Charcoal grills for arrosticini

Arrosticini come from Abruzzo, in central Italy. Traditionally they are castrato, mutton from a older sheep, cut into cubes of roughly a centimetre and threaded tight onto a thin skewer. Lamb is the common substitute and works well. The seasoning is salt. That is the whole recipe.

They are cooked over a narrow trough of charcoal called a canala or fornacella, close to the coals, turned almost continuously, and they are done in three or four minutes. Because the cubes are small and the cook is short, the margin between right and overdone is thin, and there is nowhere for a mistake to hide behind a marinade.

Arrosticini are cooked in quantity. Nobody eats three. A normal serving is a bundle, and a group gets through a lot of them, so you are cooking twenty or thirty skewers at a time as a matter of course.

Now combine that with a three minute cook and constant turning. Turning thirty thin skewers individually, repeatedly, within a three minute window is not really possible. This is precisely why the traditional canala is narrow: it lets the cook sweep a hand along the whole row and roll them together.

The geared rack on these frames does the same thing mechanically. One handle rolls every skewer at once, which means a full load of thirty two turns in a single motion and comes off matched rather than as a row where the ends and the middle disagree.

Worth saying plainly, because it affects how you use them.

A traditional canala is deliberately narrow so the meat sits over the coals while the bare ends of the skewers overhang into cool air. That is what stops the handles becoming too hot to touch and, with wooden skewers, what stops the ends burning through.

These are wider general purpose frames with a skewer rack, not purpose-built canale. They turn a full row from one handle, which is the harder problem solved, but they are not a narrow trough. In practice that means using metal skewers rather than wood, and keeping the coal bed banked under the meat rather than spread across the full width of the tray. The adjustable tray on the F1 helps here, because you can bring a shallow bed of coals up close instead of building a deep one that heats everything.