Culinary Tales: Grilling meat the old-fashioned way

I love grilled meat but I had never really tried making it myself until recently. So, this cooking experience was memorable. A friend of mine who loves to grill helped me with it. We got the chicken from a nearby supermarket and marinated it overnight with Indian spices, salt, turmeric, lemon, curd and some homemade masala.

We left the chicken rest overnight. It was all easy until it got to the grilling part.

We didn’t use a proper grill box. Instead, we decided to grill on an open fire. So, we dug up a hole in the ground in our backyard. We used a metal mesh as our grill, while we used dry twigs, leaves and charcoal to fuel the grill. To ignite it, we used some petrol and had to wait for the coal to heat after which we placed the metal mesh on the hole.

We oil brushed the mesh over which we placed the chunks of the marinated meat. The sound when the meat met the grill was ecstatic. After some time, we changed the sides of the meat to ensure it is cooked evenly and at the same time not burn it.

Once it was ready, I couldn’t believe that we actually cooked meat on an open fire. It tasted amazing. It was not just the cooking part of it, but the whole process from digging up a hole to using petrol, that was quite an adventure. It was a bit tiring though. But at the end of it, it was certainly worth all the effort.