BBQ Chimneys

The barbecue chimney is probably the best thing since the invention of the grill.

You no longer need to liberally douse your charcoal in lighter fluid or use long-forgotten boy-scout skills to create a delicate pile of kindling, twigs, bark and pine-cones to get your BBQ coals to heat. And gone are the days when you waited the best part of an hour to get the charcoal to the right temperature.

With one of these babies, you just pour charcoal in the top, place a scrunched-up piece of paper or two in the compartment underneath, light the paper, and you'll have perfectly red-hot coal in 10-15 minutes.

The trick is of course the holes, which suck air up from below and through the sides, while all the heat is funnelled upwards - rather than wastefully radiating away - to warm the coals above.

So throw away your dangerous, environmentally-unfriendly lighter fluid and your stinky, smoky MatchLight coal, and use a BBQ chimney instead. Your spare ribs, steaks, etc. will taste far better than gas-grilled food too!

Insta-heat and Insta-fire

All summer long, as you walked out of our local supermarket, you had to pass by a large and virtually unmistakable display of bags of charcoal. That's hardly surprising, since no-one - us included - needed much encouragement to have a barbecue on the beach. Yet this being the land that brought you drive-through funeral parlours and fast food restaurants, this was no ordinary charcoal, but Match Light briquets, a special form of reprocessed coal dust that is so drenched in lighter fluid that you simply pile it up, apply a burning match, step back swiftly to avoid the ensuing ball of flame, and in ten minutes hey presto, you're ready to cook your chicken 'n' ribs.

Now that the temperatures are below freezing and no-one (mad dogs and Englishmen included) would do anything outside, this pile of Match Light bags has been replaced by an equally unmistakable pile of Duraflame firelogs.

Firelogs are another wonderful American invention. Gone are the days when you had to scrunch up paper, carefully pile up kindling then balance coal and wood of various sizes on top in the hope that maybe - maybe - after about an hour's diligent tending you would a nice fire roaring in the hearth. Firelogs are made of compressed sawdust soaked in natural wax.


As a result, they not only light in about 5-10 minutes, but they burn for exactly 3.5 hours and allegedly produce less soot - and therefore pollution - than wood. Good, eh?

Of course, we don't need firelogs in our house. Not because we don't have a fireplace, though. Oh no, ours is a real fake fireplace (which I'm tempted to turn on for the first time tonight).