HOW TO use the Kamado Joe? The 3 skills YOU NEED to tackle anything, Kamado Joe 101

if you've just recently bought a kamado joe or are thinking about getting one this barbecue season this video is for you i'm gonna share the three essential skills that you need to master to avoid those last minute pizza takeout dishes to cover up for whatever sins happened on your barbecue let's get started hey i'm james from smoking dad barbecue and everybody has that unicorn cook that you want to try you're just a little bit not sure how to get started and so over the last 10 years i've narrowed down some advice into three key skills that i'm going to share with you in today's video that no matter what that unicorn cook might be for you it could be a brisket some pulled pork ribs a steak anything like that these skills will apply and help set you up for success so let me share what we're going to cover in today's video okay so if there's one thing i can say i've learned in my 10 years of cooking on a ceramic style barbecue it's that you're never quite done learning so even if you've seen some of my other videos before or maybe even checked out my kamado joe 101 playlist hopefully you'll find there's some new ideas in here that will help you continue to improve your skills or if you're starting out from scratch definitely recommend that you watch this video in its entirety if you don't have the time though i've broken the video into three chapters and i'll put the timestamp links down below so you can quickly jump to any chapter or any topic that interests you most very quickly and easily so in chapter number one we're going to focus on everything that goes into setting you up for success and that's building your fires that can include things we'll cover smoking wood charcoal quantity charcoal placement everything that usually is behind a good cook and if it's not done right usually this is where uh the issues lie in terms of those last minute takeout orders in chapter number two we'll spend some time focusing on your cooking setups so hot and fast low and slow direct indirect or multi-zone cooking i'll share some different setups and tips and tricks to help you get the most out of your kamado joe barbecue and then in chapter number three we're going to go into some operation and control best practices vent settings for different target temperatures getting up to temperature and shutting down everything that can go into extending the life and enjoyment out of your kamado joe that's what we're going to cover in chapter three today all right chapter one let's get started with building fires and so this is a question that you guys ask regularly or if you're a new subscriber maybe is a question that is on your mind which is what do i do for smoking wood how much what type where do i put it and so smoking wood is something you'll spend a lot of time getting to find out what is the right amount for you the best analogy i can give you is to think about smoking wood like salt because i'm sure that will conjure up some memories for you of perfectly seasoned food as well as over seasoned food and the same can or will likely happen with smoking wood where you find the balance between not enough smoke and too much smoke so i'm going to bring the camera a little bit closer because it gives us the opportunity to show the ideal placement of smoking wood the ideal quantity of smoking wood depending on what type of cook you're doing and since this also works hand in hand with the amount of charcoal and charcoal placement i think it's best in order to make perfect sense that i bring the camera close and we build an example fire so we can bring all of this together of course if i don't answer your question in this section or later on in the video go ahead and let me know in the comments if there's something else that's on your mind i'd be more than happy to answer that and potentially turn it into a video okay welcome to the empty inside of a kamado joe big joe three i've just cleaned out the ash and before i install the charcoal basket i'll just mention i don't have the included wings that commodo joe provides when you assemble the grill that filter any ash down into the ash pen just because i find it tends to get stuck underneath the wings and then you have to remove everything to clean it so next time you're doing a deep clean just know that it works perfectly fine the way that i have it here you have to remove it out by hand but you can make it go a little bit longer between cleaning let's go ahead and drop in our charcoal basket so i can show you some wood placement tips okay so for our smoking wood there's a couple of ways that you can look at this first way that you could look at it is on a ratio basis and so i like to go sort of no more than five to ten percent smoking wood to charcoal so with the amount of charcoal that we have right now that would be about a small piece like this that we'd place on the bottom and then cover up the other way that you can look at this ratio depending on the type of cook is uh the amount of time that you will be cooking so if i was to do a three hour cook so maybe a reversed seared tomahawk something like this small piece of wood would be enough since it's really only gonna smoke for that first little bit and part of that three hours is searing so that