Grills

The Big Green Egg is absolutely the most FANTASTIC smoker/grill combination ever invented Big Green Egg Large AllinOne Grill / Smoker After doing some extensive research on the Internet in regard to information concerning charcoal smoker/grills I d...

Big Green Egg Large All-in-One Grill / Smoker Big Green Egg Large All-in-One Grill / Smoker Product Technical DetailsTechnical Details:Lar...

The Big Green Egg is one of at least four similar ceramic cooking systems available in the US today, the other three being the Kamado cooker, the Primo grill, and the Grill Dome. All follow the same basic philosophy, that of using a nearly-sealed ceramic cooking vessel to cook food with the minimum of fuel, minimum of moisture loss, and minimum of time. Any one of the four will turn you into a master chef, assuming you have mastered fire. If you haven’t yet come to grips with flames, stick with a microwave. Add some liquid smoke and convince yourself that you’re grilling like the pros. Not.

For the rest of this review, we’ll assume you aren’t intimidated by heat-producing devices, or you have a boy scout handy. I own a large Big Green Egg because it was convenient. The Kamado is prettier, the Primo Oval is more flexible (and more costly), and the Grill Dome is, well, the Grill Dome. Only the Big Green Egg was available locally, and that at an Ace Hardware store 7 blocks from my house. If purchased online, shipping on these ceramic cookers is not cheap, upwards of $100 or more, sometimes much more. They are all very heavy, ranging from 140 pounds up to 450 pounds (think “brick” and you’ll get the picture). The logistics of getting one on your patio is nothing to sneeze at.

At 145 pounds, the large Egg is light enough to be moved around easily within the optional nest. The one to two inch thick ceramic serves as a heat sink, smoothing out the hot spots and temperature fluctuations that plague metal grills. As with all the ceramic grills mentioned, the Egg can cook “low and slow” or “high and fast,” depending on your needs. It can cook with direct or indirect heat using the optional plate setter (or you can make one from the terra cotta saucer you stole from under that dead plant in the living room, the one that you forgot to water for oh, about six months or ever). It can cook for 24 hours (or more, I’ve had 36 before) on a single load of fuel. When cooking low and slow, the fuel is consumed exceedingly slowly, just enough to keep the temperature steady. Unlike a metal grill, where heat is radiating at a furious pace and requires a much higher fire just to stay even, the ceramic bathes your food with a “warm and fuzzy” glow. The (lack of) fuel consumption is astounding. A single bag of charcoal can last months, well over a hundred hours of cooking time. You typically burn up only about 20% of the fuel with each cooking. And with less venting for the same amount of heat compared to a metal grill, less air is moving through the cooking chamber, so drying of the food is markedly reduced. Emphasis on the word “markedly.” Oh, and did I mention that the food loses no moisture at all? I mean none. Took a half-pound burger the other day straight off the grill with no resting (kids were falling down dead from starvation, you know). Cut it in half and had to empty the juice off the plate three times to make room for a bun.

You can get moist food with other kinds of cookers too, but you are adding artificial moisture manually. You are either basting, mopping, or boiling water or cider or whatever in a water pan. You can do all these things in an Egg, too, but that’s not the point. The point is simply this: You don’t have to. You don’t need to add moisture artificially. Let the outside get crispy while the inside stays moist. Try that with a water smoker. Cook all day without even opening up the grill if you want. Open the grill a dozen times an hour if you like, it doesn’t require thirty minutes to get back up to temp again. (Obviously, opening the grill just for fun kind of defeats the purpose of a semi-sealed ceramic vessel, but you can take quick peeks at regular intervals with no harm at all.)

Unlike what one reviewer stated previously, starting the egg is trivial, a piece of cake. Sure, you can use an electric starter, and they do work well. Yes, they are 1950s, and they’re still around because they do exactly what they are supposed to do and nothing else. The idea is not to poison yourself and your environment by igniting fossil fuels. Petroleum products smell bad, burn with black smoke (lots of carbon), and just plain have no redeeming qualities around food (unless you’re my mother-in-law, who uses a smoke alarm for a timer, and then yes, please do use fossil-fuels). You can start your egg with newspaper, a starter cube, or my preferred method, a cheap old propane plumber’s torch available even at crappy Walmart for a twenty dollar bill or less. The torch is portable, requires no electricity, and if you get one with the built-in starter, turns on and off instantly. The torch takes about thirty seconds to get a small section burning, and then the Egg does all the rest. You start the fire in the middle, open all the vents, then wait ten minutes, tops. You can achieve temps in the range of 700 degrees in that time. These high temps turn your grill into a self-cleaning oven, flashing anything left over from your last cookout, including that lone hot dog you forgot to take off the grill yesterday.

