How to Winterise Your Outdoor Cooking Setup
The end of October is the right moment for this, and it is worth doing now rather than in December.
Bonfire Night falls on Thursday 5 November this year, which means most people will actually mark it on the weekend either side. That is useful, because a Saturday gives you daylight to set up and no reason to rush the food.
It is also the one night of the year when a British garden is guaranteed to be full of people standing outside in the cold, which makes it worth a bit of planning. Here is how to host it well, with the fire doing the work rather than a shivering huddle round a firework box.
Traditional bonfires are a poor fit for most modern gardens, and not just for safety reasons. They need a lot of space, they need clearance you probably do not have, they produce enormous amounts of smoke that goes wherever the wind takes it, and they leave a burnt patch and a pile of debris.
A fire pit does the same job better in a domestic space. Contained fire, controllable size, heat directed outward at the people rather than up into the night, and no aftermath beyond a bowl of ash. The Buschbeck Ifen 80cm at £159.99 will comfortably hold the warmth for six or seven people standing round it, and the Barbecook Jack 100cm at £279 is the size to reach for if you are expecting a proper crowd.
If you already have a masonry barbecue, use it alongside rather than instead. It handles the cooking in whatever the weather does, and the fire bowl is what keeps people outside afterwards.
Early November evenings in Britain sit around five or six degrees by nine o’clock, and often lower. That is the number that ends parties, not the food running out.
Plan the fire as the centre of the standing area rather than off to one side, and leave enough room for a full circle. People will naturally arrange themselves around it, and if the layout only allows a half circle then half your guests are cold.
Have considerably more fuel than you think you need, stacked dry and within reach. A fire that has to be nursed because the wood ran out or is damp stops being the centre of the evening. Seasoned hardwood, and enough of it to run four or five hours without rationing.
A second smaller fire at the other end of a long garden works better than one enormous one, if you have the kit. It spreads people out and gives everyone somewhere warm to be.
The traditional menu happens to be exactly what an open fire is good at, which is no accident.
Jacket potatoes are the classic and the easiest thing to get wrong. Wrap them in a double layer of foil and bury them in the embers at the edge of the fire, not in the flames. Allow a full hour, more for large ones, and start them before guests arrive. They hold heat for ages once done, so being early is free.
Sausages and hot dogs feed a crowd with no timing pressure. A solid cooking surface beats bars here because nothing falls through and you can keep a batch warm at the cooler edge while the next cooks. The Plancha Cooking Ring for 80cm fire pits at £169.99 gives you a hot inner ring and a cooler outer band, which is the right tool for exactly this. On a 60cm bowl, the 60cm ring is £129.99.
Onions on the plancha, started early and left to go soft and sweet, will do more for a hot dog than anything else you can put on it.
If you would rather have bars for the char, the Heavy Duty Cooking Grill at £99.99 fits both bowl sizes.
Toasting is what children will want to do, and it keeps them occupied and at a sensible distance. Long metal skewers are worth having: the Martinsen skewers are £10.99 and considerably safer than the garden canes people improvise with.
Something hot to drink matters more than any of the food. Mulled cider or spiced apple juice in an urn or a pan at the edge of the fire, ready before people arrive, is the difference between a warm evening and a cold one.
The risks change when there are more people, some of them children, some of them holding drinks, and the light is poor.
Set the fire circle boundary physically rather than verbally. Chairs, a row of logs, anything that marks where people should stand. In the dark, with a group, a stated rule does not survive.
Use a spark screen when nobody is actively cooking. The Barbecook Steel Spark Screen 75cm at £129 lifts off for the jacket potatoes and goes straight back on, and with a crowd around a fire on a breezy night it is worth having on by default.
Light the route. People will be walking to the house and back in the dark, and a garden they know in daylight is unfamiliar at night with a fire wrecking their night vision. Steps and level changes are the hazard.
Keep fireworks and the fire well apart, and keep all fireworks and sparklers away from the fire entirely until they are used. Follow the official firework safety guidance for the fireworks themselves, and keep a bucket of water for spent sparklers, which stay hot far longer than anyone expects.
Do not use accelerants on the fire. Not at the start, and absolutely not with a crowd standing round it.
Mid afternoon, stack the fuel somewhere dry and within reach of the fire, get the food prepped, and set out the seating and the boundary.
Ninety minutes before guests arrive, light the fire. It needs that long to establish a proper ember bed rather than a smoky struggling flame, and the jacket potatoes want an hour in embers that do not yet exist.
An hour before, potatoes into the embers. Drinks on to warm.
As people arrive, sausages and onions on the plancha. This is the point where the evening either runs itself or does not, and it runs itself if the fire is already right.
Then stop cooking and let the fire be the fire. That is the part people came for.
Leave the ash alone. It stays hot far longer than it looks, sometimes well over twenty four hours with buried embers, and ash into a wheelie bin is the single most common way a fire pit causes actual property damage.
Move it into a metal container with a lid when it is properly cold, stand that away from the house and anything combustible, and give it forty eight hours before disposal. Our guide to fire pit safety covers ash handling and the rest of it in more detail.
Fuel, bought and stored dry. A cooking surface if you want to feed people properly. A spark screen. Long skewers. Something to put the fire out. And a metal ash container, which nobody owns until the first time they need one.
Everything here is in our fire pit and accessories range. If you are buying for the night itself, order early in the week, because the first weekend of November is not the time to discover a delivery is delayed. We are on 02476 474440.
The end of October is the right moment for this, and it is worth doing now rather than in December.
Fire pit accidents are almost never dramatic. They are scorched decking, a melted section of artificial grass, a fence panel