Perfect pairings for the steak on the barbecue

Ilearned a lot about barbecuing when I had a cheap imitation Weber but when it eventually fell apart I decided to acquire the real thing. In a nutshell, what I like about it is being able to control the temperature; as barbecues go, Webers are precision machines.

I’ve never cooked on a Green Egg but my affluent friends who have splashed out the price of a good domestic cooker on one all assure me that they, too, are simply wonderful for cooking outside.

Now, I should say that while I do cook sausages and burgers in this way, what I really enjoy doing on the Weber is a piece of beef considerably bigger than a steak. My favoured cut is a côte de boeuf or a pretty large slice of rib steak, with bone, or bones, still in situ. I get mine either from James Whelan Butchers or from my local butcher, Fitzgerald’s in Fermoy, both of whom offer very wellaged meat. My latest côte from the latter had spent seven weeks in the presence of Himalayan salt, a process pioneered in Ireland by the legendary Peter Hannan.

Anyway, it was magnificent and took longer to cook than I’d anticipated because — I’m guessing — the salt-ageing makes the flesh effectively denser so that the heat finds it harder to penetrate. I should add that I tend to cook beef over indirect heat: coals to one side, meat on the other, bottom and top vents fully open and the top vent positioned above meat. A meat thermometer helps, of course, but I find you can learn a lot by touch and feel.

And yes, I season the beef with salt before cooking. It’s utter nonsense to say that this ‘dries out’ the meat, as Keith Floyd once admonished me. Season with plenty of sea salt, cook the damn thing medium-rare and it will be as juicy as anyone could wish.

What to serve it with? Our own spuds, green salad, tomato salad, maybe some Béarnaise. Oh, you mean wine?

Well, when I’m feeling traditional, I reach for Rioja or Bordeaux and there’s no doubt that they work brilliantly. But Malbec is rapidly becoming the world’s favourite red wine grape, especially in its Argentinian form, and they certainly eat a lot of steak down there. All of the ones I mention this week will accompany a steak very pleasingly, my Wine of the Week being a bit of a revelation, to be honest. But classics have the edge in my book.