Before Suburban Bee Company, we had not experienced seasonality to the extent our bees and trees now bring us. Now we have early Spring to ready the bees after their over-winter dormancy and see the arrival of pollen and flowers in the trees. Late Spring and Summer is a rush of bee inspections, swarm control and fervent hope for the right weather. Late summer marks harvest time, with frenetic trips to collect and process honey and the gathering of fruit from the trees.

The gentle arrival of Autumn – at least this year where the warm and dry weather has persisted through September and into the middle of October – marks a slowing of pace but certainly not the absence of work. We’re readying the farm for winter and making sure the bees have enough food to make it through to spring. This is also the perfect time of the year for continuing the planting of our traditional orchard.

We recently hosted twenty-five or so friends and family at the farm to help us with the mighty task (at least to us) of planting another forty fruit trees. A real festival of work with holes to be dug, trees to be planted, mulching and deer fencing to be laid.

One thing was clear from the start. We needed to find something tasty and satisfying that would be worthy of feeding these hard working orchard heroes. The only thing standing in the way was of course the spectacular lack of kitchen. Our food plans needed to cope with the fairly primitive conditions to be found in the field.

The answer was barbecue. Not in this case the grill and sausage variety but the low and slow form which is one of the undeniable food culture greats introduced to the world from the United States of America.

This form of meat cookery with long hours of low indirect heat amid smoke from a variety of hard woods is indigenous to the southern states but now of course found widely through the US and beyond. Every state, region, town and food shack has its own cookery creeds with individualism expressed in rubs, sauces, cuts of meat. Barbecue has every bit of the obsessive, competitive following to be found in major world sports. All of which is the reason for the true delight – slow cooking tenderises tougher but tasty animal protein, spices and smoke supplement the flavour, piquant vinegar cuts through the richness of the meat. Slow preparation of the food introduces plenty of time to add love. And as we should all know, it is the love that makes food something special.

For our little version of this wonder, we turned to a truly excellent cook book for inspiration. The Pitt Cue Co. Cookbook is a day-glo covered exploration of the joy of slow food barbecue based on recipes to be found on the menu at their restaurant in London’s Soho. The book (and surely the Pitt Cue team themselves) is steeped in the tradition of barbecue. The recipes are well thought through and have never failed to bring us successful, tasty offerings.

This time we plumped to feed the orchard heroes a little taste of Texas with sliced beef brisket in brioche buns topped with burnt ends, cucumber pickles and a vinegar slaw of red and white cabbage with onions. The brioche buns (of which there were many) were baked in advance but luckily survive well when frozen. The cucumber pickles, Bread and Butter Pickles in the Pitt Cue Cookbook we also made a couple of weeks ahead of time to ensure the flavours reached peak. An 8 kilo, 35 day dry aged brisket from the fine butcher, Ginger Pig was the star of the show. The instructions called for a spice and salt rub and slow hickory smoking at 115º C for twelve hours. Once the brisket reaches its core temperature of 88ºC you’re ready to go. Half of the meat rests, ready to be sliced. The rest is then chopped up and further seared before being covered in a tasty meat sauce and barbecue sauce. This is burnt ends, and frankly the best thing by far.

Our little field kitchen consisted of a gazebo in case of rain, a couple of folding tables for preparations and serving, a fire pit, chiller boxes and assorted knives, chopping boards, squeezy bottles and the like. Here we prepared the fresh vinegar slaw, heated the meat sauce to steep the sliced brisket and organised a very orderly queue when building and handing out monstrous brisket buns to the hungry workers.

The barbecue powered us through the rest of the day and a number of new cider apple trees were safely installed.

To the volunteers we say a great big thank you for all your hard work with the orchard. To the whole state of Texas and the fine folks at Pitt Cue Co. we say thanks for the inspiration; brisket and burnt ends in a bun is a truly masterful accompaniment for a day of labour in the field. To everyone else, we say please wish us luck and hopefully in a few years time we can look forward to Suburban Bee Company cider flowing at the barbecue.