Smoke and Lump is my UK BBQ site. Charcoal and kamado are the anchor. I don’t review gas grills — ever. I don’t take payment to recommend a kit, and I don’t run a piece without first-hand experience or honest synthesis behind the words.
If you’re upgrading to a £1,200 kamado and want to know whether the £1,800 model is worth it, you’re in the right place.
Who’s behind it
Ben Austen runs the site. I’m not a chef. I’m not a professional reviewer. I’m someone with a London garden, a love of BBQ cooking, a Big Green Egg Large my sister Kate gave me last Christmas, and fifteen-plus cooks of notes that turned into “maybe I should write some of this down.” My day job is in product at Find.co; Smoke and Lump is a personal side project, run separately.
What I’ve done with BBQ is enough cooks to have opinions and not enough to pretend I know everything. Long-and-low pork belly and shoulder, short ribs, and a few fails along the way. The site reflects that — confident on what I’ve actually done, openly humble on what I haven’t.
Kate Austen is my sister and a contributor here. She was the youngest female 2-Michelin-starred head chef in the world, and the first female to win the main course on Great British Menu in the show’s history. She now runs her own food brand at kateaustenfood.co.uk. Her lane on Smoke and Lump is her own — recipes, meat reviews from a chef’s palate, and technique pieces on low-and-slow, smoking and fish. She doesn’t write the kit reviews; that’s not her world.
If a piece on Smoke and Lump has Kate’s byline, she wrote it. If it has mine, I wrote it. There are no ghostwriters and no AI bylines.
How I do reviews
Three kinds of pieces, and they read differently on purpose:
Tested by Ben — I cooked on the kit. Long enough to have a view on how it lives day to day, not just first impressions. The piece says “I” with full authority because the cook actually happened. There’s a section on what it does badly. There’s a section on who shouldn’t buy it. The verdict is plain.
Consensus Reports — I haven’t cooked on it. I’ve read what the people who have, said. The piece reads “based on what other reviewers say,” not “I tested.” That’s a deliberate register shift — you can tell within seconds of reading which kind of page you’re on.
Best Of — category guides (“best first kamado under £700,” that sort of thing). Skim-readable, tighter prose, picks labelled inline. Designed for someone with a phone and a shopping window of three weeks.
Full editorial detail lives on the Editorial & AI Policy page — including how AI is used (as scaffolding, never as the verdict), the 13-section template every Tested-by-Ben piece follows, and the lines I won’t cross.
Disclosure
Every piece that involves kit or food I didn’t pay for at retail price says so, prominently, at the top. If a butcher sent Kate a brisket via her own brand and she’s reviewing it here, the disclosure box names both parties and the chain of supply. If a manufacturer lent me a BBQ for review, the piece says so and tells you when (and to whom) it was returned.
The full record of every supplier, brand and contributor relationship lives on the Disclosures page, kept as a running log. I don’t bury that information.
I’m a member of the relevant affiliate programmes — Amazon Associates and several UK-specific networks. When you click through to a retailer from one of my pages, I may earn a commission. That commission never changes the verdict. I write the verdict before the commercial decision.
What this site isn’t
- I don’t review gas grills. The brand isn’t built for that, and I’m not the right person to review them.
- I don’t take payment to write favourably about a product. That’s not a “mostly don’t” — it’s a hard line.
- I don’t use AI to write under a human byline. Tools help me scaffold research, draft sections, and check facts. Verdicts, opinions and the prose you actually read are written by humans.
- There are no fictional contributors. Every byline is a real person with a real face.
Get in touch
Press, partnerships, factual corrections, or you cooked something on a kit I reviewed and want to share notes:
ben@smokeandlump.co.uk
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