Chasing the Live-Fire Magic

What Rig do you really need?

Dream Wood Burning Stove

Irish barbecue used to be one of life’s great oxymorons. Largely practiced by mansplaining morons, like Paul Howard’s brilliant fictional creation Ross O’Carroll-Kelly, BBQ always featured dudes who would slip on an apron adorned with a double entendre slogan, fire up the gas barbecue, and performatively burn some sausages and chicken breasts whilst everyone else got sunburnt.

Those days are gone. Instead, we have become a nation who can conduct a conversation about banchan whilst simultaneously assessing the hydration requirements of pizza dough. Where once we didn’t know our arse from our elbow when it came to barbecue, we now debate the merits of a wood-fired Ooni or a Weber kettle, and let everyone know which stalls we will be heading to first at The Big Grill.

It was Ali Dunworth who told us that when she would meet up with her Maynooth mates to have a pint, that the lads would be talking about their Ooni dough hydration rather than GAA or Shamrock Rovers (their poor mothers!) That was the moment when we realised that summertime in Ireland is now all about chasing the magic of live fire cooking, whether you are rotating your Margherita on a Gozney, or trying to finally master the perfect brisket on a Kamado (Full Disclosure: mastering the perfect brisket continues to elude us.)

Falling hard for live fire is dangerous: it is every bit as maniacal a culinary pursuit as sourdough bread baking, but much more expensive. You need a Banchan guy. You need a rig. You will decide on your holiday rental based entirely on whether or not the gaff has an outdoor grill. You will travel to Bilbao just so you can hire a car and head to Extebarri whilst everyone else goes to the Guggenheim. You will likely have opinions on Texas vs Louisiana barbecue.

But here’s the truth about barbecue: we humans are wired for live fire. We love the smell of smoke – even a hint of it – because it forebodes deliciousness. When it comes to smoke, and smoky cooking, we are all Pavlov’s dog. We can’t help it. The great food scientist and writer, Harold McGee, puts it poetically: “Smokiness remains a mark of human influence, warmth, nourishment, and community.”

Influence. Warmth. Nourishment. Community. All because of smokiness!

As flavour scientist Arielle Johnson points out, “Most of taste is actually smell”, so “smoky” is not a taste at all. Like fruitiness, floral, roasted, herby, the lure of smoke comes from our secondary sense of smell - retronasal olfaction – and we’ve been captured by it over millions of years of evolution in our senses. We actually like the smell of things that nourish us, and the smell of smoke cooking food is a smell that activates our sensory detection threshold. We need to smell very little of it to respond with feelings of hunger and excitement.

Humans have 400 genes for sensing smell, which means we’ve reserved 2% of our genomes just for smell and flavor. This is by far the largest family of genes in our genome and, as Arielle points out, we did it “All so we could sense and derive pleasure from infinitesimally tiny qualities of specific minor by-products of cooking, micronutrients, terroir, ecology, and formation in the form of flavour.”

Compounds that signal vitamins are 285,000 times more flavorful than similar compounds that don’t. Arielle writes: “We are exquisitely and especially sensitive to flavors from cooking, ecology, and quality-of-life essentials”.

Live Fire Kit: What you need to create the Ultimate Wood Burning Experience in your back garden…

Provence 2023, and our memories will always focus around a large wood fired oven constructed in the white limestone of the region set in the grounds of the house we were renting. The moment we saw it, we knew this was what our holiday was going to revolve around. We’d never used a wood fired oven, never having had the resources to build one, but once lit, we were quickly hooked on feu en bois.

We picked the tips from the metre high stalks of rosemary in the garden and threaded them with lamb. We made socca pancakes in the traditional style, and put every piece of available vegetable and fruit into the oven to try it out. The house boasted a smart kitchen and oven, but we couldn’t wait to cook outside. Wood smoke and flame made everything taste super-good.

Lamb and Rosemary brochettes

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Creating the ultimate live fire set up