could be a piece of wood if we were to go for six hours maybe we were doing three to one ribs then i would go ahead and add a second piece of wood and if i'm doing an all-nighter brisket or something like that i'm going to be adding even more charcoal sticking to about again that 90 percent charcoal 10 percent wood i'd go ahead and add a third piece of wood and for the sizes of the wood themselves on the big joe i can get away with using some of these larger pieces but on my kamado joe classic or junior i would definitely be looking at something a little smaller so you can stick with the same number of pieces like i mentioned so long as again you don't really get massive massive pieces of wood that end up taking you past that amount of wood to charcoal ratio so why does this matter so there's a couple of key reasons we take some time to get this step right so the first reason is the quality of the smoke one of the advantages of a kamado style cooker is that they retain their heat really well one of the disadvantages is that they retain their heat really well and not a lot of coals need to be burning in order to maintain that heat so that makes getting the right balance of a small fire burning cleanly really tricky to learn at first and if there's a mistake i see more people making it's adding way too much smoking wood for the size of the fire that they have going and this can cause a couple of problems the first one we already talked about which is it's not good clean smoke so your food instead of tasting sweet which is what the wood aroma and taste should be when it's burning cleanly it'll come off tasting a little dirtier this is kind of a gross analogy but after it rains imagine walking into the forest and licking a tree that's a little bit what your food will be like if you over smoke it and you don't get clean combustion the second issue that can spring up is the duration of the wood in our smoke in terms of are we actually getting smoke or are we just causing you know little fires and so i found by burying the wood underneath the charcoal it does that first point and second point here together really well is it extends the life of our smoking wood and as the smoke comes up off this piece of wood it smolders it passes through the coals that are burning and it tends to purify and give it a better cleaner smoke because you really want to be i think in that 450 degree range i'll validate in my text down below but the only way that's possible is to have the smoke go through a fire because if our grill is at 250 degrees you're not getting that temperature any other way than passing through the coals that are actually burning and then maybe the most important here is the temperature control challenges that too much smoking wood can add since this is not charcoal it tends to just combust and burn full out or it tends to smolder and throw a ton of smoke and consume all the oxygen and so this is what causes your yo-yo effect inside of your kamado joe where the temperatures are all of a sudden surging maybe a piece of wood caught fire and it's adding a bunch of btu to your grill and so you try and adjust your vents accordingly now your oxygen starved and this starts to smolder your dome fills up with smoke and it puts out your fire and now your temperatures drop and so this is really frustrating when you're first starting to learn because it feels like all day you're chasing your temperatures up down and everywhere in between except where you want it to be and usually the number one culprit of this is too much charcoal or way too much smoking wood mixed into your charcoal and then maybe just one last point before we leave smoking wood and we come back to the kamado joe big joe behind me to talk about charcoal placement is the taste that you're going after and so if you're new again start on the milder side and work your way up i have almost every variety in the garage everything from mild woods like pecan alder you know fruit woods like apple cherry peach which is what i have in front of me all the way up into the big bold stuff like mesquite or dark cherry etc if you were wanting to do pulled pork etc i would say if there's two woods that i use the most often is peach wood it goes great on almost everything from poultry to seafood to even you know big beefs like brisket or a tomahawk steak or something like that and then the second one is oak so if you had to start with just two i would go ahead and try peach as a milder kind of all-purpose wood and oak as something that i would use for ribs pulled pork brisket etc you can tweak and adjust to your taste but just to get started those are two that i'd want to have in my barbecue bin to get started so let me bring the camera back a little bit closer and now i can show you charcoal placement but before we do that another common question is removing the string and opening the bag for those epic instagram little clips let me show you how to do that we'll add some charcoal and i'll show you placement and air flow management inside your kamado jug okay so today i'm using a bag of kamado joe big block which is one of my all-time favorite brands of charcoal mostly just the combination of value for the price as well as taste and the burn duration that it runs for but um if you want to go ahead and check out i have two videos on