Recipes

Lemongrass, fish sauce and a hot grill — street food you can build at home

Walk through any Vietnamese market at dinnertime and this is the smell that stops you: beef and lemongrass hitting charcoal. The marinade is a short list doing serious work — lemongrass and garlic pounded rough, fish sauce for depth, brown sugar for the char. Thin strips of BBQ steak take it all on in an hour, thread onto skewers, and need barely five minutes over a ferocious grill. Serve them over cool vermicelli with herbs and a bowl of nuoc cham, and dinner tastes like a holiday.

Hot grilled beef, cold crisp lettuce, and the sauce that ties a Korean table together

In Korea this way of eating is called ssam — wrap. Grilled marinated beef, a spoonful of rice and a dab of punchy ssamjang, all folded into a crisp lettuce leaf and eaten in one go. Nobody plates anything; the table does the assembling and the talking. The marinade — soy, grated nashi, garlic, sesame — is the traditional one, and the BBQ steak takes to it the way it takes to every marinade: deeply. Dinner becomes an activity, and the activity empties the board.

The Portuguese chilli-citrus baste that was built for fatty cuts over flame

Piri piri gets typecast as a chicken sauce, which is a shame, because everything it does — the chilli, the lemon, the vinegar, the garlic — was made to stand up to rich meat and open fire. Lamb ribs are exactly that. The racks spend two gentle hours wrapped on the cool side of the barbecue while the fat renders, then come over the flame to be basted again and again with a bright red, sharp-edged sauce until the edges char and the whole backyard smells like a Portuguese grill house. Keep some sauce back for the table. You'll want it.

A two-minute glaze, a hot barbecue, and the four-pack sorted

Some barbecue recipes ask a lot of you. This isn't one of them. Honey, two mustards and a clove of garlic — whisked together in the time it takes the barbie to heat — then brushed over chops thick enough to take real time over the flame. That's the thing about chump chops: they've got the size and the fat to handle a proper grill, where a thinner chop would dry out and sulk. Give them twenty minutes in the glaze, ten on the grill and five to rest. Done.

Four pantry staples, one zip-lock bag, and the easiest yes at the dinner table

Some marinades need a shopping trip. This one needs the fridge door and the honey jar — soy, honey, garlic, ginger, done. It's the marinade Australian families have run on for generations, and the BBQ steak is the cut built to soak it up. An hour in the bag, ten minutes on the barbecue, five minutes' rest. You get sticky mahogany edges, savoury depth all the way through, and the kind of steak the kids ask about again before they've finished the first serve.

One steak, eight skewers, four happy people — the Greek corner-shop maths

Souvlaki is what happens when good meat, lemon and oregano stop overthinking it. Cube a rump steak, let it sit in a sharp lemon-and-oregano marinade for half an hour, thread it onto skewers and grill it hard — then pile the lot into warm pita with cold garlicky tzatziki and let everyone build their own. This is the recipe that stretches a 320g steak across four serves without anyone noticing, because the pita, the tzatziki and the salad do the honest work of a full dinner. It smells like a Greek summer and cooks in ten minutes flat.

The Sunday roast walks outside — smoke-kissed lamb, and the kitchen stays cool

A hooded barbecue is just an oven that lives outside and tastes better. Work a smoky rub over the lamb, set the burners for indirect heat, close the hood and let it hum along at 180 degrees while you do exactly nothing nearby with a cold drink. The bark goes mahogany, the middle stays blush pink, and the drip tray underneath quietly collects the makings of the gravy. Come summer, when the thought of a hot oven is unbearable, this is how the roast still makes it to the table.

The real thing — charred, smoky, and nothing like the food court

Proper satay is street food with standards: thin ribbons of well-flavoured beef, a marinade that's sweet and earthy at once, ferocious heat, and a peanut sauce built from actual peanuts rather than a jar of something beige. It's a weekend cook, but an honest one — the marinade and sauce are both fifteen-minute jobs, and the grilling itself is over in minutes. Rump is exactly the steak the satay stalls would choose: full of flavour, firm enough to thread, quick to char. One 320g steak becomes a dozen skewers, and the sauce alone is worth learning by heart.

Paprika, brown sugar, patience — American barbecue discipline meets Australian lamb

This is the recipe for the day you've decided the barbecue is the afternoon's entertainment, not just the cooking appliance. No foil, no shortcuts: a paprika and brown sugar rub, a hooded barbecue held low around 140C, and three or so unhurried hours while the fat renders, the spice sets into proper bark and the smell slowly takes over the street. Lamb ribs suit the American low-and-slow treatment better than most people expect — they're smaller and fattier than pork ribs, so you get all the bark in less time. Pour something cold. This one's a sit-outside recipe.