Woe betide you if there’s an American in the party. Our Stateside cousins consider themselves the inventors of the barbecue, and in the past five years or so have become obsessed with them. Your average Hank will curl his lip and point out that what we do is, in fact, grilling.  Strictly, they’ll point out with the sternness of a true geek, barbecuing isn’t chucking a few hamburgers on a rack over hot coal. It is cooking large chunks of meat over coals with the lid down, long and slow. And I mean long. Sixteen hours of constant monitoring is not uncommon, which is known as “babysitting the pit”.  I once cooked a butt of pork this way, which involved getting up at hourly intervals through the night to check the temperature and adjust the air vents. It tasted good, as far as I could tell in my bleary-eyed state, but not nearly as good as a proper night’s sleep. Happily, there have been a rash of openings of American-style barbecue restaurants, places such as Pitt Cue Co in London, who will do the babysitting for you and deal out pulled pork in a bun for less than a tenner.  But however irritatingly pedantic, nerdish even, those Statesiders are, they do understand the art of cooking over charcoal, and they take it very, very seriously. Down in the south-eastern states, the heart of barbecue country, the magazine Texas Monthly has just appointed its first dedicated barbecue editor, Daniel Vaughn.  And I mean dedicated – Vaughn eats barbecue four or five times a week. Who better for advice on best barbecue, or should I say grilling, practice?  I rang Vaughn, in his garden in Dallas – which he was sharing with a Disney-princess bouncy castle in preparation for his daughter’s fourth birthday party yesterday. In between sips of beer, he filled me in.  Gas barbecues, he told me, “are convenient, like stopping for a drive-through burger. If that’s what you’ve gotta do, that’s what you’ve gotta do.” The flavour, though, won’t be so good as cooking over charcoal, or best of all the ashes of a wood fire, which gives “a deeper, woodsier flavour than charcoal”. As for the new Harley-Davidsons of the barbecue world, the exorbitantly expensive Big Green Eggs: “They hold the heat really well, but for grilling you don’t need that level of insulation.” And disposable barbecues? “Yeah, I’ve used them for burgers. You wouldn’t want to do anything more on them.”  The biggest mistake people make, says Vaughn, is to “try to get too fancy. If you start with a great piece of meat, salt and pepper is all you need. You don’t want to buy a great porterhouse and smother it in sweet sauce.” Steak needs to be thick cut, an inch-and-a-half ideally, to ensure you can get a nice brown crust on the outside without overcooking the inside. Pat them dry and give them 20 minutes out of the fridge to come to room temperature before introducing them to the grill. And don’t forget the salt and pepper. With a thick steak, Vaughn explains, “people tend to under-season, because they forget they have a lower surface-to-meat ratio”.  As for vegetables, Vaughn cooks them in a foil package right on the barbecue. A favourite mix is new potatoes, onions, mushrooms and butter – plus a slug of beer. “A little bit of beer always helps,” he mused, before heading off to plan the charcoal-grilled hot dogs for the birthday party.  Despite my nightmarish pork butt experience, cooking big joints on the barbecue doesn’t have to involve an all-nighter. Before you rush out for a bumper pack of burgers and sausages, consider a boned-out leg of lamb instead. Rub it with salt and stud it with rosemary, anchovies and garlic, then push the hot coals to the edges of the barbecue, and cook the lamb in the middle, or on “indirect heat” as it’s technically known.  You’ll need to cover it to create all-round heat: either pull down the lid of the barbecue, if you’re equipped with one, or invert a large roasting tin over the top. Cook, turning once or twice, until it is browned and still pink in the middle – investigate by cutting in with a knife if necessary, or use a probe to check that the internal temperature has reached 60C. Leave to rest for 15 minutes on a big wooden board – ideally one with a groove to catch juices – and carve into fat slices to serve. Now you’re barbecuing.  1. If you’re buying a barbecue, get one with a domed lid so you can cook larger pieces of meat “lid down” as well as grill. Failing that, an old roasting tin makes a makeshift lid, as long as you have heavy-duty oven gloves for lifting it off.  2. Get the fire going well in advance. Before that first steak goes on, the flames need to have died away, and the coals should no longer be glowing red but covered in a layer of grey ash.  3. Put a table right by the barbecue for preparation. You wouldn’t design a kitchen without a work surface by the cooker, would you?  1. Be restrained with marinades, especially ready-made ones which have bullying flavours.  2. Brush food lightly with oil before cooking, and remember that any excess will drip on to the coals and burst into flames – which is bad. Keep a spray-bottle of water to hand to kill any flames that do flare up.  3. If you want a sticky barbecue glaze on your chicken, cook the meat first on the relatively gentle heat away from the coals, then move to the hotter area right over them. Cook, turning and brushing with the barbecue marinade, until glazed and touched with a deep brown.  4. Buy decent quality meat. Economy donkey burgers and mechanically recovered meat sausages make for grim eating. Cheapest grilling options: home-made burgers (use butcher’s mince, which is better than supermarket stuff), chicken legs, pork chops or fresh sardines.  5. Use a probe thermometer to check the internal temperature, or just cut into the meat to see that it’s done.  6. For recipes, American dishes can be too sweet for our tastes. Try cuisines that have been grilling over fire for millennia, such as Middle Eastern. Start with dips like humous and harissa-spiked pepper purée, and leave them on the table to eat as relishes with the meat.
Sunshine on a bank holiday Monday is sure to bring out the inner Fred   Flintstone in our menfolk. Xanthe Clay welcomes the return of a   seasonal tradition, and offers some tips on preparing and cooking the   perfect outside grill