HOW TO use The Big Green Egg Grill - The 5 Skills YOU NEED to Master a Big Green Egg Grill

five tips on how to use your big green egg properly [Music] that's right welcome back to another week of the fogo life this week we're gonna do something a little different for you we're skipping some cooking and we're going to go into the five basic fundamentals that i like to use and share on the big green egg we get asked a lot about temperature control how to set up the egg we're going to cover some of these things right down to how you clean it out the right way but before we get started do us a favor subscribe to the channel and give us a thumbs up we love to hear from you one of the most burning questions that i get about charcoal is what are the different charcoals for and how much do i use well we basically make two different types of charcoal we have our super premium and our premium low and slow kind of more for grilling here so i'm going to show you exactly how much to use for each one and how to light it and everything that you need to know about it now let's open one of these bags i'm getting a little older instead of using that big old 35 pound bag i'm gonna use our other 17.6 pound bag it's just a little easier to handle yeah the old amount of charcoal question i get asked it quite a bit and really for me there's only one answer you can have too little you can't have too much so i'm going to show you where i fill mine too i want you to understand something folks what i'm doing here is subjective there's many different ways to do it i like to use as much charcoal as i can in my grill because first of all it's going to be left for next time and i can just use it all i don't want to run out of fuel while i'm cooking we're starting with a nice cleaned out egg we got the big green egg charcoal basket in here we've got our fire bowl and our fire ring those are the three basic components to the inside of a big green egg one of the most common misconceptions is to not use enough charcoal again many different schools of thought on this but this is how i do it and most of the people that i know that are big into big green eggs how they do it as well so a lot of people just want to fill it to here and they think that that's enough just put a base layer down in the bottom not me i want to fill it to about here i want it to be just below where the deflector is going to sit said it's full of charcoal so i don't run out of charcoal while i'm cooking a lot of people only want to fill their charcoal basket up to there they feel that that's plenty got a nice bed of coals it's going to treat you well well if you're doing something that's going to take more than a couple of hours guess what you're going to run out you're going to have to take the whole thing apart and add more charcoal that may look like a lot of charcoal to some people but don't forget this thing is a lean green cooking machine once you're done cooking you shut it down it puts the coals out in minutes i'm going to show you how to do that but first let me show you how to light the charcoal for the different ways that we can cook on a kamado style cooker i am not a big gimmick guy but when it comes to lighting your charcoal there's no replacing this it's called the blazer ball it's available on our website this is a nice bright and shiny new one i'm going to use this one because you can you reuse it time and time again for lighting your charcoal let me show you how to do it so basically there's two different types of use for a kamado grill like this smoking and grilling i'm going to show you how to light the charcoal for each one we're going to start with smoking where i like to light the fire at the bottom so that the air is coming into the egg and getting directly to the fire feeding it right from the source let me show you how to do that for the purpose of our demonstration i'm just going to push some of this charcoal to the side to clear a spot notice i'm doing it right in the front of the egg okay next thing we do throw a couple of these here fire starters into the blazer ball place it right down the bottom you can start with it empty or just push some aside like that so we're going to light this and then we're going to cover it so that the basic fire for smoking is at the bottom of the grill we don't want it at the top that's for grilling like i said we're putting the blaze ball right in front of it where we want the air to get to so it's going to come right in here and hit that fire and then once you've got a good fire burning like that cover it up okay i'm also going to pour some more charcoal in here because like i said we wanted to have a nice solid high base in here are we clear on how to set it up for smoking good now let's set it up for grilling this thing's the extra large it's ginormous so i'm going to use four fire starters to show you how to get the most surface area going in the quickest amount of time just like this kind of clear yourself out four little holes or whatever you want to do divots whatever whatever you want to call it so what's going to happen is as we light it it's going to light all the charcoal so that we have the maximum grilling surface with fire underneath it now that it's lit temperature control if you wanted to set your temperature to 250 degrees would you use your bottom vent or your top vent if the temperature gets out of control and suddenly jumps