marcus will already have various dishes on the go and it’s not long before you’re nibbling something like “dirty toast” cooked with the help of some beef dripping and piled high with crumbled black pudding and a dressing of sriracha mayonnaise. If you didn’t know it, then the word “dirty” in barbecue terms means cooked directly on the hot coals. As Marcus is keen to point out, the toast or steaks or whatever else you chuck straight onto the charcoal remains surprisingly un-dirty, it just happens to be a very fast, efficient and delicious way of cooking things.
After the starter cooked on a basic open fire-pit, the action will turn to one of the many kamado style barbecues at the school where (in our case at least) a large chuck of prime Devon Long Horn sirloin beef on the bone will be slowly turning from raw to pink and unctuous and fabulous. And there will be the veg, cooking slowly but merrily away in various cast iron pans – in my case wonderful melt-in-the-mouth shallots cooked almost but not quite to a crisp, red cabbage in wine and a really luxurious creamy celeriac gratin.
Marcus is a very cool, laid-back sort of guy. You can’t imagine him getting into a faff about anything – and I say that because while all this food is cooking he’s talking to me all the time, making tea and coffee, and generally giving tip after tip about how to barbecue well and simply, with little or no fuss. There is no fuss – and it is one of the best lunches
I’ve had all year.
So, who is this Somerset-born and bred lad who has ended up in Devon running what could be described as the nation’s premier barbecue school?
“My family lived at Burnham-on-Sea and certainly we were brought up to enjoy good produce, but we never really barbecued anything. In fact, I was a vegetarian for 14 years,” said Marcus, startling me because I follow his Instagram account and have never seen anyone cook so much meat.
“What I eat now is always good quality meat,” he shrugs. “But back in the days when I went to Plymouth University, supermarket ‘value’ chicken was all I could afford and I decided I didn’t want to eat that stuff. In fact I went on to do most of my oil rig days as a veggie – you can imagine my American colleagues on rigs off the coast of Africa saying: ‘Why ain’t you eatin’ meat, boy?’
“But we did do barbecues on those rigs – health and safety wasn’t so strict in Africa – and we caught tuna and prawns and barbecued them on the rig.”
Back at home Marcus’s wife Lisa was a meat eater. “She’d be having steak and I’d be having tofu and chips. Of course, it didn’t take long for me to try that – and eventually I thought I’d have go at cooking a nice rib-eye. I’m the sort of bloke who, when he does something, he just has to throw the whole book at it and do it well. Research it, read up on it. The steak was delicious. And that was it!”
The couple moved to the Devon countryside outside Cullompton with their three children and found themselves with a large garden.
“Of course, when you’ve got a nice garden you start getting friends and family gathering – and I was barbecuing the basic stuff like sausages and burgers and feeling pretty stressed by it.
“But in other ways I really enjoyed it and, as I say, doing it the standard way isn’t enough for me. I’d go back to the oil rig and spend my spare time researching barbecue – and when I came home I cooked and cooked.
“About 10 years ago no one was really doing barbecue properly in this country. I remember on my son’s first birthday we spit-roast an entire pig – I am not one to mess around. That was a big jump. You become popular quite quickly with friends when you really get into barbecuing. I wasn’t difficult because the BBQ bar was set pretty low in the UK.
“I was always into photography and writing, so I could tap away doing a nice recipe with photos. And now, in past five years, barbecue has gone boom! Something that was my hobby came into the light!
“That’s partly because cooking outdoors has been neglected as a culinary thing
– you see chefs in white jackets at food shows with all their foams and micro-herbs.
To me it’s all lacking a bit of soul – I think food should be a more wholesome thing. We need that more than ever.
“I remember going to food events and getting overlooked because I was just the ‘BBQ guy’. That does sting a bit. But then you start getting chefs coming to you asking advice –
because a lot of chefs don’t have the training with barbecue. And now you see kamados in restaurant kitchens and on TV – and I can see the chefs don’t really know how to use them.”
By now Marcus is in his stride, talking about the differing techniques which can be employed in the
various types of barbecue appliance. He regularly uses a car-analogy saying this like: “This kamado is like a VW camper – it’s slow and comfortable and it’ll take the whole family safely along. You can’t go wrong. But this open fire barbecue is like a classic sports car – it’s thrilling, you feel the wind in your hair – but you really have to know how to drive it.”
He also shows us a book about classic British open fire cooking written by Devon based author
Robert Deeley. “This is real
cooking,” sighs Marcus, admiring photos of some open-fire spit-roasting device made 800 years ago.
Returning to modern times Marcus tells me that a typical day at his school start starts with a bout of basic barbecuing. “I ask people to get rid of the ideas they already have. We do a hangar steak directly on the coals – and it is the thing most people want to do when they get home. People who really know how to barbecue meat cook on the coals – but you’ve got to use the right charcoal, not the briquettes. Hangar steak is four minutes a side. You do not get the pretty sear with neat lines across the steak – but that’s just ‘meat
lipstick’ anyway.” Marcus started to gain a reputation for his love for barbecue when he set up his
Country Woodsmoke Instagram account. Since then he has written two highly successful books, Wood and Fire and Skewered and he founded the successful magazine BBQ, Fire, Food and Outdoor Living.
“It wasn’t as if I’d planned this school,” he said. “Covid came along and said, ‘Have a go!’ When things give you a shove in the right direction, you have to recognise it.
“James and Tom who run the farm shop put all this up. They said, ‘We will build it, if you rent it from us’. Fantastic! It’s three minutes from home.
“I’ve been doing BBQ lessons from home for the past five years – but since we opened here, I’ve been blown away by the demand.”
I was blown away with Marcus’s food and by the morning I spent with him. I went home armed with an array of useful tips and thought that if my charming new friend doesn’t have his own specialist TV show soon then I’d eat my barbecued hat.