Tag Archives: Pollo a la brasa

Charcoal grilled fresh water fish in Quistococha

Sausages are dead

Sausages are dead.

if you’re a true blue Aussie and pride yourself BBQ’ing sausages on a gas burner, think again. When you buy sausages, you’re at the mercy of the butcher who processed them. You have no idea what’s in them (cartilage, ligaments, fat), unless you’re lucky enough to have a label that clearly explains what ingredients were used in making them. Even then, manufacturing processes can’t fully control factors such as humans cutting corners or flies dropping into the mixing batch. And do you know what is the allowable percentage of fat content in your sausages? Do you even know what that tube the sausages are encased in is made of? Is it a dissolvable synthetic material or animal’s intestine?

Have you ever tried something other than sausages? For example Turkish/Uyghur lamb skewers (with cumin, salt and paprika) or Russian pork and onion “shashlik“? – you say you haven’t? You really are in for a gastronomical delight!

Australia, it’s time to rethink your meat purchases for the old traditional Aussie BBQ. And while we’re at it, let’s not just stop at purchasing sausages, let’s rethink how we cook our meat. Are you using a gas BBQ? Oh my lord, it’s time to go to your local BBQ vendor and drag yourself out of your stereotypical nightmare and into 2016.

In this day and age, you want to be cooking with red hot coals on a hot grill – your taste buds will thank you for it. Can you begin to imagine the depth of flavours you can achieve from cooking with seasoned Australian hardwood? When you cook with coals, the fat renders off the meat and drips onto the burning ambers, this gives off a smoke that encapsulates your meat. You can’t obtain the same depth from cooking on a gas burner. At best, the solidified fat on your flame tamer catches on fire and those flames burn your sausages for a distasteful bitterness – if this makes you happy, then I do feel sorry for you.

Grill on wheels

Grill on wheels

Grill on wheels

Grill on wheels – if you Google these words, you’ll probably end up seeing some hotted up cars with big fat “grills” and massive shiny rims. If that’s what you were looking for, then I congratulate you.

On the other hand, if you were looking for something to roast meat on, that has a certain level of mobility then you probably ended up here.

The grill on wheels was an idea that came to me after I made a grill for the WFO that I used for roasting a pig in the WFO. When I pushed the grill into the oven, it scratched the surface of the bricks and made my teeth grind at the same time. So I came up with this simple idea to easily insert and extract the grill from the wood fired oven.

The wheels are made from solid steel flat bar that I cut into squares, then transformed into circles. They are attached to the grill by bolts that were welded to the grill’s ‘feet’. If you have mild steel square bar (10mm x 10mm), some flat 10mm x 75mm bar and 4 M10 nuts and bolts (and know how to weld), then the grill on wheels concept is quite easy to put together. Here are some photos showing the build process  and then the grill on wheels put into action. I certainly hope you enjoy these, as much as I enjoyed eating the Peruvian charcoal chicken that came out of the oven!