Roasting ANd Baking

All the recipes on this page involve either roasting and baking or hot smoking and to do this style of outddor cooking you need a grill with a lid. Barbecue terminology for this style of cookery is indirect cooking. In other words, your heat source is not in immediate contact with your food and dependent on the brand of grill that you have, this can be achieved in a number of ways.

Most of the time I cook on a Monolith ceramic grill because it is supremely easy to maintain a stable temperature over long periods of time whatever the outside temperature.

The roasting and baking set up is as shown below with either one or both the half moon heat deflector stones sited to act as a barrier between the heat of the charcoal fire  in the bottom of the grill and the grill grate (not shown) where your food is.

Use the heat deflctor stones to set up for roasting and baking in a Monolith

I also have a Grillson wood pellet grill for those days when I need instant heat at the flick of a switch. In fact it was actually the Grillson that I used for the buffalo cauliflower recipe in the picture at the top.

The Grillson operates in a different way but the principle is the same. Direct heat is fired from the side into the food chamber using air jet technology so there is a barrier in the diffuser (horizontal pipe) to to block the direct heat and create an indirect cooking area. It's the "U" shaped piece that slides across to vary the amount of direct / indirect cooking area.

There are other indirect cooking set ups dependent on the type of grill you have. If you have a kettle style grill then you'll have your charcoal to one side and your food to the other. Similarly on a gas grill it's food on one side and the burner to provide the heat is on the other.

the difference between roasting and baking

Some say that temperature plays a part in differentiating between roasting and baking but for me it's the same thing and maybe just depends on what I'm cooking. I roast veg, I bake bread, that's it and the only other things that define roasting and baking are:

• Indirect heat as we've already discussed
• Un-covered - otherwise one could argue that we're steaming

There may be the odd occasion in when I'm going to add a few wood chips onto my fire to create some smoky flavour and I'm not going to categorise this as "hot smoking" or "American barbecue" because these terms like "low and slow" are related to the cooking of animal products and that's not what I want this site to be associated with.

BBQ Recipes For Roasting And baking

Buffalo Cauliflower With Tangy Ranch Dip

Baked Potatoes With Colourful Crunchy Coleslaw

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