SIZZLE! Modern barbecue food
By Allan Campion and Michele Curtis

This is one of the more successful contemporary barbecue cookery books produced by Australians for an Australian audience. It's great to see ingredients such as blue swimmer crabs, Moreton Bay bugs, kangaroo fillets and our wonderful beef properly showcased.

The recipes (nearly 200 of them) are excellent and very easy to follow. They feature a list of ingredients on one side of the page balanced by the steps in the process on the other.Top marks for clarity.

And top marks for broad appeal. Some recipes offer variations on traditional barby favourites that could be cooked by anyone. Others are designed for those with a bit more confidence and many reflect distinct Mediterranean, Middle Eastern and Asian influences. My particular favourites were the mushroom risotto cakes and the spiced beef in basil leaves.

However, the section on barbecue wines was disappointing. Surely it would have been better to leave it out altogether rather than include less than a dozen small paragraphs each giving a very superficial rundown on a particular style of wine.

I believe the authors lost an important opportunity by ignoring the fact that most trolley barbecues are sold with hoods. Another dimension would have been added to this book if the authors had indicated in relevant recipes how hoods could have been used to enhance flavour (particularly with smoke), shorten cooking times to retain maximum moisture and use less fuel.

ORIGIN: Australia
FIRST PUBLISHED: 2000
VERDICT: Great recipes, appealing layout and whimsical photography make it well worth buying.