my channel dedicated to charcoal taste texture the quantity etc you can check those out when you've got some free time but right now i'm just going to show you how to open this style of bag and so the way that i like to do that is start on the back of the bag and go to the top left corner so the short string here not the long string over on the right and what we want to do is just pull this through the end loop right here so right now i'll just go ahead i don't think i can do that in a way that you can see it really well okay so now that i've removed the string from the loop it's ready for me to go ahead and start pulling and you'll see here so i just give that a pull we're done everything comes out with one tug so thanks so much for asking for me to show that that's a quick and easy way of how to open uh a sew-in bag style of charcoal let's move back and set up a fire okay so this is going to be something that you might see as you're starting to build your fire and so what i want to do is take the time to now start covering the smoking wood underneath and mixing some of these fresh pieces that we just added in with our used charcoal so i'm just going to take you fast forward while we start to recover that so i can point out why and how i've arranged the fire and the coals the way that we have okay so this looks great if i was going to be doing maybe a rib cook or a quicker pork but this is about enough to go maybe i'd guess eight hours outside right now it's just below freezing with this amount of charcoal wood and so you don't want to over fill your basket i've loaded up the basket here on my kamado joe big joe 3 before set a fire for low and slow temperatures and wanted to see how long it would run for the punch line is it went 56 hours and so if you fill your grill up regularly all the time that is way too much charcoal and so a couple of things start to get more difficult for you when you do that one is the airflow so you start blocking these air holes that you can see in your fire box all the way around the grill and that limits the amount of air that can come to your fire you also start to have a challenge controlling the burn direction and so if the grill is full you know the fire might wander this way and then burn down and reach a spot where there's no more charcoal accessible or it's not naturally falling and you can start to get your fire going out so the natural tendency for you know almost every kamado that i've used is for the fire draw to pull strongest towards the back right so we've got our air coming in down at the front and it just sort of naturally pulls that air into the back and so if there's an area that i like to put a few extra pieces it's towards the rear of the kamado so i like to light my fire just front center so a little bit of skew here front center knowing that it'll sort of naturally draw itself to the back so placing your coals in a way that will accommodate for the burn direction as well as creating ample space for airflow will help again ensure good clean smoke and continuity of your fire it'll also help the next time that you want to cook and you want to be able to access the bottom that you don't have an entire full basket to manage and have to you know go burrowing down in order to clean it out and get to the bottom so those are a couple good reasons for building your fire how to place your charcoal and how much air you should see and again if i was doing anything in the six to eight hour range this is what my fire would look like all right welcome to chapter two where we are going to tackle our cooking setups between direct indirect whether using heat deflector plates or the slow roller that's included on the series three kamado joe grills or as an after thought add-on accessory to series 1 series 2 grills as well as covering some of our dividing conker two-tier setups so just like our first chapter i'll bring the camera a little bit closer to the kamado joe series 3 behind me and show you how it's set up for each of these styles of cooking okay so let's start first with the indirect setup so i'm going to start this way because this is matching how you may cook many times where you start a cook indirect and you finish direct with those hot coals and this is a setup that you will use most often because if you do it the other way where you start with searing maybe a steak and then you want to finish it indirect the heat retention of the kamado is so great it just takes a long time for things to cool down and so because of that the method that's most common here is what's called the reverse sear where you start off low and slow indirect and then you finish direct so i'll start with the slow roller setup how i set up for long slow cooks i use the slow roller most often for things like ribs brisket pulled pork anything that will take advantage of the you know the claim here is 20x better airflow inside of our kamado joe where you really want that smoke to penetrate and get an amazing smoke ring something that the slow roller makes really easy so let me show you how to set up for the slow roller and then we'll set up with the heat deflector plates okay so when i'm setting up for a slow roller indirect cook this is as far as i go before i light my coals i would like to assemble the base of the sole roller get a fire going so