Homemade food for summer BBQs
What could be better than enjoying delicious food at your summer BBQ? Enjoying delicious homemade food at your summer BBQ!
Even though BBQs are informal occasions, there’s no reason why you can’t make your own homemade food to show your guests and family how much you appreciate them. Here are some of our favourite recipes that are bound to make them want to come back for seconds.
Burger buns
You can make your own soft burger buns using a stand mixer with the dough hook attachment. For a straightforward recipe for Soft Burger Buns, check out the BBC Good Food website.
Homemade beef burgers
The classic beef burger is really easy to make and tastes amazing. This recipe makes four burgers.
Ingredients:
500g lean minced beef
1 onion, finely chopped
1 egg, beaten
Salt and pepper to taste
Method
Fry the onion until soft - around five minutes - then remove from the heat. Put the minced beef into a bowl and mix with the onion, egg and seasoning. Divide the mixture into four and shape into patties with your hands. On a preheated BBQ, or if you’re frying on the hob, they should take five minutes per side to cook.
Serve with your homemade soft burger buns as well as your favourite fillings, pickles and sauces.
Coleslaw
No BBQ would be complete without a big bowl of coleslaw, which is something else that tastes so much better when it’s homemade. You can make the coleslaw in advance and keep it in the fridge in an airtight container.
Ingredients:
½ cabbage - you can use red or white cabbage, or a mixture of the two
2 carrots
1 red onion or a small bunch of spring onions
3 tbsp mayonnaise
Salt and pepper to taste
Method
Chop the cabbage, carrots and onions into small strips. To make your life a lot easier, we recommend using the Sensio Home Mini Food Chopper. Put the chopped vegetables into a large bowl and mix in seasoning and mayonnaise.
Ice cream
One of our favourite kitchen accessories is our ice cream maker. Perfect for when friends come round! Whether you want an old favourite such as vanilla or raspberry ripple, or something a bit healthier like a sorbet or frozen yoghurt, check out our own ice cream recipes for inspiration.
Keeping cool at your BBQ
Assuming the weather will be nice and warm for your BBQ (which is by no means a given even though it’s supposed to be summer!), you’ll be keen to find ways of keeping cool. One fun way to do this is with our snow cone machine, which crushes ice cubes that, as soon as you add syrup, will make slushies in no time at all! It’s a perfect way to keep the kids occupied and happy. And later in the evening, the adults can use it to make crushed ice for their cocktails!
Beer and BBQs are a marriage made in heaven, but when you’re hosting a party, with all that food in the fridge and the ice being used for the snow cones, how are you going to keep the beers cold? As you’d expect, we have an easy answer, a back-up mini fridge! We have two sizes of mini fridge - 10L and 15L. The best thing about our mini fridges is that they’re portable - you can even plug them into your car’s cigarette socket - so you can justify getting one because there’ll always be a use for it, whether it’s to keep your picnic cold as you drive to your favourite spot, to keep the milk cold in your home office, or to take on a camping holiday (as long as there’s electricity of course). People even use them to keep make-up in. And it’s always very handy to have when thirsty friends drop by!