Fire & Spice

There’s a lot more to flame-grilling than charred snags and burgers. Learn how to make fire an ingredient in its own right and revitalise your barbecue game with these innovative, nutritious dishes from three masters of the blaze

P H O T O G R A P H Y B Y J A M I E L A U PEOPLE HAVE BEEN cooking with flames for around two million years. Aussie blokes in suburban backyards have been wielding the tongs with relish for generations. And yet it’s taken a while for the international food scene to catch on. Many of the 20th century’s finest culinary artists would toil with convection ovens, gas stoves and bratt pans, or later microwaves and even water baths. But it wasn’t until fairly recently that commercial kitchens began utilising the most versatile and sophisticated cooking source of all: fire, and by extension, smoke.

It was Andre Blais’s Bodean’s, the first branch of which opened in London’s Soho in 2002, that brought the wonders of gnarly cuts of meat, smoked low and slow, to a modern palate that associated barbecue with the taste of lighter fluid and the texture of leather. But it took a young Welshman by the name of Tomos Parry, first as head chef at Kitty Fisher’s and then with his own restaurant Brat, to show the breadth of cooking with fire. Inspired by the food of the Basque Country, cooked over flame or in the asador, Parry proved with signature dishes such as whole grilled turbot that fire and refinement need not be mutually exclusive.

Now some of the most exciting food in the world is being scorched over charcoal or flavoured with wood smoke – and it’s not just hunks of meat, either. From the Berber-influenced fare at The Barbary (salmon blackened over embers and burned eggplant syrup) to the innovative use of the flame at Manteca (smoked shiitakes, charred hispi cabbage, grilled onions), this is cooking that brings a new dimension to foods we thought we knew well.

“Cooking with fire is primal,” says David Carter, co-owner of Manteca. “Whether using smoke and indirect heat to cook, grilling directly over fire or even on top of smouldering embers, the options are endlessly exciting. It’s Stone Age stuff and no induction hob will ever be as fun. Plus, the flavour is unrivalled. It’s not clean and it’s not supposed to be. But a lick of flame on the right ingredient can be game-changing. You won’t even need tomato sauce.