there's no obstruction whatsoever so any heat coming out of our fire can pre-warm our ceramics i'll explain a little bit more of the why and the how behind that in our next chapter once though our fire is going and our grill is up to temperature let me show you how i assemble for the rest of the soil roller assembly okay next would be our divide and conquer rack system which you drop in just like this then you have the extender that goes on the base of the sole roller followed by the top of the slow roller okay something optional that i like to do is go ahead and grab my x accessory ring and i like to drop that for a low and slow cook on the second level of the divide and conquer rack system because what that does is that's giving me just about maybe an inch or a little bit more separation between the x accessory ring and the top of our sole roller and why this is really handy is you can grab either a foil drip tray or one like i use from smoke wear and drop that on top of your x accessory ring so this is now going to keep fat drippings with an air gap up away from the source of heat and this will reduce the amount of white fat burning smoke and it'll just help improve not just the cleanup and the longevity of your slow roller but also the taste of your food itself so you would go ahead now with that in place and drop in your grids which would sit nicely above that you again can squish a foil pan from costco and make it fit in the same arrangement i like the circle though from the smokewear pan as it matches the profile and diameter of the slow roller and so there's no interference with the intended use of the slow roller in terms of creating that circular airflow pattern let's get this out and i'll show you how to set up now for indirect hooks using the divide and conquer rack and the included heat deflector plates okay so this one is controversial and purely my opinion but i see on facebook groups or questions a lot of people struggling with cracking their ceramic heat deflector plates and so you know my theory based on what i read a lot of people doing is that it comes from installing their heat deflector plates this way and i am not a fan of doing the setup i'm going to show it to you right now and explain why and then i'll show you what i like to do moving forward so a common setup in the older kamado joes is to go ahead and try and preserve two levels of cooking on your divide and conquer rack is to drop the deflector plates right on the firebox and so one of the problems with this setup is the first one goes in no problem but getting this second one in place is really tight on the fingers and it's easy to then drop there you heard it there that little tiny drop now that wasn't a big drop that's not going to crack my ceramics but if you had a fire under here your fingers are getting really hot you're more likely to rush and drop your ceramic and that little jarring of ceramic hitting the metal is something that i believe can help accelerate the wear and tear on your ceramic components the other reason i'm not a fan of this setup is it blocks a lot of the heat that's able to come up and fill the rest of your grill and so in order to maintain a temperature you need a raging fire underneath here with just a little bit escaping in order to maintain let's say 250 degrees and while this helps with achieving a clean burn because you're in inferno mode essentially underneath these heat deflector plates it's acting as a heat cap and it's putting a lot of stress on the ceramic underneath because you basically have a really really really hot fire with just a little bit of heat coming up so not only will you burn more charcoal this way the risk of dropping and cracking a deflector plate is higher plus the stress on your firebox is higher so for all those reasons i don't use this setup let me get it out and show you how i like to set up okay i like to start my setups with the x accessory ring on the bottom this may not look like much of a different but there is an inch to two inches difference between where we were on the fire ring and the charcoal basket to being up on the bottom level here let me show you what that looks like and what that means so first our issue of installing the plates is much easier because now i have the x accessory rack supporting my deflector plates so there's no risk of dropping so it's easier for me to get my hands in plus again the height is not coming through here but before where i could barely even get the plate into position you know i can now reach my hands in and get right underneath and so this is just allowing that little bit more heat to come up which will help reduce the amount of coal and fuel we need to use to hit and maintain temperature so this will still provide great smoke good air flow and a large distance away from your heat source especially if we were to go ahead and drop a cooking grid on top just like this and since this is a video for our newbie friends or someone who is hoping to be a newbie this is the correct way to install your grids they work both ways let me show you so the disadvantage of setting up this way is if you're cleaning your grate so you're loading a large food if you hit it the wrong way you can knock your grates off because there's nothing supporting it on the sides when you put it into this position [Music] they sit against these notches and they're really not going anywhere so that is the right way to install your cooking grids the other thing i'll point out while we're here is this is also how i like to set up for a reverse sear steak so if i was doing this i would either set up exactly like we're doing right now where we've got our heat deflectors installed and i could throw my stake on here if you're going to do a small fire you could even start the whole time by removing this plate pushing those coals further to the back starting with a second grid installed now we are ready to do two things we could throw our protein up here and do a reverse sear so we're getting the smoke and the advantage of being protected by this heat deflector plate but then when it's time to sear we could immediately just go from the top position right down above the coals so any combination of this you like depending on how big of a rush you're in is a great way to set up for low and slow indirect cooking as well as hot and fast so since this is a kamado joe 101 video there's no such thing as dumb questions in fact the very first time i tried to do this myself i was puzzled and it took me a minute to figure out which is something as simple as storing your slow roller so let me show you the proper way to slide it in because if you do it the other way it doesn't work so let's drop down to the base and i'll show you how to tuck away your slow roller on the included cart of the series 3 kamado joe okay so this will only take a few seconds but i'm sure if you're like me the very first time you want to put away your slow roller you just lined it up with a circle and pushed in and got about this far and you started to say well that's that's odd and if you're again like me maybe try the left side the right side the back to no avail so let me show you the right way that this goes in so first i like to start with my base as well as the top portion of the slow roller and put that on the stand next grab the base portion of the slow roller and on an angle sliding upwards just lift into position and it's as easy as that hope oh and i'm glad to hear i'm not the only one who's asked that question let me know in the comments if that's one that's puzzled you before but it's literally that easy all right on to our next chapter okay welcome to our third chapter which is all about operating your kamado joe and so in this chapter we're going to cover getting up to temperature some vent settings for hitting some common temperatures that you'll use for a variety of cooks as well as our shutdown procedures now so i alluded to this in the previous chapter when i was talking about building some of our fires but now this is where i want to go deep and explain the importance of why getting up to temperature will make or break your cooking experience on the kamado joe so hands down the biggest mistake that i made when i was first learning as well as so many of you who reach out asking for help is rushing the setup process and getting up to temperature you start a fire you throw in your grids you see a temperature and you throw on your food and this is a recipe for chasing your temperatures all day and so before i sort of address kind of how i like to do it and to solve this i want to take a minute and just let you know about the different types of heat sources inside your kamado joe because understanding what makes a ceramic barbecue unique and different than say an offset smoker is really really important there are a lot of great videos on youtube and there's a lot of people using different types of smokers giving that advice and while some advice is universal and can be applied to any type of barbecue there's other types of advice that is barbecue specific i've used this analogy before but if you've not heard it if you're trying to figure out how to parallel park a car you know you're a young driver you're learning to drive you go into youtube but you can't find a video for parallel parking a car but you see a video on how to dock a boat you know sure there's some common things here there's a steering wheel on a boat and a car there's a forward there's a reverse and so what else is there anybody who's tried to do any of these two things can tell you that watching a video set up for how to dock a boat won't apply to how to parallel park a car and vice versa and the same is true if you've watched aaron franklin you know giving some great advice on a thousand gallon drum smoker and try to apply that to a kamado joe where it's air constrained high heat retention with different heat signatures and you know heat sources you're going to get completely different results than what he might get so you can get some amazing results inside your commodore joe but it comes down to understanding how it works and what type of heat sources you can count on so the three most common ones i'll take a minute to explain the first one is conduction heat and so conduction heat is cold meat touching a hot surface so think about your cast iron pan that's searing hot you throw a steak on you are now cooking through conduction heat where the energy is leaving the hot surface and going into your protein the second which you know our kamado joe has an offset smoker has but to varying degrees is convection airflow so this is hot air