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The Backyard Fire Cookbook by Linda Ly is a fantastic collection of recipes and tips for cooking food on a live fire. The book explains the different ways of cooking on fire, as well as how to create the perfect fire. It is a detailed book that can be useful to anyone wishing to cook on fire, regardless of experience.
Author: Linda Ly
Publisher: Harvard Common Press
Genres: Cookbook, Lifestyle
Publication Date: May 7, 2019
Rating:
Ditch the boring gas grill and light your fire with this comprehensive guide from the author of The New Camp Cookbook. The Backyard Fire Cookbook offers techniques and recipes to master cooking with live fire and coals, including smoking, planking, cast iron, foil packs, and more.
You might have distinct memories of your parents lighting the coals in your backyard, or of some of your favorite meals being cooked by campfire. Whatever your experience, it's undeniable that when cooking starts with a live fire, the results are worth remembering.
In The Backyard Fire Cookbook, author Linda Ly will teach you how to master the flames, as well as a variety of other techniques—all possible in your own backyard. For the adventurous, start by building a home fire pit. It's easier than it sounds and requires minimal investment of time and space. If you'd rather not, that's okay! There are plenty of other options, from vessel fire pits to cowboy grills to open-grate grills. Even a tabletop charcoal grill will give you more flavor than cooking with gas. Ly also covers everything you need to know about fuel sources (hardwoods and charcoal types), building fires, fire safety, and how to be an efficient outdoor chef.
The recipes let you choose your own adventure, with dozens of options for live fire cooking, charcoal grills, cast iron, and foil pack cooking. Next-level techniques like hot smoking, cold smoking, and planking are all part of the fun, too.
Whether you're a seasoned home cook or a novice when it comes to the grill, The Backyard Fire Cookbook will help you make the backyard your new kitchen.
❃ I received this book for free from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review. ❃
Review: The Backyard Fire Cookbook
Cooking on fire is something that I had pretty much reserved for camping trips. When I first saw The Backyard Fire Cookbook, I was really intrigued about the possibility of bringing a campfire to my own backyard. It is definitely a cooking technique that requires lots of additional planning and time, but the end result is absolutely worthwhile.
Korean Grilled Chicken
❀ Perfect for those with little experience
Ly has organized this book into different sections that describe various ways to cook on fire: the fire pit, foil packets, pots, grills, and planks. For those with little experience, there is a section at the beginning that goes through the basics and describes the tools and types of wood that will work best.
Sweet Potatoes with Sriracha-Maple Glaze
❀ Easy to follow Instructions
What is also really enjoyable about this book of recipes are the colourful images and easy to follow instructions. The recipes are also very unique and varied. The unpredictability of cooking on a live fire can, as Ly describes, be exciting as the tastes and outcomes are never the same. This is one recipe book that has inspired me to change the way I approach cooking outdoors.
About Linda Ly
As the voice behind the award-winning blog gardenbetty.com, Linda Ly has been demystifying the art of gardening, homesteading, farm-to-table cooking and fearless exploration for a global audience since 2010.
Her love for food is inspired by her hilltop homestead on the California coast, otherwise known as a little house with a big, big backyard. There she grows hundreds of vegetables, fruits and herbs, raises a flock of chickens, and attempts to craft a more sustainable and "simple" life, though anyone who tends a homestead knows it's anything but simple!
Linda lives in Los Angeles with her photographer husband, Will Taylor (whose talent can be seen in her first book, The CSA Cookbook), and their two pugs. Beyond the homestead, they enjoy surfing, snowboarding, climbing, kayaking, backpacking all over the great state of California, and fixing up their off-grid surfside bungalow in Mexico.
About The Candid Cover
Olivia ❀ Canadian YA book blogger, Starbucks lover, & professional bibliophile.