Whether you’re planning on a Christmas Day BBQ or just enjoying a summer evening meal, Simon Gault shares his tips for perfectly cooked meat on the barbie.
Photo: Unsplash / Marek Mucha
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While turkey and ham don’t really lend themselves well to the BBQ, Gault says serving a whole eye fillet on Christmas Day “would just be genius”.
The trick, he says, is to season it generously.
“Your enemy is moisture when you’re cooking meat on the BBQ – or in a frying pan – you want to dry the meat off with a paper towel and then season it just before you cook it.”
Gault recommends having different cooking zones on your BBQ, starting the meat on a hot section to seal it.
“Brown it up and then move it to the cooler part of the BBQ.”
Eye fillet’s an expensive piece of meat, so you don’t want to overcook it, he says.
“Get it to room temperature before you cook it. Not 20 minutes out of the fridge, like a couple of hours and then get it on there.”
Your best friend when cooking a cut like this is a meat thermometer, Gault says. If you know it’s internal temperature, you’ll know exactly when to take it off the heat.
Once it comes off, it’ll keep cooking and increase in temperature by about five to eight degrees.
“You want to understand what temperature you’re heading for. Let’s say you want a medium rare, you probably want to be head to about 50 degrees, because once it comes off the BBQ it’ll increase in temperature to probably 55, 58 degrees after you rest it.”
The bigger the piece of meat, the longer it needs to rest.
“If you don’t rest it and you cut into it, you’re going to have juice all over the plate and you’ll have a dry piece of meat.”
Gault says what you don’t want to do on a BBQ is oil the grill rather than the meat.
Oil up the meat and be generous with your seasoning because a lot of it will get left on the grill, he says.
If you’ve got a tougher, cheaper cut “which I love because they’ve generally got more fat in them, and fat equals flavour”, Gault recommends you marinate it.
“But I’d never put a sugar-type marinade on there, which is what you see in most of the supermarkets. All that does is burn on the BBQ and burnt sugar doesn’t taste great.”
He'd opt to marinate the meat in olive oil, garlic and freshly chopped herbs, a bit of lemon zest, and maybe some Moroccan or Italian seasoning.
“There’s two ways to season meat, you can season it the day before and the salt will bring the moisture out and after about an hour you’ll look at your piece of steak and there’ll be all of this water, or look like water that’s come out of it.
“But if it’s left on a cake rack in your fridge overnight, that...juice will get reabsorbed with the salt into the steak and you’ll really get the seasoning into the steak.”
If you don’t do this, you’ll want to season the meat at the last minute, just before you cook it, he says, to prevent the moisture coming out.
If you're more into fish, Gault recommends you slice lemon very thinly and lay it on the BBQ grill directly, placing the fish on top of it.
“It’s kind of like cooking on a lemon pan on your BBQ.”
Or you can lay the lemon onto tinfoil with a bit of oil, with the fillet wrapped up into it.
He wouldn’t recommend putting the fish directly onto the grill itself – you'll have problems with it sticking and falling apart.
“I think the greatest things on BBQs are prawns, because they’ve got that little shell and you can grill them up delicious.”
Need some inspiration? Check out these BBQ recipes
Simon Gault's BBQ half chicken Photo: Supplied