moving across your food and that hot air is actually cooking it now while we get much much better airflow with the slow roller and smoke rings are easy you are still moving way less volume of air in a kamado joe versus a fan powered pellet grill or an offset smoker and that also throws a couple common pieces of advice out the window since we're moving less air things like a water pan don't work as well for two reasons one you know in a high airflow volume that just increases the humidity a little bit and it's like if we were spraying our meat and those moisture pollicl moisture particles flying by your meat can adhere to it and help improve the overall moisture inside our kamado joe it retains a lot of moisture because of the ceramic and it's not moving as much air and so you tend to get lingering particles and so i found adding a watering pan tends to reduce the quality of our bark as well as reduce the quality of the smoke profile and so that brings us to our third and final heat source so we've got our conduction our convection the last is this radiant heat and this is where a kamado style grill really shines and so what's going on here and the importance of setting your fires is to let your dome get heat soaked if you just start your fire put in your heat deflector plates and immediately start you know waiting to get cooking you're missing out on not just an important cooking source because the radiant heat that gets trapped in your dome can act a lot like the sun so on a nice day you go out and get a sunburn that's from that radiant energy your dome will do the same thing and i've done some experiments on my kamado joe jr where i crank the heat and then i almost turn it off and get crispy chicken skin without any convection airflow without any conduction that's how powerful this heat source can be the other thing that it does is it is a great stabilizer and so it helps sort of get your whole grill up to temperature and significantly reduces the up down back and forth yo-yo effect that can go on when you're chasing temperatures and so if there's anything that i could suggest you take some time to do right is wait until you have heat in your dome before doing anything else sounds good in theory right so how do you actually achieve this and so i've covered this in another video i'll just put a little clip so you can see that but the way that i like to do that if i'm using the deflector plates is to install them in a pizza pie configuration so that the heat from the fire can escape and come up and warm up our ceramic or like i showed earlier with the slow roller leave the base off or the top portion of the slow roller off until you hit temperature so it doesn't matter what temperature you're after for illustration today let's say i want 250 degrees fahrenheit what i would do is i would install my deflector plates in that pizza pie configuration or just the base of the sole roller and i would close the dome and i would do nothing until i see 250 degrees fahrenheit so bottom vent is all the way open top vent is all the way open and then once i see 250 degrees i'm gonna go ahead and give it the hand test and so if i place my hand on the dome and i don't feel any heat it's okay to keep going longer because usually what's happening is a piece of charcoal has ignited and a flame is coming up and it's making that thermometer read 250 degrees but if you can go and touch the dome and you feel little to no heat at all it's not up to temperature 250 degrees should feel like in winter a nice hand warming experience where you can get some heat uh but it's not uncomfortable you could hold it there you know five ten more seconds if you want uh quite comfortably as you start to get into the 300 degree range you touch your dome but you know after a second or two he's like okay i've i've had enough above 400 degrees it's really just touch and remove and anything longer you might start to think that you're going to give yourself a bit of a burn so that's a quick guide to tell how warm your dome is just by feel and so even though i say 250 degrees you want to go ahead and make sure that you do the hand test and you actually feel some heat it's okay sometimes if you need to go 300 degrees 330 degrees before you move on to step two here that is okay but you want heat in your dome once you start to see heat in your dome and the information on your temp gauge says that you are past the temperature that you want what i like to do first is adjust my bottom vent and that's our next section so i won't dwell on that too long but i'll go down to a single fingers width on the bottom vent then i'll push the heat deflector plates together if that's what we're using or install the top of our slow roller system along with our cooking grids then i'll close the vent from the top from being all the way open to closed but i'll have that i'll have that in the still max open position so when we're starting the fire all the way open to when we're starting to stabilize like this and then as we start to recover back towards 250 degrees slowly start to make the adjustments here on our top dome so now that we've covered that let me bring the camera a little closer and show you some common vent settings so all of these settings that i'm giving you are designed to work with one finger width on the bottom draft