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Cooking in an outdoor kitchen: how much do you know?

An outdoor kitchen can be used just as an ordinary, indoor kitchen, without anything to envy to the latter. Unfortunately, many families still use their outdoor space to enjoy the dishes they have prepared inside the house, forgetting that the dishes can be prepared directly outdoors, without going back and forth from one environment to another. All you need is the right appliances, barbecue and furniture. How much do you know about this? Here are some tips on how to exploit at 100% all the potential of an outdoor kitchen.

What you need to cook well outdoors

Are you afraid that cooking outdoors can be challenging because you will necessarily have to adapt, as you cannot have all the tools and conveniences of a well-equipped home kitchen at hand? No, this is not the case if you are organized and have everything under control. To cook well outdoors is therefore essential to:

 

  • Properly organize your outdoor space.
  • Avoid the formation of smoke from the outdoor oven.
  • Cleverly set up an outdoor kitchen in your spaces.

Organizing your outdoor space: it all starts here

The space available is the key element of the layout of your outdoor kitchen. The living situations, in this case, can be two:

  1. Space is scarce, as occurs in a house with a small balcony;
  2. Space is not a problem, since you have a large garden or terrace.

In the first case, you will need a product not too bulky, but rather manageable, such as a small barbecue or a compact mobile pizza oven. With these tools you can cook dishes such as Neapolitan pizza in a wood oven at very high temperatures. On the contrary, if you have plenty of space and you wish to install a fully equipped outdoor kitchen, with all utensils such as sink, gas stoves, fridge or dishwasher, make sure to cover them after use to protect them from the weather.

Avoid the accumulation of smoke from the outdoor oven: alternatively choose a barbecue or an electric oven

Cooking outdoors means burning firewood without having to worry about smoke problems. Today this is possible. The most common appliances are in fact powered by gas or electricity and do not need to be connected to a chimney, which is necessary for stoves, fireplaces or wood ovens. Therefore, you do not even have to worry about ventilation. In addition to the oven, or as an alternative to it, the outdoor kitchen can have a grill or a barbecue, which, although similar, have their own distinctive features. We talked about it several times in our blog, because we at OF are really great lovers of barbecue and grilling. As you already know, grill and barbecue/embers techniques are different. Grilling is, in fact, a rapid cooking of food over direct heat at very high temperatures and is perfect for small cuts of meat, fish and vegetables. Barbecuing, however, means cooking over a very low heat for a long time, using an appliance with a lid which better retains the heat, steam and smoky flavour of the embers. It is used for larger cuts of meat (ribs, whole chickens, piglets..) which are often marinated in advance.

Do you want convenience? Opt for an electric or gas oven

Ovens, barbecues or grills are all great wood tools for cooking outdoor, but these appliances also run on gas or on dual power (gas and firewood) in their hybrid versions. Gas is a fairly inexpensive fuel and easy to handle as it can be used by hooking the appliances to the main or to a cylinder and it offers performances not far from those of wood ovens.