[Contrary to a previous review, the charcoal is nothing special, and you can even use Kingsford in it if you want. You will want to use lump charcoal though, as there is no filler, which means less ash to clean up. (Kingsford and other briquettes are mostly clay to hold their basic shape. Clay doesn’t burn, and it ends up in the bottom of the grill in vast amounts. When you clean out your Weber, that gray stuff is mostly clay with only a little ash. Add water, scoop off the ash that floats, and see how much remains on the bottom — nearly all of it — as clay sinks.) Lump charcoal has almost no ash at all. You can use any kind of lump, including Cowboy charcoal from your local Menards. Coconut extruded is still the best, but you have to order it online from those nice Kamado cooker folks. Big Green Egg lump is a pretty good choice as well, available at your Egg dealer, but any lump will work just fine. What you don’t want, naturally, is Match-Light or any of those other fossil-fuel impregnated briquettes. Evil, foul-smelling things. Yecch and stuff. Oh, and since lump ‘coal has no clay, it will be much lighter for the same size bag. Don’t think you are being ripped off because it weighs so much less. You actually get more charcoal in an 8 pound bag of lump than you do in a 20 pound bag of briquettes. Even if you don’t buy an Egg, upgrade your Weber to lump and throw away the starter fluid. You’ll thank me for this tip, I guarantee it.]

After a good high-temp burn, you begin closing down the vents and establishing a working temperature that is compatible with your menu. With steaks, cook them at 700. On a 3/4″ steak, two minutes per side with a 2 minute dwell. They will come out spectacularly medium rare (this is how steaks are cooked at Ruth’s Chris steak house, except they do it at 1800 degrees, yowzer!). With ribs or Boston butts or anything else that needs time to soften up, cook them low and slow using indirect heat via the plate setter. The Egg holds temperatures very consistently, without constant fussing. The ceramic is very forgiving of fluctuations.

You will be tempted to cut corners and go with a smaller Egg just to save a little cash. Foolish move, Grasshopper. Not even one person on the planet has ever wished their Egg was smaller. Not even Crazy Larry, and he’s crazy. The large Egg has room for a 15 pound turkey roasted vertically, and the smaller ones don’t. The extra large Egg has a huge diameter, but the dome height is less. The large is just the perfect turkey cooker, and yes, you will be cooking all your turkeys on this from now on. Get the large or you will regret your decision. I know what I’m talking about here.

But $650 for a charcoal grill? Yes, and here’s why. No LP tanks to haul back to the store. Food that tastes better than it ever has before or ever will again. Bread, pizza, veggies baked in a wood-burning brick oven, even during the hottest part of the summer when your indoor oven is covered with cobwebs. Steaks that exceed the best steakhouses around and will give Ruth’s Chris a run for the money. Burgers that don’t shrink. Chicken so moist and flavorful it will bring tears to your eyes. Ribs that fall apart inside the smoker before you can even get them on a plate. You cannot get better-tasting, moister food on any other cooking system, period. End of story. Ceramic is the flat-out best you can get, and second best isn’t even close. This from someone who has tried them all: Hibachis, Mecos, Webers, water smokers, offset firebox smokers, dutch ovens, campfires, Calphalon pots, and All-Clad pots, just to name a few.

[Hard-core offset firebox smokers take note: I previously owned a top-of-the-line New Braunfels. No Pitt’s %26 Spitt’s, but pretty okay. Kind of like the Weber of offset smokers. Food coming off the offset smoker is “dust-bowl-dry” in comparison to the Egg. If you didn’t mop the meat constantly during an offset smoking, it would be inedible and you know it. Not so with the Egg. Results are better in every way — the offset doesn’t do even one thing better than the Egg, and it eats ‘coal and wood like crazy. I gave my New Braunfels away, along with my Weber kettle, and I never once looked back.]

Look around the Internet for a used egg. You won’t find any. When Egg-owners die, their survivors fight over it. All Egg owners will tell you the same shared regret: “I just wish I had bought mine sooner.” Egg-owners are fanatical, almost cult-like, in their love affairs with the Egg, while Egg-owner neighbors all suffer the same affliction: Egg envy.

It’s an absolute joy to cook on, and you will be quickly tackling recipes that would intimidate you otherwise. It will rank right up there as one of the best investments of your life. And yes, you can expect a good twenty five years use from your Egg. That works out to pocket change per month over the lifetime of the grill.

Buy an Egg and you will give away every other grill you own. Happily - no, triumphantly - at that. And that’s not an Eggzaggeration.

I have no conflicts of interest with this review. I am not an employee of Green Egg nor any of its distributors, and I have not received a nickle for the words I typed above. I just like it. Registered trademarks used in this review include Big Green Egg, Weber, New Braunfels, Kamado Cooker, Primo, Grill Dome, Pitt’s %26 Spitt’s, Kingsford, Match-Light, Cowboy, Menards, Ruth’s Chris, Calphalon, All-Clad, Meco, Hibachi, Walmart and Ace Hardware, among others. No animals were harmed during the writing of this review, but several were eaten afterwards.

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