door if you've seen some of my older videos part of that continuing to learn and evolve that i mentioned as i used to use two fingers but i found i get much better results with a single finger and that's because it does a couple of things one is it promotes better draw and so when there's less of a gap on the bottom that helps insulate against things like gusts of wind so if you start cooking in the day when maybe there's a breeze and then at night the breeze goes away now all of a sudden your variables for controlling your temperature go askew and now you're you know in the middle of the night getting alarms that you need to go adjust your grill so by reducing the air flow in the bottom you protect against the wind it makes it more stable it also makes it a little bit easier to control the top vent where you're not having to get down to you know quarter of an inch type openings and we can be more liberal with the top slider on our control tower top in order to hit the right temperature so before i move the camera really close and show you uh two common settings if you're trying to achieve different temperatures uh let me just explain just the theory really quick behind this and so imagine uh if your bottom vent is your gas pedal and your top vent is your brake pedal so you want to go faster you know more gas that's more air on the bottom if you want to slow down you know we're closing our top vent here but you don't want to drive your car with your foot all the way on the gas and then pushing the brake as hard as you can to try and hold you know 50 miles an hour what you want to do is just apply the right amount of gas and ideally you know just cruise along at uh you know that 50 mile hour or whatever speed you're trying to achieve and so the same is true on your kamado grow where you don't over rely on too much gas too much airflow and you reduce the amount of air or temp swings that can happen when you're relying on riding the brakes heavily hope that makes sense let me bring you a little closer and show you some common vet settings that will help you achieve a sort of a low and slow kind of 250 degree temperature range as well as maybe more of a grilling temperature range sort of that 350 degree fahrenheit okay so welcome to our control tower top on the kamado joe series 3 big joe and so one of the things i'll first start off pointing is the adjustments that you make as you're coming up to your target temperature so if we are working with one fingers width on the bottom and we wanted to go for about 250 degrees fahrenheit where i would often land with that is just about a third of an inch from the far side of this line to the control tab here on our control tower top so that's a good visual setting to remember for about 250 degrees if i want 275 to 300 degrees i'm just about the third of an inch on the other side of the line so that's about your range right so 270 to 300 degrees to down here on this side of the line would be where i would go for 250 degrees now while i have you here is if we were watching our temperature come up it's not on today and we had started with everything i just explained in terms of closing the bottom draft door closing the plates etc and then leaving our top vent open as i start to get close to that temperature that's when i want to start making some adjustments so as i recover to about 200 degrees on the dome i'd go ahead if i'm trying to land at 250 degrees i'd land at about my 270 to 300 degree range it's still more air than what we need we don't want to wait forever to come up to temperature but we don't want to be coming up to our target speed our target temperature with so much momentum we shoot right past it sticking with the car analogy if i'm trying to accelerate to 50 miles an hour i want to let off full throttle before 50 miles an hour because if i wait till 50 miles an hour to let off i'll blast right past that speed so i want to start reducing the gas and you know slowing down my rate of acceleration to land at 50 miles an hour so right here for 250 degrees once i saw 200 i would come here i would wait and as it started to get in the 240 range to 245 that's when i would make my final adjustment to my 250 degrees and let it just continue to inch closer over the last four or five minutes or so to hit a nice stable 250 degrees done this this setup many times and you can just sort of walk away once you do that while we're nice and close let me go ahead and show you a 350 degree range so i mentioned over here a third of an inch on this side is 270 to 300 staying a third of an inch away from this line this will be our 350 degrees fahrenheit setting and this works both on the model joe big joe that i'm using as well as the kamado joe classic three beside me with one finger the max that i can get is in about the four to four fifty range depending again on the amount and the type of charcoal that i'm using if i want to get some more heat than 450 degrees i'm going to need to add more than a single finger on the bottom and or consider opening my top vent like that so my last piece of advice on this before we move to shutting down your kamado joe is kind of mid-cook peeking so this is where a lot of people get in trouble because anytime you're mid-cook and you go ahead and open your dome and you're checking out your food maybe