on you is there a way to control that absolutely and absolutely and absolutely yes on all three all right i'm going to show you right now how i like to do it then i'm going to show you how you can also do it if i was going to set this up for 250 degree cooking once i got it to temperature i'm going to sit my bottom vent just open maybe about an eighth of an inch maybe a touch more okay and my bottom vent my top vent i'm sorry i'm going to leave completely open full air flow that'll catch you at 250 degrees and it will leave it cooking solid that whole entire time if you wanted to cook a little bit hotter just open your bottom vent a little bit more and let it come to temperature it's real simple it's called controlling temperature with the bottom vent some of you may have a different type of top than this this is called the regulator the old one is called the daisy wheel and we have a lot of people have this one from smokewear you can do the same thing you just leave the vent fully open okay just like that or on the daisy wheel i'm going to show you on the egg how to set it up properly it's a little bit involved now a couple things with what's called the daisy wheel which is the old style if you put the words big green egg in the front when you open up your grill this thing is going to slide and you're not going to have any kind of control so the proper way to do it is to set this up with the writing on the back okay now when you open it up it doesn't move that's the first part second if you want to you can open this up like this and have full airflow or if you want just semi-good airflow and not have it move the little trick is line this tab up with the letter n on the word green in big green egg and you'll have perfect airflow the second way to control the temperature is using just the top vent but in order to do that we have to readjust our bottom vent so let's head down there by that bottom vent being halfway open it allows the air to come in nicely you may want to open it more you may want to open it a little bit less that's up to you find your personal preference using a regulator if you wanted to have it at 250 degrees or so you're going to keep that bottom vent about halfway and have just a slight opening here you don't want a ton because you want to restrict the airflow so that it's not building a hotter fire the fire lives off of air the more airflow the hotter it's going to burn let's say you're cooking chicken and you want about 350 degrees that's going to be somewhere around there so there's your chicken setting you want pizza slider open 700 800 900 degrees whatever you want control it here remember just restrict the airflow for cooler temperatures open the airflow for greater temperatures now that we have temperature control completely in order hopefully let me show you the differences of what we use the different temperatures for one being direct grilling one being indirect grilling when you buy your big green egg this is how it comes set up directly from the store it gives your your firing and then your grate will sit right on top of that for direct grilling that's all there is to it you use your simple multi spots to light the fire get that whole layer of charcoal lid on top and you're grilling within about 15 minutes plain and simple if you're a little bit uneasy having to reach down into the grill for grilling like that this is what's called the expander system that you can get for the big green egg there's a lot of accessories available for eggs and this is one that i highly recommend this allows you to raise the grade up higher so you're working at the same level as the egg and you're going to have a little bit easier control with cooking your food because it's not going to be just so darn tight and close to the flames you're going to have a little bit of space in there easier cooking management and that is direct cooking folks which leads us into indirect cooking where you're cooking without flames directly below your food almost sort of like an oven or a convection style cooking it's really simple for this another reason i love the expander just take out the grates and we're going to talk about this piece this is not a steering wheel it's called a convector it's a deflector it's a heat deflector so basically all it's going to do is it sits right in here like this you're going to put your grates right back on top you can use the standard grate that comes with the egg which is one piece or you can use the two piece which we're going to cover in a different video but now you can smoke your meats indirect no flames you're going to get full warmth all around it it's going to come around the edges and cook your meat almost like it's in an oven i also want to show you that you can use the convector without having to use the expander system now all you do if you look here you'll see that there's three slots grooves in the firing i believe newer eggs maybe don't even come with them in it but you just lay this down here put the three legs right in there and you're going to put your grate right on top of that that's all finished the last thing i'm going to show you is how to clean out the big green egg a couple different ways but first we want to make sure our fire is completely out you do not want any burning ashes if you want to shut it down simply close the top vent close the bottom vent give it about 10 15 minutes or so your