Adara Enthaler is a spoken word poet and the host of Enough Said Poetry Slam. She has featured at the South Coast Writers Festival, Word Travels' Story-Fest, Narellan Poetry Slam, Yours & Owls Festival, Wollongong Writers Festival, Heroines Festival, Viva la Gong, SCWC International Women's Day and the National Folk Festival, and her work has appeared in the Heroines Anthology Vol II, Baby Teeth Literary Journal and the Baby Teeth Anthology, as well as her self-published poetry chapbooks Equidistant and Crowdsourced Poems.
LIFE ISN'T EITHER/OR. IT'S BOTH.
IT'S BREATHTAKING JOY
AND THE WEIGHT OF HEARTBREAK.
IT'S SHOUTING WITH EXCITEMENT AND WHISPERING "I CAN'T DO THIS."
IT'S LAUGHING AT 2AM AND CRYING IN THE CAR.
IT'S THE GOOD. IT'S THE HARD.
IT'S THE IN-BETWEEN.
AND THROUGH IT ALL, THE UPS AND DOWNS, IT'S STILL YOURS.
A GIFT.
Rachel Marie
The mega barbecue that showed us why Australians love cooking outside
With the right preparation, the Broil King Regal Q 690 PRO is a mean machine for summer entertaining.
finally understand Australia’s love of backyard summer barbecues.
It’s not simply that we’re fascinated by fire, nor that this shared attraction to fire opens up unique social opportunities.
What I’ve realised this past month, reviewing the very high-tech, very capable Broil King Regal Q 690 PRO, is that if you don’t cook outdoors on a barbecue, you have to cook indoors, with your oven, and in summer, that heats the living bejesus out of your house.
Broil King’s Regal Q 690 PRO has eight burners, most of which can be controlled with an app.
I say that because I am absolutely sweltering as I write to you. A cool change has come through and it’s a pleasant 23 degrees on the patio by the Broil King right now. But inside, where we’ve had to bake the potatoes, carrots and sweet potato we had to rescue from the barbecue for reasons I’ll get into presently, it must be 15 degrees hotter. Maybe 500 degrees hotter.
Baking indoors bakes indoors, if you catch my drift.
Also, it still stinks in here from a smoked brisket we had to relocate from the barbecue to the kitchen oven late last night, out of an abundance of caution about leaving the gas-powered Broil King unattended overnight here at the Digital Life Labs Mountain Outpost, where bushfires are a constant concern.
Never having been a backyard barbecue aficionado before, those two, very practical reasons for cooking outside – the heat, and the smell – were lost on me. I always thought it was just a blokey thing.
The Broil King Regal Q 690 PRO is a very social barbecue, as well as a practical one. It’s got six burners distributed across two cookboxes – four in the left, and two in the smaller cookbox on the right – as well as a seventh burner on the far left for boiling or sautéing, and an eighth burner, running along the rear of the left cookbox and designed for infrared heat, for the barbecue’s built-in rotisserie system.
We haven’t come anywhere near testing the limits of how many people you could cook for with this barbecue, but it would be dozens, no doubt.
We only did six cooks with the Broil King, including a rotisserie chicken, a rotisserie lamb, steaks, sausages, roasted vegetables and a 12-hour smoked brisket which, as I said, we had to finish off in an oven simply because we started it too late.
Not everything went to plan, due mostly (though not entirely) to our inexperience with barbecues in general, and with rotisserie barbecues in particular.
Vegetables we hoped to roast underneath our rotisserie chicken, for instance, simply wouldn’t brown. I’ve seen videos of people doing it, and I’m sure there must be some way to do it, but it didn’t work for us, and in the end we had to bake them (and ourselves) in the kitchen.
Similarly, we had been planning to test the limit of how much food the Broil King can cook at once by doing the rotisserie lamb and the brisket at the same time, but that plan went awry when we discovered the smaller cookbox has a minimum thermostat setting of 175 degrees, too hot for the brisket, which we were forced to cook in the left cookbox at a temperature of 107 degrees after the lamb was cooked at 176 degrees for three hours.
