The recipe I always take to a BBQ that my friends rave about (and 4 other recipes you have to try)

It’s hard to overemphasise how much I love a BBQ. The sunshine, being outdoors, the informality, that aroma of lightly charred meat (and fish, and cheese, and veggies), sipping wine in the sunshine with friends… it’s everything I enjoy most.

Of course, since everyone knows I both work in food and love to BBQ, I tend to get roped in to cook more often not (whether or not I’m hosting), but I love that too. There’s something so much more low-key about turning food on a grill than cooking in a kitchen, especially when you can just plop everything down on a table and holler for people to help themselves. It’s the polar opposite of a stiff and formal dinner party – something I’ve loathed since my childhood days helping my mum prep for them (something that always stressed her out no end, yet she never said no when people suggested them!)

When asked what s my go-to dish to take to a BBQ is, people are often surprised by the answer. It’s simple. It’s got no chilli in it (something I’m known to add to everything). It’s something anyone (and I do mean anyone) can make. It is, of course, potato salad. In my mind, no alfresco meal – BBQ or otherwise – is complete without potato salad. And for anyone who questions this, I can only suspect they’ve only ever had the shop-bought ones, claggy with heavy mayo and cold from the fridge.

‘In my mind, no alfresco meal is complete without potato salad’

Home-made potato salad is in a different league entirely. You can choose the perfect potatoes for maximum flavour and optimum texture – no one likes a soggy, clumpy salad. Charlottes are the key to my family’s top-secret recipe, but Jersey Royals are the ones to go for if cooking early enough in the year for them to still be in season, and Anya are also superb. You can dress the salad while it’s still a little warm, so the flavours are properly absorbed by the potatoes, and, best of all, you can ditch the mayo entirely. While I personally love mayonnaise, more and more friends and colleagues are coming out of the secret mayo-hating closet, and since mayonnaise doesn’t sit well in the sunshine anyway (ewww), the potato salad I swear by for hot, sunny days is made with pesto instead and is the first serving bowl to be scraped clean any time I bring it to an event.

And once you’ve whipped up a bowl of potato salad, I’ve got a few other sure-fire hit recipes you might want to consider making next time someone asks you to bring a dish to a BBQ…