An Interview with Daniel Cooper
Conducted by Gary R. Hafer
Daniel Cooper is Head Grill Master of Western Europe for Weber-Stephen Products, UK Ltd. where he develops course materials for the Weber Grilling Academy, recipes, food photography and content for social and print media. One of his first major assignments for Weber in 2011-12 involved touring England and Ireland in a 32-foot Airstream to demonstrate covered cooking, logging 20,000 miles in his first seven-month period.
Today, he regularly designs live cooking shows in the UK and Republic of Ireland where live audiences can reach up to 170, teaching the Weber Way at food fairs, festivals, and retail demonstrations. Daniel is responsible for much of the food photography in Weber’s social media outlets, as well as representing Weber-UK in YouTube videos and print magazines like Men’s Health and GQ.
An inventive charcoal griller, Daniel owns and cooks on many historic kettle grills from Weber’s past.
He live with his wife Roz, also a talented outdoor chef and entrepreneur, and son Monty in Stroud, Gloucestershire.
The interview took place on September 29, 2021 at 6:30 am via Zoom.
Daniel Cooper: It's nice to talk to you, finally.
Gary R. Hafer: Thank you so much. So I’ve been following your exploits for some time: your cooking, your singing . . .
Cooper: Yes, that’s a lovely, lovely time working with musician Robbie Humphries.
I’ve worked for Weber for a long time, since about the 23rd of February 2011, so for about 11 years.
Hafer: Wow! Tell me something particular about your interest in food and how you pursued a culinary degree. What's your background?
Cooper: I did start life as a chef. I went to quite a good British cookery school [Wycliffe College, Stonehouse, UK], quite a highly revered one. I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do when I left school but knew that I had certainly a passion for cooking.
I was quite lucky because my parents were quite foodie. So that gave us a lot of insight into different cuisines, different cultures. Initially, it was just cooking: things like dinner parties for friends and that kind of thing.
After I'd done the cooking courses, I was interested in having a go at it commercially, so I actually ran a pub for a while with a very good school friend, Bruno Darbo, who's an interesting chap. [Both laugh.] I don’t want to divert too much! . . . Basically, he is an old school friend—we had a lot of friends, a lot of fun together when we ran a pub.
We also ran a really nice cafe restaurant, and we ran a catering business for five years together: Cooper-Darbo. And this is where my love for outdoor cooking came into play because, as you know, outside catering is often outside [laughs], and you don't always want to be cooking on gas ovens. It was grills. We started this business in 2005. . . . It was then I started to really enjoy catering for weddings, dinner parties, but using the medium of live fire.
That was my first experience with live fire cooking professionally, but I always knew I was quite good at organizing sausages on a grill and making sure things didn't burn. [Both laugh.] I was the kind of chef that would do it at home, and I had this weird natural intuition: to be able to understand what the fire was doing to the protein. Do you know what I mean?
Hafer: Yes!
Cooper:: I felt like I already had a little bit of control in me. Even though I hadn't been taught it, there was some intuition already there. It was something that I recognized, like building fires.
I like camping, but I didn't have a grill or a barbecue, and we didn't really have one when I was a kid either. But we used to cook, as I remember, on this kind of weird old cast iron grate, an antique that had been thrown out. We used to cook with seasoned twigs and stuff to make some embers, and so that was a very rudimentary type of cooking that we did at home.
Hafer: So no covered cooking?
Cooper: No, no covered grill at all. In fact, that was a complete revelation, really right up until I started actually working for Weber.
And that was when I had that kind of light bulb moment.
You need, if you're cooking on seasoned logs, such a high residual heat and a huge amount of fuel to cook through your proteins properly. It's just very inefficient and a very smoky way of doing it.
I can remember doing a lot of big catering events where I was staggering around with sort of carbon monoxide poisoning and that kind of thing. [Laughs]
Hafer: Plus big cuts of meat that you try to cook uncovered are difficult. In the States and in the 1950s, we called that an “open brazier.”
Cooper: Yeah, there was no covered cooking, as you know. Yeah, it was just an open barbecue, which is what we called it in the UK.
I mean, we've historically been a bit behind the times in the UK, Gary.
Hafer: Really? It’s hard to believe.
Cooper: We’re [UK] quickly catching up. You wouldn't believe how advanced barbecuing culture is now in the UK. It's still not on a parallel with America, but we're all first-generation grillers, you see.
