As we head into another weekend, it's time to kick start the barbecue or fire up the outdoor grill (didn’t you hear that outdoor kitchens are the new status symbol?) and make the most of the fact that we can gather again.

Telegraph Luxury tried and tested the very best meat, fish and grocery boxes perfect for cooking al fresco, so that you can make the most informed decision.

Casa Txuleta

I have never devoured a more delicious steak than that of Casa Txuleta. The London-based butcher specialises in importing dry-aged Galician beef for restaurants such as Chiltern Firehouse, Bibendum and Lurra at Txuleta. But there is a weekly delivery available for keen home chefs, too.

On the menu is Galician Blonde prime rib (£35 for 1kg), rib roast (£38 for 1.2kg), rib eye (£30 for 500g), fillet (£20 for 280g) or English shorthorn mince (£10 for 1kg). It’s the cheapest this Michelin-calibre supplier has ever been at retail.

When my best friend and her fiancé arrived for a celebratory dinner party, I felt the pressure mount: you can’t mess up a cut this good, so I turned to the internet for advice, deciding in favour of a pan rather than a barbecue for control.

After leaving the rib out of the fridge for two hours to reach room temperature, I heated the pan to a medium temperature, threw in some butter and added the salted and peppered meat. After 12 minutes on each side I wrapped the meat in foil to rest for a further 10 minutes.

Don’t insult this beef with a sauce - it speaks for itself and is best served with sautéed potatoes and a salad. Even the most discerning meat eaters will be impressed. Eilidh Hargreaves

1kg of Galician Blond prime rib costs £35; casatxuleta.co.uk

BBQ in a Box

Since April, when the first wafts of smoke began drifting over neighbouring gardens, I’ve been craving a barbecue. One problem: I don’t own one, and the waiting list for a Weber compact kettle right now rivals that of an Hermès handbag. So when restrictions allowed, decamping to my in-laws’ to light up their outdoor grill was the next best thing. If you’re wondering how to go about inviting yourself to a garden party nobody has agreed to host, BBQ in a Box is the answer. With the tagline #chillandgrill, it promises all the fun of a barbecue with none of the faff.

An easy-to-navigate online menu features staples such as homemade burgers, Jerk marinated chicken wings and Cumberland sausages, alongside Asian-style marinated salmon, feather steak with Chimichurri and whole Cajun-rubbed seabass. Vegetarians aren’t forgotten, with rainbow vegetable kebabs, miso, honey and soy aubergine, and mushroom Shawarma. Build your own box, or choose a ready-made bundle for anywhere from two to eight people - everything is delivered, contact-free, ready to chuck on the BBQ or freeze for a later date.

A sheet of cooking instructions that accompanied the dishes basically boils down to ‘try not to burn anything’ - and it really is that simple. With everything pre-marinated and even the chilli-dusted corn on the cob pre-grilled, it’s impossible to get wrong, even for a barbecue novice. Burgers are fat, juicy and non-stick, vegetables are beautifully seasoned and even usually humble sides such as potato salad and slaw come with an extra bit of oomph. We were using a gas barbecue and every dish surpassed expectations; no doubt the flavours are even more pronounced if cooking over coal.

At £3.95 per burger or £2.75 per veggie skewer, it’s hardly a cost-effective way to BBQ. But for maximum flavour with minimum effort, it can’t be beaten. One word of advice: definitely don’t scrimp on the halloumi; you’ll fight over every last bite. Sarah Royce-Greensill

From £40 for a box for two to four people, or build your own box minimum order £35; delivery is £3.95 within the M25; bbqinabox.co.uk

Spring’s mixed delivery box

Skye Gyngell’s Somerset House restaurant Spring's delivery box is no ordinary delivery box. It doesn't just send you raspberries; it sends you a punnet of soft summer English berries. Heirloom tomatoes, walnut and raisin sourdough and rose geranium and blackcurrant ripple ice cream are also on the menu.

True to style, Gyngell's offering is considered, ethically sourced and beautifully presented. The bake-at-home cookie dough (again, no ordinary cookie dough) comes wrapped in greaseproof paper and tied with string, while milk is delivered in glass bottles, which are collected and refilled after use.

Alongside the fresh ingredients, it also offers 'ready-meals' - lobster with fennel and garlic butter, short rib beef and many more. Expensive, but worth every penny, this goes way beyond Waitrose’s best. And when it comes to preparation there is literally nothing to it other than reheat and eat. What a divine way to celebrate being together again. Sophie Warburton

Price depends on the individual items you select for your box; springrestaurant-shop.co.uk

Wright Bros Seafood Experience at Home

Seafood merchants who opened in 2002 in Borough Market, Wright Bros are synonymous with oysters. Their BBQ box focusses on seafood and fish that can be lightly grilled rather than eaten straight from the sea, and yet the shellfish in particular arrives looking fresh enough to grace any raw bar. It’s a selection for four people and all the items were vacuum-packed and tucked into a sealed, iced cardboard box.

