Breathe explores the primal joy of cooking outside over flames
One of the greatest shames about barbecues is that they’re often reserved for the summer months. Of course, there’s an obvious charm to eating al fresco during the long balmy evenings of December to February, but then there are other distractions – salads, ice cream, and sunshine – and the fired-up barbecue becomes almost secondary. In many ways, cooler nights are the time when cooking outdoors really comes into its own, when the evenings are a little more brisk and huddling round a crackling fire as you cook a nourishing meal takes on a whole new level of magic.
Connecting with nature
Take the cusp of spring, for example: it’s a time of mellow fruitfulness, the trees are beginning to blossom, the weather’s still cool but comfortable. There’s an abundance of new season produce which can be cooked outside over an open flame or barbecue. Or winter, where the air is crisp and hearty veggies are abundant, and a fire-roasted meal warms us from the inside out. It’s a beautiful chance to cook and connect with the natural world around us.
Linking to our past
Of course, you don’t have to be an anthropologist to know that discovering fire was one of the pivotal moments of human evolution, freeing up energy taken to digest raw food and allowing the brain to develop. It’s for this reason that humans are totally hypnotised by the flickering and glowing of a flame – it’s in our nature to congregate around a fire. The heat from fires has been harnessed to cook food for millions of years. We were doing it long before we knew how to speak or clothe ourselves – in fact, we were pretty good at it. Despite being in our DNA, it holds an element of unpredictability for many modern cooks.
But cooking over fire puts a hold on the immediacy of modern kitchen gadgets, and helps us slow down and appreciate the process rather than just the results. With a fire, you become a manager of heat, equating distance over temperature over time. It unifies your senses so that recipes become entangled with ideas, not to mention wind and rain – elements you need to balance against timber and charcoal. Roasting food outdoors under an open sky, with hot embers and smoke, can be feel-good cooking at its finest.
Speed goes out of the equation when you’re cooking over fire, as do proper recipes and precise measurements. But that’s where the real magic begins.
Earth ovens
Burying a heat source and cooking underground is something that’s been practised in different ways and by different cultures for many thousands of years. The most famous earth ovens – or hāngī – are those of the Māori people of New Zealand, where traditionally, fish and sweet potato are wrapped in flax leaves and cooked underground for three to four hours.
There are different ways of constructing a hāngī, but at its most basic, a large hole is dug in the ground and a fire is set either in its base or next to it. Stones are placed in the fire and when they are as hot as they’ll get (which is very hot), they’re arranged in the base of the hole. Raw food is placed on the stones and covered with a layer of leaves or cloth, and then everything is buried under a layer of earth.
The earth retains the heat incredibly well and the food cooks gently, sometimes for many hours. Essentially, you’re creating heat in a dug-out pit, and trapping it there by re-covering it with soil. Just like a modern domestic oven, it relies on the basic principle of cooking food with a heat source contained inside an insulated space.
