Recipes often suggest that the meat, fish or vegetable element is best cooked on a barbecue. Can I get close to that result indoors?
Justin, Bournemouth, England, UK
Well, yes and no. “How grilling works is that the fat drips on to the coals below and it smokes, which permeates the meat. So you can’t really recreate that, for obvious reasons,” says David Carter, chef-founder of Smokestak in London.
That said, there are a few tactics Justin can deploy to get close. The first and simplest, says Jack Stein, chef-director at Rick Stein Restaurants, is to use a griddle pan: “It gives you the ability to get those charred bar marks on whatever you’re cooking.” That’s the route Patrick Williams, chef-patron of Kudu Collective in south-east London, would take for…