The dozen scallops on shells are a showstopper for any garden grill. They were ready in five minutes, including cleaning time and prep (a light brush of olive oil). Octopus and raw king prawns come frozen so needed to be thoroughly defrosted before flinging on the barbie, but again, the quality was excellent; the octopus is only a couple of ready-cooked tentacles so was more of a taster than full-on Greek taverna style feast.

We also opted for a whole wild turbot (£40), which demanded a bit more cheffy skill to handle over flames: unless you pay very close attention, the skin and precious flesh stick to the grill. Much simpler is the monkfish tail, which comes as part of the BBQ box and works beautifully grilled on a skewer - I alternated cubes of the meaty, white fish with yuzu-marinated baby leek to make three large kebabs. Just add ouzo. Susie Rushton

BBQ Box for Four, £65; thewrightbrothers.co.uk

Jimmy’s BBQ Club

When Covid-19 put the brakes on chef Jimmy Garcia’s thriving pop-up restaurant and catering business, he didn’t rest on his laurels. After partnering with Age UK to cook meals for the most vulnerable in his borough, he launched a whole range of at-home food boxes: from pizza or paella parties to tacos and tequila, and Sunday roast hampers. And as well as boxes packed full of restaurant-grade ingredients, he runs virtual masterclasses to demonstrate how to pull it all together.

The Gourmet BBQ box is an at-home, virtual version of the pop-up BBQ club that’s usually hosted on London’s Southbank; and it’s about as far from a box of chuck-em-on-the-barbie burgers as is possible. Jimmy’s aim is to reinvent stereotypical barbecue food and prove that cooking on an outdoor grill can be every bit as inventive, healthy and delicious as on a conventional hob.

The five-course menu includes charred asparagus with whipped, smoked lemon feta, toasted pinenuts, pickled pink shallots and gremolata, followed by gin-cured hot smoked salmon, Hoisin duck pickled Asian leaf wraps, Sirloin steak (or Moving Mountains burger for veggies), finishing up with a smoked mango Eton mess. Not your standard BBQ fare.

Every ingredient comes vacuum-packed and labelled, right down to the chive and dill garnishes and the tiny bottle of angostura bitters for the welcome cocktail. We dialled into the video call with Jimmy half-expecting an anonymous webcast that we could fudge our way through, but we got an interactive, one-to-one call with Jimmy as he explained exactly how to cook and plate up every dish.

It pays to be prepared. Sort the ingredients into courses, have a ready supply of serving dishes and utensils nearby, and position your camera close to the barbecue - you’ll need one person manning the grill and one person getting creative with the plating. We weren’t - cue much panicked rifling through the fiddly little packets - but luckily Jimmy is endlessly patient and adept at translating cheffy terms like ‘quenelle’ to novices like me.

So long as you follow his grilling instructions,  it’s impossible for the result to taste anything but delicious as everything is pre-prepared - garnishes pickled, sauces homemade, meat and fish marinated - by Jimmy’s talented team. If you’re in London, you can even borrow a Big Green Egg for the evening too. SRG

£90 for two people; jimmyspopup.com

field&flower BBQ Box

Another delivery service that prides itself not only on the taste but also the ethics of its offering, field&flower supplies sustainable fish and traceable free-range meat to its customers.

The focus is definitely on the meat, but there are also quantities of cheeses and fish including quite esoteric options such as cod cheeks to choose from.

We chose the Chef’s BBQ Box to try out and were rewarded with six Toulouse sausages, four beef and chorizo burgers, a rump steak big enough for two, half a kilo of prime salmon, four lamb chops and eight Teriyaki-marinated slices of pork belly that were particularly exciting for me since I was supposed to have marinated some chops overnight for a barbecue and, of course, had completely forgotten.

Plus, this was a much more exciting marinade than my habitual lemon juice, olive oil, garlic and parsley standby. It is stunningly good value adding up, they say, to £3.79 per serving, though I suspect that is to under-estimate the greed of this particular horde of barbecuers.

