Big Green Egg Tutorial and Review - How to Use the Big Green Egg

hey everyone chef Jason Hill here and I'm with my friend Brian and we're down in beautiful Laguna Beach and he's going to tell us a little bit about this cooking device known as the big green egg beautiful digestion Brian well what we have here today is this the big green egg this is the extra-large version it's the actual the biggest egg that they make right now they are talking about building a bigger one than this it's actually a monstrosity but they haven't come out with it yet it'll be interesting to see but they have many styles versions of this actual egg it all basically has the same configuration but they're basically different sizes from tabletop up to this size which is the XL currently I'm using it on just a standard foot pedestal they actually make several tables for these they can come up off the ground more of an even cooking level it is a ceramic style leg these are basically come from the Qin Dynasty in China and many centuries ago and what's happening here is it being that it's ceramic it retains a lot of heat so they're real the great thing about these these big green eggs and the other Komodo style cookers is once you bring them to temperature they stay constant you don't have to mess with them you use a lump style coal which is kind of like these coals we have over here so we have a couple different versions here now this is this is a hundred percent lump mesquite coal this bag here there's several retailers that sell that then there's the big green egg version of the of the lump coal now the lung coal that big green egg cells is an organic style coal it's premium oak and hickory and they're both they're pretty comparable in terms of use however I do have a preference of the big green egg coal and the reason why is the type of wood it burns a little bit hotter a little more consistent temperature range the Mesquite's been working out fairly well you know if you want to cook a quick burger or something you can do that but the versatility of the big green eggs pretty awesome you can pretty much use it as a smoker you can use it as a normal grill or you can actually use it as like a pizza oven okay so you can build this thing - whatever tent but sure you want based on controlling the dampers and the way you do that you got it comes with this damper here and the way this thing works here is it actually spins on top two different devices that spin up here on top so the real temperature control on this device comes from two things one is the damper here on the bottom real important when you're smoking I actually learn the tough way by overcooking some meat that you don't need to keep this thing open very much for temperature basically you want to get up in the 200 range and you only keep this between a quarter and a half inch down here on the bottom now when you're getting the fire going though you keep this thing wide open with the screen shut the only purpose of the bottom screen opening is this is how you remove your ash after you're done cooking the lump coal is really nice because it actually generates very little ash it's not like a typical briquette where you have all these briquettes and I asked you have to handle at the end this lump coal is great being that it burns very hot high heat and if you snuff your fire you can actually reuse your lump coal it actually will just stop the cooking process the fire will go out you go to relight at another time and I'll show you that how to do that but you can go ahead and light it later time and reuse those coals all over again so it's real nice I mean I've cooked over 12 hours with this thing up to I think 15 hours and I still had a pretty good amount of coal in there so I'd imagine it'll go at least 18 hours on a good full you know set of coal now when you close this grill this thing will run basically full heat you want to get about six or eight hundred six or seven hundred degrees you want this thing open wide open okay but when you're cooking down the you know 350 I actually take it down about an inch to get to about 350 and temperature okay and really to get down to 225 somewhere in there I really damper that thing down it takes very little airflow to keep this thing moving it's just the coals are smoldering and it really creates a nice product okay and you control your temperature up here with the same thing on the top damper so you just that's airflow it's it's your airflow control is really what you're doing here when you're cooking if you want a lot of heat you open the door wide open open this damper up top wide open you can really get this thing billowing you get this thing up to 700 degrees and you can control the heat real low if you want to bring it down to about you know somewhere down around 200 for smoking anywhere from 225 to 240 you keep the bottom open about quarter to half-inch real important I learned this through several trials cooking pork butts cooking ribs cooking what else do we have on here some tri-tip we cook some brisket and you know risky that was awesome yeah anything from cooking from five pounds up to you know I think I had some eight pound brisket in here and you know I cooked everything about an hour and a half a pound in this at about 225 to 240 in that range the real cool thing about this more than anything is I could put something in here at 10 o'clock at night at a constant 225 temperature and with the lump coal it burns so consistent all night long with this Green Egg I can come back at 10 o'clock the next morning a 12-hour cook the food's done and it's still 225 degrees that's awesome so that's the real real cool thing about the Green Egg more than anything and then today we're going to take this - we're going to do salmon and we're going to take it up all the way to probably 600 and do the pizzas that's correct