Actually I was a little bit different because my grandparents used to live in France, and they would grill whole lamb legs and stuff on fires. They did actual barbecue, as a matter of fact, but most people you'd speak to or to their parents or grandparents would have looked at you like you're mad if you said you were going to cook something on a barbecue. They'd be like, “Why? Why on earth would you want to do that?”
That's what we were dealing with when I started with Weber. When I told people I was working for a barbecue company, a lot of people looked at me with real pity, like I'd taken a big plummet. [Hafer laughs.] I'm not joking! You laugh at that, but I can remember a few occasions when their response would be very “Oh, I'm really sorry. That must have been tough for you.”
Hafer: So it was quite, quite disparaging, simply because of their own limited knowledge about barbecuing?
Cooper: A little bit of that. I think there's always a little bit of a snobby perception that we’re “burger flipper” people, a kind of lowly job. If you had a catering business, then you were perceived to have done quite well in the sorts of chef severe. Maybe that’s the way it was looked upon.
But I hated being a chef; it was horrendous. It was the worst thing. I always hated it. I hated every single day of it. [Laughs]
Hafer: Really? Tell me why.
Cooper: Well, you're stuck in a pretty hostile stainless steel room with no windows. It’s hot. Often you're working with people you don't particularly like. You don't get any gratitude for what you're doing. There's no aesthetics or ergonomics in any of the environment you're in. Everything's very hard and quite dirty. . . .
Hafer: The hours are long. . . .
Cooper: The hours are long. You're working when everyone else is at the pub and having fun.
All the creativity and joy of cooking is just sucked out in a commercial kitchen, as far as I'm concerned.
Hafer: Let me take you from that experience now and ask how you developed your professional relationship with Weber.
Cooper: Well, it was a really interesting one because, after I left working in commercial kitchens, I went to run a catering business, which I loved, and because outside catering took me out of that environment a bit. If you're running your own business, you're a little bit more in charge, although the hours are still shitty.
It’s actually quite an interesting story of how I came to work for Weber because I was working as a demonstration chef a little bit for a few different people and companies, but also as a freelance chef. I was really sticking rigidly to my plan of keeping out of commercial kitchens, and a great friend of mine—actually a guy I was renting a room off—had developed this pizza oven, called the Chadwick Oven. It is a very, very cool pizza oven which you use indoors on a gas hub, and you can make brilliant, Italian-style pizza as it gets up to 500 degrees C [932º F]. So Daniel was developing this Chadwick Oven in collaboration with Alex James, the bassist for a famous pop group called Blur [formed in 1988], which you may have heard of.
Anyway, so Alex had the Weber connection, and he was convinced that this could be converted into a Weber accessory for a charcoal grill. So I was asked to go to Chicago—to Palatine [Illinois]—to see the R&D [Research and Development] guys and show them how this grill worked. Weber made a prototype, and it worked on a charcoal grill, and it worked on a gas grill. They ended up actually licensing it for Northern Europe as an accessory. They don't sell it anymore, but it was the pizza oven top. It went on the top of a kettle.
You have one, right?
Hafer: Yes. I received one from the Weber sales agency Babcock and Associates.
Cooper: That's how I came to work for Weber. So Weber didn't love the product; actually, it was quite painful. It's a really good product if it's used properly. You need to get the kettle really hot and the communication wasn't brilliant on how to use it properly. It was quite expensive.
Hafer: The instructions were poor.
Cooper: Yes, the instructions were poor.
But anyway, I got contacted by Weber-UK because they were starting this new demonstration project where they bought a 1952 32-meter, American Airstream Land Yacht, and they wanted someone to tow it around and do demonstrations from it. And you know I was keen to get out of commercial kitchens, as we discussed, and it seemed like quite a fun idea. They were offering a fairly decent salary for this compared to what I'd been getting, so I jumped on board with it, and I did it for two years.
It was really hardcore because I just was away all the time: sometimes a month at a time, sometimes three months at a time. I was with Roz at the time—my now wife, so we've been together for a long time—and she enjoyed a lot of time without me. She probably was happy about that [laughs]; I don't know. [Both laugh.]
So then my role changed and kind of mutated a bit from there into lots of differences within the company, but that's how it started: as always, as a demonstration chef, and it started with this amazing Airstream. I can send you some pictures. I've got some brilliant images of it and me standing next to it. I look a lot younger . . .
Hafer: But didn’t we all? [Both laugh.]
