A BBQ'd Sunday Lunch

It's Scotland, it's February, the temperature hasn't reach double figures but.... it's not raining therefore it's BBQ time! We use our kettle bbq as an extension to the kitchen and need very little excuse to break out the charcoal, even Christmas lunch is bbq'd weather permitting. Today is Sunday and being a traditional sort of family, we tend to have a roast most Sundays.

It's not hard to use a BBQ as a second oven but there are a couple of things we do to make it work for us. Firstly, you need a kettle BBQ, ours is a Weber 47cm which is a good size without being massive and has the relevant racks inside for keeping the charcoal off to the side easily. Using a chimney starter filled to the brim, wait till the charcoal is white before putting them around the side with the drip tray in the middle, do not put the meat directly over the coals. To avoid having to top up the charcoal later, we put the hot charcoal on top of cold ones.

The two ribs of beef we had today were cooked to an internal temperature of 50 degrees Celsius using a digital BBQ meat thermometer and rested for an hour whilst the roast potatoes and yorkshires were cooked. The drip tray catches enough fat from the beef to ensure crisp, smokey and packed full of beef flavoured roasties.

We use a Redicheck meat thermometer to get rid of the "is it done yet" worry. The probe goes into the meat on the BBQ's and talks via wifi to a second screen and an alarm goes off when either the temperature starts to drop (time for more charcoal) or when the meat reaches the required internal temp.