Australia has a barbeque tradition all its own. With a highly efficient gas bbq, under a solid plate (or if you are really fancy, open grill), we have cooked our top quality meat and seafood for friends and family.

So all this talk about low and slow barbeque may have come as a bit of a surprise. Surely Australian bbqs are good enough!

The Americans believe smoke is the third leg of barbecue, with the other two being heat and time.

Of course, the Yanks didn't invent cooking with smoke. Smoke and cooking over smoking timbers is a way to add flavor to anything you cook.

Anyone who has been fortunate enough to have been cooked for over an old style Lions BBQ fuelled by eucalyptus off cuts can understand the romance of the flavour of smoke even on the cheapest sausage.

Smoke has been used to preserve meat, cheese and fish for long periods of time. But more often nowadays smoke is used to enhance the flavor of meats we share with a friends and family in our Australian tradition of the backyard barbie.

Its this flavour that is the key to low and slow barbeque. You can cook cheaper cuts of meat, more slowly, and choose exactly the flavour you want to impart, not the one your butcher decides is the best.

Imagine a slow cooked shoulder of lamb, smoked with Australian Pine (She-Oak) and rosemary. Subtle, sweet and definitley Australian.

Or a grass fed beef brisket, smoked with Australian Hickory and Ironbark, served with an ironbark honey chilli sauce on fresh white rolls.

Low and slow barbeque will be the next cuisine to inspire Australian cooking. Thai, Japanese, Korean, Italian and English have all had their turn.

Lets take American low and slow barbeque and make it our own.

CG Smoking Timbers - Australias' Own.