Freshman of Fire
Keen to up his grilling game for the summer, CASPAR BARNES headed to BBQ school at a Leicester garden centre, cooking curries, steaks and salmon, graduating with honours.
Catching the early train to Leicester makes for a pleasant change to my usual London commute. The skyscrapers shrink behind you as the window fills with rolling greenery and open fields, with my destination home to kings and unlikely champions.
Just an hour from the English capital, the last 12 years has seen the city of Leicester hit international headlines for two big stories. The discovery, underneath a car park, of the unearthed remains of Richard III’s body, and the shock win of the English Premier League by Leicester City Football Club in 2016, at odds of 5000-1. Now, a garden centre, Birstall Garden & Leisure, run by sister and brother Jo Henderson and Jordan Lee, is putting Leicester on the culinary map for a different reason – its BBQ Basecamp school.
In 1969, Jo and Jordan’s parents Brian and Ann Lee bought a little nursery in Birstall, a large village three miles north of Leicester city centre. For 30 years, the family ran a traditional garden centre selling seeds and potted plants. Over time, as the owners of the neighbouring terraced houses moved away, the garden centre was able to expand into those very houses. This means the place is something of a Tardis – much larger inside than it appears to be from the street. There’s room for everything; a shop, aquatics rooms, fish ponds, pavilions, gazebos, and, as of 12 months ago, a barbecue cook school.
Growing up in London where most green spaces are reserved for ‘picnics only’, my prior experience of firing up the outdoor grill was limited to a handful of disappointing encounters with supermarket-bought instant barbecues. Fiendishly hard to light; okay if you want a half-cooked sausage, but not much else.
However, the scene that greeted me at Birstall immediately put me at ease. Spring morning sunshine beamed through sweet-smelling smoke on to a prep kitchen equipped with the day’s tools: thermometers, heat-resistant mitts, spatulas, skewers, meat hooks and some very sharp knives.
While barbecue is far more diverse these days, there are still the ‘hero dad’ stereotype and several of my classmates were inspecting a fleet of red Kamado Joe ceramic grills as if looking under the bonnet of a Ferrari.
Before class started, the true experts showed their skills by taking charge of breakfast. John Eaton was looking after the morning’s meal. Usually his working day would consist of erecting large sheds and Victorian greenhouses, heading up Birstall’s building projects.
Today, he was making us a breakfast of his own creation – sausage meat wrapped in bacon with egg stuffed in the middle. Because the patty was roasted inside an enormous temperature controlled Masterbuilt grill, the egg stayed deliciously fluffy. Grace Brown, one of the shop managers, was in charge of the other half of breakfast, an omelette in a cup peppered with cheese and bacon, and another shop manager, Josh Hickey, was also on hand with the tuition.
Time to cook and learn. The Kamado Joe grills had air vents at the bottom and a control tower at the top, which managed airflow into its fiery belly, and after about 10 minutes clean smoke was blowing through.
“It shouldn’t be smoking too much, otherwise you’ll give the food an acrid taste,” says Eaton. Minimum airflow for low and slow, maximum airflow for maximum power. With our fires lit, we turned our attention to our first dish of the day: a chicken tikka masala.
Of the abundance of dishes that passed my lips – fragrant steaks, paprika paella, maple and orange glazed salmon – the tikka masala stood out. The chicken thighs were marinated in Angus & Oink’s Tikka Gold Tandoori BBQ rub and then mixed with onions, chilli pepper and lemon,before grilled over a cast iron griddle – quite simply, the smokiest curry I’ve ever eaten. A triumph. Meanwhile, we made our own flat breads from scratch in a Gozney pizza oven.
In our ranks was Tom Croft, a former professional rugby player for England and Leicester Tigers, who would later win praise for his impeccable presentation. Ian Bursnall, a live-fire legend of Leicester, dropped in with his new recipe book, The Skint Cook, which has a whole chapter devoted to BBQ. Bursnall was a finalist on The Great Cookbook Challenge with Jamie Oliver on Channel 4 in 2022.
Next up were ribeye steaks, followed by a dessert pizza topped with custard instead of passata, and shortbread crumble and pears where once mozzarella and basil might have sat.
“I worked here before I could see behind the counter. I always knew I wanted to be here,” says Jo Henderson.
Her father had decided to open a garden centre because he was a landscape gardener, and everything was geared towards that. Nowadays, they no longer sell plants, seeds or compost, but primarily deal in flame, and high-end outdoor brands like US cool box icon Yeti.
“We decided to just be niche and stand out.” Over the years, Birstall has developed a particularly close relationship with the Kamado Joe brand and will frequently host representatives of the company at their events up and down the country.
“It’s all about relationships and having a fabulous team. Everyone here cooks on a Kamado Joe and a Gozney, so they know what they’re selling.”
On the train back into London, with the green fields now disappearing behind me, and tower blocks growing in the distance, my day spent learning the ways of the grill got me thinking. Why aren’t more of my friends in London barbecuing? Space is one limiting factor, but so is limited knowledge.
A good quality barbecue is a serious investment, but, as a reluctant chef, I can’t remember the last time I had had so much fun cooking. I started looking through my tenancy agreement to see what the rules were around barbecues. It was a heroic vision – me, grilling on the roof of my flat, beer in hand.