One of the crew was not a committed carnivore and so was extremely grateful for the very fresh-tasting salmon but the rest of us tucked into the meaty feast with a will. The beef and chorizo burgers were a particular hit, as were the marinated pork slices which took the humble concept of bacon to an entirely new level. Sasha Slater

Chef’s Barbecue Box £56.85 plus delivery; fieldandflower.co.uk

Bakers of Nailsea

We love a barbecue in our house and we don’t even need the excuse of friends coming round to wheel out our classic, round, old-school Weber. My husband has been known to rustle up dinner for two on it after work on a weekday in March, a smoky, flavour-rich slab of beef perfectly charred over the coals, just for the craic.

While we’re huge steak fans, I was keen to see what Bakers of Nailsea had to offer in their 25-piece BBQ Box. This is a highly regarded butcher outside Bristol which also does round-the-country ‘meat box’ deliveries which arrive perfectly chilled and vacuum-packed in temperature-controlled ice sheets wrapped in fleece liners.

People can then add things, should they wish, so I did. The box came with five of everything: moist and generously-sized beef patties fresh from the Baker family farm, pre-marinated tender garlic butter chicken thighs from nearby Castlemead Farm (“wow - you’d have to marinate them overnight for that level of flavour”, said my husband, the house chef), Chinese pork steaks steeped in garlic and ginger and perfectly seasoned pork sausages, both from farmer James Mitchell near Taunton. There were also exquisitely flavourful garden mint lamb chops.

While it was all amazing, my additions, again from the butcher’s family farm up the road, completed the picture: a pair of tender steak fillets, which hardly touched the grill before they were perfectly done, and the grand finale, dry-aged T-bone steaks – each a piece of fillet and a piece of sirloin rolled into one – genius. All in all? An experience made effortless in all the right places and incredibly good value. Francesca Syz

The 25-piece barbecue box costs £25; bakersofnailsea.co.uk

HG Walter 

HG Walter is a neighbourhood butcher tucked away in West Kensington that attracts fans from all over London. It used to be my local and I remember cooks including Simon Hopkinson and Nigella Lawson among the regular shoppers.

Sadly I’m now reliant on supermarkets, so to discover that Walter sends out BBQ boxes is like cavalry to the rescue. The ‘luxury’ box covers the essentials of any grill - burgers, sausages, bone-in chicken thighs, all of a high quality - while also upping the ante. Four Iberico pork chops are rich and gamey, with melting fat that caramelises on the grill; you won’t need much else after one of these acorn-enriched Spanish chops.

The single 950g T-bone steak was also exceptional, even if it does need attentive grilling (and, in my case, the assistance of a meat thermometer) due to its asymmetric cut. It feeds two. But the biggest revelation were the two spatchcocked poussins. Not a bird that I’d usually buy, the preparation is perfect for the grill - the little poussins flattened and spread out with great skill - and the flavour much better than chicken. A treat-packed box that easily serves six to eight. Susie Rushton

Luxury BBQ Box For Four, £110; hgwalter.com

Pipers Farm 

Living in a terrace, we’re necessarily cheek by jowl with our neighbours and live so intimately with them that we can hear them sneeze through the walls when we’re in bed. During the hottest days of lockdown, it seemed rude to fire up our very cranky barbecue and fumigate next door. But now that they can leave the house if they find the plumes of smoke objectionable, we feel less guilty. So we ordered a Pipers Farm Family Favourites box to celebrate.

It arrived promptly in a cardboard box decorated with a drawing of a friendly looking cow and the contents were so well insulated and chilled that they were practically frozen.

Pipers Farm is a 50-acre family-owned farm in Devon that’s on the Prince Charles end of the farming spectrum and is on a mission to convert us all to sustainable meat eating. It encourages biodiversity with thick hedgerows round its fields. Its cattle are local Devon Red Ruby and its chickens the traditional Little Red Hen breed called Hubbard. The pigs it rears are the lovely mint-humbug patterned Saddleback and its sheep stocky, old-fashioned, black-faced Suffolk Tup that look like fat Siamese cats.

Its deliveries are not limited to its own animals, though. The team at Pipers works with 25 other farms that share their ethos so the website offers everything from a chicken-and-chorizo raised pie to craft ales. No wonder the farm’s won BBC Food & Farming’s Best Producer award and is recommended by Rick Stein and The Telegraph’s own Diana Henry.

The Family Favourites box is astonishing value, containing as it does a chicken, a kilo of mince, chicken fillets, pork steaks, chicken burgers, breakfast sausages, and sandwich steak. It was enough to feed Augustus Gloop for a week and ample for 10 hearty eaters for a highly successful barbecue, leaving the whole chicken for roasting later. Sasha Slater

Family Favourites Box £65; pipersfarm.com ​

Notting Hill Fish Shop

I love barbecues, and am of the firm belief that it out-door grilling should be a year-round activity (other than when there’s actual rain or snow), but the main deterrent for me is the meat. As much as I love the waft of steak drifting from the barbecue, as a pescetarian, I can’t eat it. Usually, I bring my own alternative or stick to salad and grilled halloumi. But this has all changed with Notting Hill Fish Shops’s BBQ Dreams box.

