Analiese Gregory’s Best Tips for Cooking Outdoors Over Fire

For Analiese Gregory, playing with fire has its own rewards. The primal experience of cooking over an open flame is a relatively recent exploration for the Michelin-trained chef, who traded the streamlined sophistication of restaurants like Le Meurice in Paris and Quay in Sydney for a more rugged culinary life in Tasmania.

“I really only started when I moved to Tasmania, and I was working with the woodfired oven at Franklin,” Gregory says. “I got thrown in really hard, and had to learn that you have to manage the fire and, if you don’t, then after two hours you won’t be cooking anything else.”

It’s a style of cookery she calls “less precise” than the induction cooktops and steam ovens of most professional kitchens, but the unique flavours and “rustic” experience make it worth it. So much so that she’s bringing her fiery passion for it to the next edition of Victoria’s Grampians Grape Escape as part of the festival’s outdoor Coal Pit cooking space. At her Earth to Plate session, Gregory hopes to show that cooking over flame can be used for more than just roasting huge slabs of meat.

“I’ll be cooking octopus, which is actually a dish that I made when I was at Franklin,” Gregory says. “It’s a by-catch octopus and I just grill it straight over the fire, doing a plated dish with smoked macadamia nuts using the fire, and kombucha-pickled currants – kind of a play on a sweet and sour, agrodolce thing.”

Although there’s naturally a chef’s touch to all of Gregory’s open-flame cooking, she’s clear that it’s a style that should be open to anyone. In that spirit, here are a few of her top tips to remember on your next camping trip, or any time you feel like cooking over fire.

Start small

Open-fire cooking might call to mind images of a huge pit filled with roaring flames roasting whole animals, but Gregory says that there are some more self-contained ways to start cooking outdoors – like a hibachi, for example. 

“A Japanese charcoal hibachi is contained,” Gregory says. “I used to use it on my balcony in Sydney before I moved to Tasmania – you don’t need a large outdoor area to be able to use it. Charcoal can be a bit more contained, a little bit easier to work with.”

Choose your fire-ready equipment

If you’re thinking of going beyond the hibachi towards the bigger fires, there are a few pieces of relatively inexpensive gear that Gregory recommends.  

“I’ve got some really basic stuff from BCF and Barbeques Galore,” she says. “One of them is just a rack with feet on it – like a big, round rack is raised off the ground. You can spread out your coals and stick [the rack] there. That way you can put food straight on it, but you can also put pots on it. I’ve also got a metal tripod with a rack that you can raise and lower in the centre, and that folds down really small. That was like $150.”

As for the cookware itself, Gregory says you can’t go past cast-iron. “It’s the heat retention and the way it disperses the heat – you don’t really get hot spots in your pans or anything like that.”

It’s all about the ingredients

Gear aside, the beauty of cooking over fire is naturally in the food. Gregory says that eggs are a great option if you’re whipping up a campfire breakfast, but to really get the benefits of the open flame, seafood is a surprisingly good bet. 

“If I’m seaside camping, then I’ll go diving for abalone and collect periwinkles and cook things like that over the fire for dinner,” she says. “The really fast cooking works well – you just build your fire up and you don’t need to wait for it to die down.”

Otherwise, those cuts of red meat like lamb or steak are classics for a reason – just be careful with anything too lean. “Fattier meats are good because they’ve got that intramuscular fat and, if they lose a bit of moisture, they’re still going to be delicious,” Gregory says.

Visit Halls Gap from May 1 to 3 for a flavour-packed line-up of regional wineries, coal-led cooking experiences and live music. Analiese Gregory leads sessions at The Coal Pit, alongside Tom Ballinger, Cat Clarke and more. Get your tickets now.

This article is produced by Broadsheet in partnership with Grampians Grape Escape.