Hang Fire Southern Kitchen - a BBQ delight

The Hang Fire Southern Kitchen is a restaurant in Barry, in the Vale of Glamorgan, South Wales. It's been  extensively reviewed in blogs, newspaper articles, and Twitterati, Instagrammers and people on Facebook. It's owners Sam and Shauna have appeared in their own TV series  and they've written books on their take on southern US BBQ style cooking. In short, it's an amazing place to eat (and drink) and it's really, really popular. Although walk ups are available, they disappear in the flash of an eye, and if you want to book a table, you normally have to do so weeks, if not months in advance.

We've eaten there several times, and never been disappointed. But as for all hospitality venues, the pandemic, and lockdown has been a challenge. Never ones to shirk an opportunity, Hang Fire have developed their "Heat at Home" menu. Basically a click and collect of their best dishes that you can order online and pick up to eat at home.

So this weekend, we did just that.

The online ordering process felt a little more protracted than it should have been - I have used easier online ordering systems.  Oddly, once I'd selected and paid, although I had a confirmation page with my order number, I didn't get an email or text confirmation so had to take a screenshot of the confirmation page for my sanity.

We were ordering for four adults (although neither my wife or daughter have big appetites). We ordered the Big BBQ Deal which promises a feast of 9hr smoked Brisket, 21hr smoked Pork, 3hr smoked BBQ Wings, Mac & Cheese, Pastrami & Potato Hash, plus fixings of 'slaw and pickles and 12oz tub of their Kansas City BBQ sauce. It's stated to serve 3-4 people. Cost £56. We also added their famous, 8hr smoked, free-range, pork spare ribs which they say serves 1-2 at £14. There was also some chilli brisket and beans.

I turned up at the appointed collection time, and was served in a Covid secure way, the heating prep explained (a leaflet is also provided) and was out within a couple of minutes. Seamless.

It's not the cheapest, but as the saying goes, you get what you pay for, and this is quality food, ready prepared for you to heat and eat. It's worth every penny.

The food is slated to last up to 3 days kept in a fridge, and we were planning to eat the next day.

The heating time for each item varied, but the maximum was 25-30 minutes (the Mac & Cheese, Pastrami Hash and brisket and chilli beans in their foil containers). The wings around 20 minutes, the ribs took around 20 minutes and the brisket and pulled pork heated gently in simmering water in the vacuum packs for around 8-10 minutes. Usefully everything that needed heating in the over needed the same heat level, so it was just a matter of getting your timing right.

Once everything was cooked, it looked like this

The Feast

Firstly, you've obviously got to love meat to eat this sort of food!

The wings, once doused in their special BBQ sauce were delicious. The pulled pork was tasty. The mac and cheese was creamy and warming, and the pastrami hash was chunky and added a nice texture to the plate. The chilli brisket and beans was suitably spicy but not overbearingly so. The stars of the menu though was undoubtedly the tender, thickly sliced brisket and the enormous, cricket bat sized ribs. With accompaniments of house pickles and slaw, and plenty of BBQ sauce it made for a sumptuous feast. So much so, that even with the four of us, there's probably plenty enough left for a an almost complete second sitting the following day.

All in all, it was brilliant, and I'd highly recommend splashing out on this as a treat if you like quality food, especially meat and BBQ's!

What's your most popular photo?

Regular readers will know I like photography, and take loads of pictures. Some make their way here, but many can be found on my social media streams, Facebook, Twitter (@statto1927), Instagram (simon_hiscocks) or my cloud service of choice, Flickr which I use both as a backup but also searchable archive, both for personal and public consumption. 

I can flick (pun intended) through these at my leisure - many of these, and increasingly so, I've given a title and occasional a description. Whilst this works for me (after all, I know what the photo is as I took it), it's interesting to see what people search fro on Flickr. 

On this platform, my two most viewed photos are titled "The road to Papagayo beach" and "One of the Papagayo beaches" with almost 1,700 and just over 1,600 views respectively. These were taken in Lanzarote in early 202 (before the pandemic hit). They're miles ahead of the next highest viewed photo neatly titled "Centre Parcs" with a meagre 1,256 views at the time of writing.

Why are my photos of the road to Papagayo beach so interesting for people? Surely it's not because it's a great photo. It isn't as you can see here, it's a photo of a rubbly road taken out of an electric VW Golf back seat!

The road to Papagayo beach

No, I rather suspect that why this sits at the top of my viewed list is because Papagayo beach is knows as a nudist beach, and people weren't actually searching for a photo of a road, but rather something a little more raw as it were...

Even the one of the Papagayo beach itself wouldn't help them - it's a photo of a deserted beach!

One of the Papagayo beaches

The 3rd most viewed photo on my Flickr account is titled "Centre Parcs". Now I'm sure there are many people who want to, or have visited one of the Centre Parcs sites and want to see a little more about the place. However, this particular photo is a donkeys years old (2008) out of focus, low resolution photo of a road in Longleat Centre Parcs taken on a Palm Centro device (an early smartphone) with a whopping 1.3 megapixel camera. Consequently, it's neither interesting, nor an image of any reputable quality. However, it's been viewed over 1,200 times. If I had entitled it "A boring blurry image of some tarmac in Center Parcs"I doubt it would have got the same exposure.

The 3rd most popular photo I've uploaded!

Finally, just sneaking into the top ten most viewed is this beauty of my foot after a knee op I had in 2008.

No. 10 in the all time viewed list

I'm not entirely sure why I wrote this post other than as an observation that of all the decent photo's I've take over the years most of my all time viewed photos are pretty rubbish ones that people have come across inadvertently whilst searching for something else entirely. Maybe I need to get better at titling and tagging....