we're going to see the the range of this big green egg today so I'm very excited alright so what I've done here is basically I've just got some standard Applewood chips and get them at any up you know barbecue store order them online whatever these are Applewood so a good thing a good practice to do with the smoking is go ahead and soak your chips for anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour okay put them right on top of your coals and you know if you're looking for a different smoky flavor with whatever you know type of meat you're cooking you know there's many types of wood you can use on this also you don't want to use you don't want to use certain resin type woods actually very bad and harmful to cook with those type of woods you want to use a natural wood that's like a Hickory and mesquite something Apple a lot of fruit trees are good to use basically you can use these as kind of an ad somewhat of an additive for the smokiness you know in different types of flavors you're going to be cooking with so all it does is it just enhances the flavor a little more in the food doesn't really do much to the cooking aspect of heat or anything like that then the reason I'm soaking them here is if you just throw them in dry they're just going to burn up real quick so you retain a little longer heat a little longer use out of them if you just soak them ahead of time and you know you could soak them as long as you want basically they're only going to soak up so much water and you know don't put so much on there that you're going to douse your fire but you know drain the water out when you're done basically just I just grab them like this and just throw them right on top of my coals yeah okay so we got the coals in here now what's our next step alright so next step is here a couple things one we want to pull this damper off that we use to snuff the fire from last time let's go ahead and put our new heat control damper on here okay open that up all the way let's open the open the door here we're already got a little bit of the fire kicking off here just from the previous cooking that we've done actually had a little bit of some hot coals in there so it's starting to smoke a little bit now we'll open this bottom damper and I like to open it up all the way to get full airflow okay and then let's go ahead and just fire up our basically our our fire starters I just basically let it flame for about 10 minutes or so okay we're going to go ahead and add some these are apple smoke chips we add them pre soaked in here for a while about a couple hours already we're just going to add them right on top of the fire and it's going to give us a little more Applewood smoky flavor all right it's been about ten minutes we got our fire going it's already been flamed out we're at the point now where we can go ahead and put our plate setter on so this is full ceramic plate setter basically there's two purposes of this plate setter when you put it in like this you're creating an indirect heat for smoking food when you flip it over you can now use it as a pizza stone okay so it's dual purpose definitely recommend buying this when you get the big green egg it's really the main main part of what you need here so it fits right in here right in the slots it'll start building heat here fairly quickly go ahead and put our grill right on top okay we're now at a point where we can go ahead and close the top and close the bottom and two things we want to do here we have this thing wide open for getting temperature we actually left the door open the whole time we actually want to close it now I'm pretty familiar with where this needs to be for the temperature I need I want a 200 degrees so I want to really damper this down barely open and I also want to damper this thing down at the bottom real important and all I want is about a quarter inch air flow down at the bottom really hard to believe that that's all the air you need but that's all you need okay one last tip I would like to remind you of on the Big Green Egg very important that you burp these especially in temperatures above 350 degrees what happens is it creates a backdraft when you open these at hot temperatures and you'll get this real backdraft effect so what you do is just open it crack a little bit before you go ahead and open it the whole way give it a few seconds to breathe you don't want that backdraft effect really just hitting your face and you know burning your face up so O'Brien I really appreciate you showing me the Big Green Egg and showing my viewers what's next well it's been my pleasure Jason I appreciate the opportunity well what's next I'd like to get this thing up to an elevation where you can actually cook where it's at a similar height as your countertop so I'm going to start producing some tables probably start off with a nice nice butcher block table top so I'm you can pull your meat out and do some slicing or chopping right on top maybe even a stainless steel option some you can keep nice and clean and I want to build something maybe that's mobile too something you could use for you know the outdoor camping or whatever else you might want to do with it that's a great idea as soon as you get your first one done I'll come film it it sounds great thank you Thanks right thank you Ben

Channel: Chef Tips

Views: 888,455

Rating: 4.4652519 out of 5

Keywords: The Big Green Egg (Brand), How to Use the Big Green Egg, Big Green Egg operation, Big Green Egg tips, Big Green Egg accessories, Big Green Egg heat control, Smoking on the Big Green Egg, Smokers, How to Smoke Meats, Smoking Food, Big Green Egg recipes, Chef Jason Hill, Chef Tips, Cheftips, Brian Zagorsky, Laguna Beach, Three Arch Bay, How-to (Media Genre), Big Green Egg tutorial

Id: tvGDCUPmQvw

Length: 11min 2sec (662 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 24 2013