The box includes everything you’d need for an almost fish-only meal for you and one other person, including the sauces and sides with detailed instructions on how to prepare it on the grill properly, leaving very little room for mistakes. I was particularly in awe of the quality of all of the food: there was fresh octopus tentacle which had been marinated for 24hrs, native lobster and tuna steak farmed in Spain, complete with a salad that included tomatoes so sweet, they tasted more like a citrus fruit.

Each helping of fish also came with a sauce specifically designed to add flavour, XO Sauce for the octopus (which contains jamon... a little meat for those who can), salsa verde for the tuna steak, garlic butter for the lobster and a dressing for the pickled crab that went in the salad. I couldn’t have asked for a better meal to make for friends or the perfect date night menu in the garden. With holidays in jeopardy this year, this box will trick your brain into thinking you’ve escaped to a restaurant on the Mediterranean. Precious Adesina

£100; nottinghillfishshop.co.uk

Henderson to Home

I always promise myself I will eat more fish. It usually starts off on a Monday when I stock up for the week, but by Wednesday the shop-bought fish has most likely found its way into the freezer or a spice-packed curry. So the idea of having fish so fresh that was caught in the morning delivered straight to your door the same day sounds heavenly.

Henderson to Home was started by Shaun Henderson in lockdown when his usual business of delivering to restaurants came to an abrupt halt. The concept is simple: order online, pick your delivery day and a friendly man will arrive at your door with a heavenly box of fresh seafood. Most of the fish is caught in Brixham, in the early morning, packaged up and delivered to your door that day. Choose from a boneless box, a shellfish box, which includes mussels, lobster and a crab, or make up your own box from the vast range of fish and shellfish that Henderson to Home offers.

We opted for the Luxe Box, which costs £50 for two people and includes a 250g tub of crab meat, 1kg fresh mussels and a whole fish (turbot, brill, line caught sea bass or whatever was caught by the fisherman on the day). The box arrived in the early afternoon, delivered by Henderson himself, and we chatted on my doorstep about the best ways to cook the crab.

By the time it came to dinner, my partner and I were armed and ready to go. We started off with the crab in lettuce leaves, seasoned with only a small squeeze of lemon. The crab was succulent and full of flavour without being too watery. We grilled the whole turbot on my Eva Solo Grill, which was the perfect size for the fish, and it flaked off the bone beautifully, washed down with a crisp glass of Assyrtiko. The next day I made fresh mussel pasta for lunch, which tasted as good as any I’ve had in top London restaurants, even if I do say so myself.

The fare is so fresh that you'll feel as if you’re eating in a local taverna by some azure Greek harbour watching the fishermen catch your next meal. There’s no way I will be opting for supermarket fish again. Helen Gibson

From £30 for a box for two people, or build your own box minimum order £35 and delivery is £5; hendersontohome.com 

Turner and George BBQ Box 

When a large box arrived from Turner and George on my doorstep early on a Friday morning, it could not have come at a better time - I had two barbecues planned that weekend. Both were for four people, so the original burger box (£60) for eight people was perfect, and came brimming with everything from Black Label burgers to brioche buns, Le Pig sausages, pork loin ribs, a 1kg bavette steak and South Carolina sauce.

As a meat loving family the burgers, steak and sausages went down a storm at my mother’s house, along with her potato salad. The sausages, made from 100% pork shoulder, ground coarsely and mixed with fresh garlic and herbs, plus a bun with nothing but a little tomato ketchup made for one of the best ‘hot dogs’ I’ve ever had. The Black Label burgers are one of Turner & George’s best selling products and it’s obvious why: the beef is ground together with bone marrow, enhancing its juiciness; there's no need to add extra seasoning as it's already so flavourful.

The next day I hosted a USA-style feast for three friends. For starters, I cooked the ribs and smothered them with the South Carolina sauce. Then came the bavette steak, which I fried to medium rare, although it could easily be braised or grilled. Accompanied by a creamy mac ‘n’ cheese, some ice cold beers and several months’ worth of gossip to catch up on, it felt like we’d been whisked away to a local barbecue joint in the Deep South, rather than north London. HG

The Original BBQ Box, £60 for a box for eight people, or build your own box minimum order £35 and delivery is £5; turnerandgeorge.co.uk

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