Fire It Up
’Tis the season to venture outside and enjoy the pleasure of cooking and imbibing your meals under the warm sunshine. And cooking in the great outdoors gets an exciting uplift when you grab your tongs and try BBQ fusion dishes.
BBQ fusion is a culinary trend that weaves traditional barbecue techniques with flavours and ingredients from global cuisines. It’s a fun way to reinvent classic grilled dishes like burgers by incorporating elements from varied culinary traditions.
Think burgers seasoned with Caribbean spices, or grilled fish tacos surprisingly stuffed with Asian flavours. Flame-licked pizza adorned with a punchy gochujang mayo sauce? You bet. The possibilities are endless, and the goal is to create unique and delicious dishes by combining unexpected tastes that push the boundaries of conventional barbecue, yet all served in a casual manner that befits flip-flop season.
Exciting, right? Now let’s get outside, unwind, and explore some sizzling fusion meals.
Inspired by the popular Vietnamese banh mì sandwich, this grilled pizza is bursting with fresh and lively flavour from crunchy pickled veggies, gingery pork, and fiery mayo sauce. No pizza oven is required when you have a grill. Flatbreads are an easy pizza base, but you could be more adventurous and grill formed pizza dough.
Buttery grilled salmon smothered in a deeply flavoured Chinese-inspired kung pao sauce and topped with fresh broccoli slaw and peanut crunch is a recipe for taco night happiness. Using the same sauce for the fish and broccoli elevates the tacos with an even greater savoury, spicy, sweet flavour that is the signature of kung pao.
Jerk chicken is the most popular dish to come out of Jamaica, and it’s the inspiration for these burgers that sing to the island nation’s audacious spirit. Turkey burgers are flavoured with Jamaican-inspired seasoning, seared, and then served adorned with a punchy pineapple sauce. The result is a burger with the perfect balance of seasoning, smoke, and heat.
You may recognize falafel from the menu of your favourite Middle Eastern restaurant, where the fried chickpea balls are served on mezze platters or stuffed into pita. Here, we give it a grilled treatment and serve the chickpea patties with a fresh salad. The texture of the flame-licked falafels are crispy on the outside and tender inside, with an earthy, herbaceous flavour profile. All finished with a tahini-based sauce, with a homemade barbecue twist.
With seasoning inspiration from North African cuisine, this grilled chicken and potato meal is simple enough to serve on any summer weeknight. Harissa is a feisty chili paste hailing from North Africa and an exciting marinade for juicy chicken. With a bit of extra fat, chicken thighs tend to retain more juicy flavour on the grill than does breast meat. Taking the extra step of par-boiling your potatoes until slightly soft before grilling them helps ensure that the outsides don’t char long before the potatoes are cooked all the way through on the grill. If available, try the Moroccan spice mixture ras el hanout to season the potatoes.
Matthew Kadey, MSc, RD, is a dietitian, nutrition writer, and recipe developer. He is also the author of Rocket Fuel (VeloPress, 2016) and Muffin Tin Chef (Ulysses Press, 2012).