You can set the cookbox temperature with an app, or on the barbecue itself.
And when I say we cooked at 107 degrees and 176 degrees, I do mean 107 degrees and 176 degrees. We monitored and graphed all our cooks using a pair of Meater Pro Duo wireless thermometers, and we were impressed to see the barbecue maintained a preset temperature of plus or minus 1 degree, much more precise than our conventional electric oven, which cooks in a range of 9 degrees, or plus or mines 4.5 degrees.
That’s the reason we took an interest in the Regal Q 690 PRO barbecue – it’s thermostatically, digitally controllable, allowing for all sorts of cooking you might struggle to do on a conventional gas barbecue.
On the front of the barbecue there’s an LCD panel that lets you precisely set the temperature of two of the four burners in the left cookbox, both the burners in the right cookbox, and the rotisserie burner. There’s also a very easy-to-use app that lets you do the same thing.
All of this is what Broil King calls its iQue system, which is mostly straightforward to use, though at first we did struggle with where to locate the two wired, digital thermometers that it uses to monitor the temperature and increase and decrease the amount of gas going to the burners to keep it at its preset.
When you assemble the barbecue – a task so fraught with frustration, you really should pay someone else to do – Broil King suggests two locations in each cookbox for affixing the thermometers: one at the top and one halfway up, under the warming tray.
Neither of those locations was suitable for a lamb rotisserie, however: one was too high in the cookbox, producing wildly inflated readings compared to a Meater located at the lamb; and one disappeared when we removed the warming tray to accommodate the rotisserie.
In the end we had to use the Meater Pro Duo thermometers to figure out where to locate the Broil King thermometers to give accurate readings. Once we did that, however, the barbecue performed like a champion.
Not that you can do without wireless thermometers once you have it set up. The two probe thermometers Broil King supplies so you know when something is at the desired internal temperature are very accurate – they gave the same readings as our calibrated Meater probes – but they’re wired, meaning you can’t use them for rotisseries without them wrapping around the skewer.
Locating the thermometer at the top of the cookbox isn’t always the right choice.
If you’re going to spend $6999 on the Regal Q 690 PRO, it wouldn’t hurt to buy some Meater probes while you’re at it. In addition to helping calibrate the thermometer locations in the Broil King, and helping with rotisseries, the Meater app is better for monitoring an ongoing cook, and charting its progress.
And, well, progress is the word. Six cooks in, we have mostly figured out the mechanics of this very sophisticated cooking device, but we still have a lot to learn about actually cooking with it.
Our rotisserie chicken, for instance, cooked at the exact temperature we set it to, but we still had to cook it to a higher internal temperature than we wanted, to get it to brown properly. I suspect the flaw wasn’t with the barbecue but with how we prepared the chicken itself.
Likewise, our leg of lamb was tougher than we hoped, perhaps because we fiddled with the thermometer placement, but more likely because we didn’t prepare it well. Something about brining it for 24 hours?
The steaks and the brisket, on the other hand – they were something else.
Broil King puts stainless steel panels above its burners, which it calls Flav-R-Waves, designed to vapourise drippings a bit like charcoal does. They were a great addition to the flavour of the steaks, which tasted more like they were cooked over charcoal than gas.
We took that a step further with the brisket, which we smoked using wooden chips in a steel box sitting on a Flav-R-Wave. It’s not the same smoking effect you’d get from a pellet smoker, but it was enough to add a lot of flavour to the brisket.
So much flavour, in fact, that the brisket stunk the house out when we were forced to finish it inside.
That’s the other area we need to make progress in: planning. Even a barbecue as sophisticated and as precise as the Regal Q 690 PRO gets you only halfway to the perfect backyard barbecue. You can still let yourself down, as we did, with poor planning.
Success, as they say, is 50 per cent preparation. Failure is 100 per cent perspiration, which is what I have now.
