Sunday, February 11, 2018

I'm A Novice EGGHead

I recently purchased a Big Green Egg which is the brand name of a kamado-style ceramic charcoal barbecue cooker.  "What is a kamado-style ceramic cooker," you might well ask.  "That's a really good question," I might answer.  About 3,000 years ago the Japanese developed an earthenware cooking urn called a kamado.  There are a lot of these kamado-style cookers on the market today.  I chose the Big Green Egg because after extensive research I decided it was the prettiest.  It also weighs a couple hundred pounds so there didn't seem to be much chance that the strong summer winds would blow it over.  I'm still learning how to use it.  Of course I'm still keeping my propane Weber and my plain old charcoal Weber because you just never know when outdoors may be my only place to cook.  The EGG uses lump charcoal which is a cleaner, longer burn than than regular charcoal.  I was told to not get the EGG temperature above 350 degrees the first few times I used it so I've limited myself to smoking first a brisket, then a whole chicken, then some beef short ribs.  I will smoke one more chicken and then the EGG and I will be ready to higher temperatures.  I'm looking forward to using it to bake pizza and bread as well as the more traditional things we cook outdoors.  A fellow EGG devotee said that when she lived in Maine she didn't know which to shovel first-a path to her EGG or a path to her car.  She generally decided to shovel the snow to her EGG because there wasn't much of anyplace to go anyway but at least she could have fun cooking and eating good food. I'll keep you posted.

2 comments:

Tom Walker said...

I liked your Big Green Egg post because I used to enjoy barbecuing all kinds of things. I can't do that anymore because of the smoke and mainly because of the fire. Unfortunately, fire and oxygen don't mix too well. I need to find an electric grill that you can use indoors. We have a George Foreman grill but don't like it very much. Just an open grill would be perfect. Anyway, you whetted my appetite for grilling. Thank you for that.

MaryWalkerBaron said...

There are a number of electric grills for city balconies but I'm not sure they'd be okay for use indoors.