coals should be completely out which brings us to our last and final step cleaning out the big green egg how do we do it there's a number of different ways it's real easy first we're going to start with cleaning out the charcoal basket let's show you how that's done first make sure all of your coals are extinguished they have to be completely out not even a little tiny bit going you want to be absolutely out before you do it the nice part about like having a big green egg basket like this or any other kind of basket is easy charcoal clean out now there's still a lot of charcoal in here that's still good to use right we don't want to get rid of that so what we're going to do is we're going to take a kitchen garbage bag we're going to place this in there and just shake it out see all these holes that's where these holes are in the tops in the bottom four once it's in the bag grab your two handles pull your bag up kind of around it if you can like so and just start shaking all the ash all the garbage is all going to shake down into the bottom then you pull this back out and you've got reusable charcoal yay now underneath that basket you've got all of this ash that's built up down here okay and here it's almost an inch thick so you want to keep this cleaned out i recommend doing it about every three to four maybe five uses at the most but you want to keep this clean because otherwise it's going to restrict the airflow coming into the egg and it's not going to allow your fire to build properly there are a number of different ways to clean that ash out of there you can use an ash tool which you can get from big green egg or whatever and i like to use a shop vac again you want your coals to be out have i mentioned that yet let's start with the shot with the airs tool show you how to do that first okay first thing we do is we open up our bottom vent all the way and you can see we have plenty of ash buildup in there with the ash tool it's really simple you're simply just sticking it in and pulling that ash out just do it right into a dust pan whatever you have even better for me is i like to use a shop vac very simple it gets it nice and clean nice and easy gets everything out of there for that you can either go in through the front as such or right from the top i like to go from the top like this and that's how you clean it out right not so quick we're not done yet there's one more step that for a deep cleaning that you want to do we're going to take the insides out of the egg so we're going to take the fire ring out now remember these are ceramic handle them carefully okay they're fragile and the last one is the actual fire bowl take this out as well okay again very carefully fragile now you can see i cleaned this out recently so there's not a ton here but you're going to get some buildup of ash around the outside simply take your shop vac or whatever you want to use you could even use a little you know push broom or something like that and just vacuum this out and the last question we want to answer is why in the world does anybody need this many big green eggs well let me tell you you want to cook up one steak use the mini you want to cook a couple lobster tails and a steak use this you want to cook up a whole lot of stuff use the xl you want it no nobody uses that one i've never cooked in it here's why the story is that back a number of years ago big green egg made about 200 limited edition blue ones if you ever see one of those reach out to me i want to buy it okay let me know there you can't find them anywhere anyway i hope that you enjoyed this i hope you got some great information out of it we tried to provide it so it's easy to use and make your enjoyable make your experience enjoyable so remember to subscribe give us a thumbs up we really work hard for it give us a thumbs up and leave us a comment below tell us a tip that you'd like to see or that maybe you have a secret about on your big green egg or kamado cooker until then remember get out and grill keep them clean and we'll see you next week on the fogo life

Channel: FOGO Charcoal

Views: 6,787

Rating: 4.9504132 out of 5

Keywords: fogo charcoal, charcoal, lump charcoal, grill, grilling, big green egg, kamado joe, bbq, recipes, which charcoal should i use, how to light charcoal in a big green egg, light your kamado for smoking, light your big green egg for grilling, how to control temeprature in a big green egg, how to clean out the big green egg, unicorn blue big green egg

Id: KyVuEL_4hc4

Length: 14min 7sec (847 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 01 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/CountryPhi]

Love the videos

[u/MagicMarkerMX3]

Captain Ron!!!!

[u/Notsocooldad]

Nice Video. I wish I could get a blue one too!

What I found interesting, is that you use the fire starters, but use a blow torch to light them. Seems a bit redundant. Just light the coals with the blow torch directly.

[u/TrackingTenCross1]

Hey Ron, I really enjoy your posts, thanks for this. I appreciate that you focused on the technical aspects of the grill instead of the food cooking. I thought I knew everything, but learned something about the vent control, and that there were only 200 blue eggs made.

Future video thoughts: how to get the egg to a lower temp if it creeps up on low & slow cooks without getting a bunch of white smoke mid-cook.

Thanks again, enjoy a cold one!