moving some things around you've done a couple of things you've won you've increased the amount of air draw so it's pulling in even more air through the bottom as well as letting in more air out the top there's now no breaks and we're going downhill so you will gain speed very quickly so a little trick not that you should be looking too often you know the saying if you're looking you're not cooking but if you do have to check your food or maybe spray it or something like that a little trick that i like to do is go ahead and close the bottom draft door before you open your vent so you might just close it then open your dome do what you need to do don't touch your top vent that's still going to hold your settings when you're done go ahead close it and then just give that you know 60 90 seconds to stabilize before putting your bottom vent back to that single finger position and doing that what you're doing a minute before you open the dome in that minute after the dome is you're killing a bit of that fire and trying to mitigate any runaway coals that want to ignite and burn much hotter and that will just help reduce the the fluctuations that you get from opening your dome anyways you've made it to the end of this chapter our last piece of advice is shutting down your grill and so there is a method to your madness or at least my madness here sorry to pull you into into that categorization but i like to close my bottom draft door first before closing my top bone top vent if you do it the other way around you risk a flashback as well as a bit of a pressure bubble so if i had my bottom draft door open and i were to have my vent open close it all the way and then push down you'll notice it's actually physically harder to push because you're you're pushing and packing that air pressure all the way down into your ceramics and kind of like a balloon here that's putting pressure on your firebox and your lower ceramics and you also risk a bit of a flashback depending on how hot you are at the bottom of your kamado so instead what i like to do is close the bottom draft door first and if we were inferno mode you know kind of going crazy with it all the way open the first thing i would do is close it but leave it a little bit open on our settings so we would close the bottom door like that maybe put our vent like this and then after a few minutes i could work it a little bit more closed and after maybe another few minutes close it completely that's only if you're in the 700 plus degree range where if you were doing pizzas or searing a steak and you just want to settle things down giving it sort of that total 10 minute shutdown procedure is something that really just kind of helps bring the ceramics down cool your fire from a raging inferno to something that will settle down and cool off nicely leave your dome closed overnight and the next day once everything's cool go ahead and just unlatch that and leave your kamado joe just like i've got mine here unlocked and ready to go for next time well here we are at the end of the video i hope you really enjoyed it but actually if there's anything i really hope it's that you have the confidence to go ahead and tackle that unicorn cook that you've been wanting to try maybe it's going to be a feast for a holiday that's coming up or just a weekend where you want to tackle ribs brisket or pulled pork anything like that so this video is meant for you and i hope that you have the confidence and the tools and the information you need to pull off the perfect cook i'd love to hear what you're cooking and i'd love to hear how it went if you've just recently done it let me know in the comments and let me know if there's still a question that's on your mind that we haven't covered and i'd be more than happy to either answer it right there or go ahead and include it in a future video anyways as it's time to sign off please let youtube know if you got some value out of this one little tip helped you smash that thumbs up button and let me know that you appreciate this video by hitting subscribe to catch future videos they both those things really help the channel and before you go i'll mention there's a series of playlists down below and the one if you're here checking out this video i think would be most helpful for you is my kamado joe 101 playlist where there's a whole bunch of other topics that myself when i was new and folks like you who are new or looking to get better have asked me in the past and i think will be a great resource for you really enjoyed our time together hanging out can't wait to see you in the next one i'm james from smoking dab barbecue signing off and remember don't be afraid to fire it up you

Channel: Smoking Dad BBQ

Views: 257,391

Keywords: kamado joe, smoking dad bbq, how to use a kamado joe, how to use a kamado joe grill, how to use kamado joe grill, kamado joe classic 3, kamado joe big joe 3, kamado joe 101, how to use kamado joe, kamado joe charcoal placement, kamado joe smoking wood chunks, kamado joe direct, kamado joe indirect, kamado joe sloroller, kamado joe divide and conquer, kamado joe vent settings, kamado joe temperature control, kamado joe temp control, how to control kamado temperature, bbq, smoker

Id: x3nvkwmwuFw

Length: 45min 27sec (2727 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 14 2021