Team HaloodieFoodie’s beginner’s guide to BBQ.
Team HaloodieFoodie grill and BBQ all year round. Sadly, most Brits only grill when the weather is settled between April & October. This post is designed to improve your BBQ game. With these tips and tricks, you soon will become a grill master.
Equipment
- Lidded Charcoal BBQ you can use a gas BBQ.
- Charcoal briquettes or lumpwood
- Chimney starter
- Pair of tongs
- Digital instant-read thermometer
- Smoking wood any fruit hardwood such as apple, plum, cherry
Instructions
How to light a charcoal BBQ?
- I use a Weber charcoal chimney starter.
- How to use a charcoal chimney starter: Part 1
- How to use a charcoal chimney starter: Part 2
- How to use a charcoal chimney starter: Part 3
- How to use a charcoal chimney starter: Part 4
- Hold the chimney starter by the handles and slowly place the lit coal into your charcoal BBQ.
A question of marination?
- Only salt (Sodium Chloride, NaCl) is small enough to pass through the cell membrane.
- Dry brine with ½ tsp salt per kg of meat.
- What about other spices? Please do add other spices. But this is a surface-only marinade and the spices won't penetrate into the meat, ONLY SALT can penetrate deep into the muscle.
- Allow the chicken to dry brine for as long as possible.
Indirect grilling:
- Place the charcoal on one side of the BBQ with a piece of fruit hardwood on top of the grill grates.
- Place the chicken on the opposite side of the grill, close the lid of the BBQ and allow the chicken to slowly cook with the indirect heat.
- After 25 minutes the chicken has darkened with the action of the smoke.
- Check the internal temperature of the chicken by using an instant-read thermometer.Target temperature:75°C for chicken legs and thighs (dark meat)65°C for chicken breast (white meat)I will discuss chicken pasterisation temperatures later in this post.
- Close the lid and continue to cook until we reach the desired temperature.
- The chicken breast has reached the temperature of 65°C.
- Sear the chicken breast over the hot coals.
- The chicken breast remains super juicy.
- Cook the chicken thighs/leg until the temperature reaches 75°C. Finish with a final sear to crisp up the chicken skin.
- 'The chicken looks RAW!'. The pink colour is caused by the interaction of smoke with the meat. The final temperature is above 75°C and thus fully cooked.
Coal matters!
- Charcoal Briquettes: Part 1
- Charcoal Briquettes: Part 2
- Restaurant-style Briquettes:
- Lumpwood Charcoal: Part 1
- Lumpwood Charcoal: Part 2
Questions
- I've always been told to cook chicken to 75°C but you are advocating cooking the chicken breast to 65°C? Please explain why?
- What's the difference between charcoal and gas BBQ's?
- How do you keep the temperature low enough to smoke?
Salams bro, great reminders for us BBQ novices!
Would love to see your Chicken wing Turkish style recipe on here.
Jzk for the feedback. Its in the pipeline inshallah. For the moment it’s on my Instagram story highlights.
Assalamu alaykum.
Great info and tips!
Some feedback: Is is possible to make all the clips and slides/screenshot into one YouTube video as well. Some of my friends found it difficult to follow the short videos on the website. Or a link to the Instagram highlights ? Thanks
Ws,
Jzk for your valuable feedback.
Since Dec 17 our unique recipe content has been on Instagram highlights.
Sadly, we exhausted the maximum number of Instagram story highlights, and thus everytime we posted a new recipe an older recipe vanished! 😠
Furthermore, our followers found that searching for recipes on Instagram was very cumbersome and many others were pausing my story highlights to note down ingredients and steps.
We decided to move to a bigger and better platform with full listed ingredients, step by step written as well as our distinctive video recipe content.
We feel Haloodiefoodie.com is unique and groundbreaking. I’m yet to see a food website with this level of detail.
And it’s totally free.
It’s Team Haloodiefoodie’s Sadaqah Jariyah (perpetual charity) to the ummah!
I hope to see your (and your friends) amazing cooks in our socials soon.
Duas.
Team Haloodiefoodie