Cooking with your chiminea or firebowl
Chiminea cooking tips for novices
Apr
Looking for expert chiminea cooking tips? First, let’s talk pizzas. A chiminea makes it easy to create your own masterpiece with a simple pizza stone. Then there’s roasting meat or fish, just as easy and fun even when it is something creative like sticky ribs or chilli salmon. You just need a cast iron cooking grill or cooking iron. Yes, you can bake spuds in a chiminea. Just wrap them in foil. Succulent burgers, sausages and hot dogs are the name of the game when there’s a cooking stick and cooking iron to play with. Toasted marshmallows and popcorn are only a few minutes away. You can even bake bread. Here’s how to get cracking cooking in – and on – your chim.
Chiminea cooking tips
First, the sensible stuff. Put the chiminea on level ground if possible, if not you’ll want a three-leg stand to keep it stable. Most of our clay chimineas come with a steel stand. Place it away from plants, wooden fences and resin or wood garden furniture. Keep a fire extinguisher and a water source close by or at least a bucket of sand and an unused fire blanket. Wear heat-resistant gloves and use proper BBQ utensils with long handles. Don’t let drunk people wobble anywhere near it!
Clean out any old ash and debris to keep the flow of air nice and strong – which gives you a good, clean, hot burn and minimises the risk of smoke. Season a new clay chiminea first so it doesn’t suffer from heat shock. And keep the fire small. It’s tempting to build a bloody great bonfire but a small, neat fire does abetter job and doesn’t waste fuel.
Gradually increase the heat until the fire is hot enough to cook on, just like you would with any other sort of BBQ. Wood fuel flavours the food, with every different kind of wood smoke having its own lovely taste. Charcoal is best for the long lasting, consistent heat you need for an exciting variety of cooking techniques.
Direct cooking – for example grilling – cooks food directly over the fire, perfect for burgers, sausages, steak and fowl. You’re better off cooking delicate things like fish on the actual chimney part of the chiminea, where it isn’t as fiercely hot. To grill like a ninja exercise patience for 20 minutes or so while the beast heats up, then go cook.
Indirect cooking with a Dutch Oven – basically a lidded cookpot – makes marvellous stews, soups and casseroles. Sit it inside the chiminea, making sure it isn’t wobbly, then leave it to slow-cook while you chat and get merry. Or stand it on top of the chimney for an even slower cook.
Baking is also on the list. Pizza is just one popular dish for chim cooking, alongside bread. The enclosed heat inside the fat clay body of a chiminea is excellent for baking as long as you pre-heat it properly and use a baking tray or pizza stone to keep the heat evenly distributed. Otherwise you’ll get a soggy bottom 😉
To make a roast, wrap veggies in heavy duty aluminium foil then put them directly on top of the coals or wood. You can grill shrimp, crab and lobster as well as meats. Linda McCartney’s superb frozen vegetarian mozarella burgers taste uncannily meat-like, totally delish. And fruit kebabs make a mouth-watering morsel, especially when served in a bowl, drizzled with honey and smothered in fresh cream; naughty and nice, the best of both worlds. Baked apple is just as wonderful with custard, and baked pears are something else served with melted chocolate. Raspberry kebabs pooled in a puddle of cherry brandy? Go for it.
We hope you like our chiminea cooking tips. You might be a ‘give it a go and see what happens’ person, or someone who plans the heck out of every BBQ. Either way the sheer versatility of chiminea cooking will surprise and delight you. It just goes to show, keeping things super-simple has advantages!
