Part of the extended Festival family, Australian-born chef Dave Pynt (MFWF class of 2023) is the founder of Burnt Ends, a modern barbecue restaurant in Singapore’s Dempsey Hill. The magic Pynt works with his custom four-tonne, dual cavity oven and four elevation grills has made the restaurant one of the key stops on any world tour of fire cooking and an absolute must for any food lover visiting Singapore.
Now Pynt has published his first book and, true to his values, he has done it his own way, publishing it himself and enlisting Festival friends Per-Anders and Lotta Jörgensen, the Malmö-based photography and design duo behind Fool magazine, and Perth writer and critic Max Veenhuyzen, to help him put it all together. The result, Burnt Ends, is 388 pages of stories, recipes, techniques and merriment, and contains no small amout of swearing. Here’s Dave himself with the inside word.
If you take one thing from this book, it should be the confidence to light up a wood-fired barbecue and have a crack at cooking a big piece of meat or fish or some awesome veggies.
But I’d also love it if you had a crack at the smoked quail rggs, the leek or a large-format whole fish.
The main thing I learned writing it was how much information we shared amongst ourselves but never properly articulated. It was great to be forced to articulate what we know so we could teach and train the team better.
If you’re a relatively new cook, give the Jamaican chicken and lime crema a try.
If you’re looking to extend yourself a bit more, meanwhile, have a crack at the pulled pork sanger or the beef marmalade.
People worry about a lot of things when they’re cooking with fire. One thing I think you could relax about is putting too much wood on: you can always wait till the fire dies down a bit.
On the other hand, one detail that often gets overlooked that will make a difference to the quality of your fire cooking is diligence. Don’t get distracted and walk away, and make sure you check your temperatures of all your proteins.
How do you know if your fire is hot enough? You know when the fire is hot enough when you know, and you don’t know if you don’t know.
I wrote Burnt Ends because I felt that after 10 years, we had enough to say and a lot to share. I hope to inspire the next wood-fired barbecue chefs and enthusiasts and articulate what I think makes wood-fired cooking so special.
You decided to produce and publish this book yourself rather than going through a publisher. What were the pros and cons there? We decided to self-publish because we wanted to do it our way. We wanted to create a unique Burnt Ends book that we could be proud of and didn’t need to meet any salesy requirements. We wanted everything in the book to be something we could be proud of. The cons… self-publishing is a lot of hard work and a lot of money, ha ha.
When you’ve finished reading Burnt Ends I hope you’ll light up and have a crack at some recipes and cook some delicious food for your family and friends.
Dave Pynt’s Burnt Ends: “What is Modern BBQ? Whatever the F*ck I Want It to Be” is published by Fool Agency and retails for $SGD95, burntends.sg, @dpynto