My FOOLPROOF tips & tricks for low & slow Kamado Joe cooking. How to keep temperatures controlled!

hey I'm James from smokin dad barbecue and are you new to Komodo style cooking or do you already have a coatl Joe and you want to learn how to operate it better I'm gonna share you everything I've learned over 10 years of cooking on Kamado style cookers help make your life easier and get the food you want so let's do a quick overview I've already got a meal set up and going on this one but while I'm waiting I'm going to do a fresh set up on the comodo Joe behind me and I'll show you everything you need to know from cleaning to setting up building your fire for a nice low slow cook I'll also point out some of those things that you want to do a little bit differently if you're aiming for a hot and fast boat so let me move the camera join me over here we'll get started all right so before we jump in and start building our fire I just want to point out a couple of the components of the comodo Joe and why they really matter so up top you have your control tower talk if you have an older version quemado Joe you might have a daisy wheel if you have an over big green egg you might also have a daisy wheel style control what that is is an air vent to help control your temperatures on the bottom you have a draft door and so I like to think of the the two as a gas pedal and a brake pedal so on the bottom you have your gas pedal you open it wide open your foots on the on the accelerator and on the top if you close this all the way down it's like riding the brake pedal really hard so depending on how powerful your car is you'd be going nowhere that's about what would happen here if you had our bottom back door all the way open and our top all the way closed our fire would go out and so it's this balance between how much gas you want to give it to how much you want to slow things down this is your fine precise temperature control so if if you're struggling with getting your temperatures just think about if you want more heat you need more air start with the bottom get more air if it's going too far beyond what you want you want to slow things down use your fine control on the top to help reduce the heat so let's dive in and I'll show you some of the internal components okay first we're going to remove our divide and conquer systems shaking that out so all the loose ash falls to the bottom and we can collect it in our ash pan let me show you what that looks like so you can see all the ash so the most part is collected in that ash pan I've removed from coatl Jo the stock accessory that collects the ash and helps shape it down into the ash removal pan I've done that because I noticed over time things inevitably get stuck behind it and then it's hard to clean out behind it whereas this I have to use gloves and clean every time but I can get that really clean let me show you how I do that so now we have the inside of our kimono Jo all nice and clean so there's gonna be a really good airflow what I'm going to do now is we're going to install the charcoal basket back then divide and conquer and I'll show you how to set up for a low and slow cook you can't see on the camera here but each of these little notches will hook into the charcoal basket that I just installed so when I turn it in and I slide those into place this is all now connected as one unit and I can move it into position so to unhook you just put some pressure down release and then twist those so they're out I also have from previous cook my x-raying accessory we'll add that back in a second soon as we've dyed some charcoal alright so I'm just gone and added two or three pieces of Quemado Jo a big block and while I have you here I just point out that's about the right amount of charcoal for three four hours you should still be able to see some air gaps at the bottom if you need more charcoal you'll burn a little bit hotter a little bit faster you can always add some more later but the number one mistake that I see new grill owners do is pack us to the brim full of our charcoal and if you do that you're going to have potentially some airflow problems plus it's hard to predict where the fires going to burn if it burns you know down to the front you know the back the side etc it just makes a little bit more difficult to control nice even heat where if you filled the the coals like you're building a campfire and you use good charcoal like I'm using here today you'll have no problem maintaining those temperatures for a long time now for lighting your charcoal you can do a couple things you can use an electric Lu flight or something like that where you just hold it down in position and light it or you use a fire starter today just for this video since I don't have my outdoor extension cord out in winter I'm going to use a fire starter cube okay so far whether if we're doing a hot fast or a low and slow and the setup is the same so if you saw the text and you skipped ahead in the video to this point where you're already comfortable on how to clean it out you already have a general idea of what the top and the bottom vents are doing and you already know how to arrange coal for a good fire you're joining me here now on a way to stabilize your Kamado Joe for very consistent ease of operation so what I like to do is we're going to install the the X ring and we're going to then install the Halfmoon dividers what I'm going to have them in a pizza pie open configuration until we get the heat in the comodo Joe that we want what that's going to do is that's going to make sure that we have heat in the dome heat in in our stones and then we're not yo-yoing with the temperature if you put in the stones and they're nice and closed at the top you're gonna have a really hot fire underneath with a bit of a cap holding all that heat in and then you'll see your temperature hit 225 or something like that the dome you say okay great I've got my temperature you throw on your food you go in for 40 minutes you come back out and all of a sudden your girl's 350 oh no it's too much and you close your vents and next thing you know you're flirting with extinguishing your fire and you're in this fight back and forth once you get this down I often now we'll set up mike amato Joe at night I'll put on something like a brisket or pork shoulders go to bed wake up seven eight hours later the next morning and the temperature is exactly where I left it so I hope that this tip serves you well and you're able to get some hassle-free hours of steady operations so right now we've got the event all the way open on the top the bent on the draught all the way open and we're gonna do that till we start getting a little bit closer but I'm gonna go ahead now and install our grit accessories all right that's it so as you can see we've got everything in the comodo Joe divide-and-conquer I installed the X ring accessory on the middle tier this is a coatl Joe clasp series three so there's three tiers I do that just because I like the extra clearance that I can have from the charcoal and I still have a good gap to the food service area it really doesn't matter it's just a matter of preference but I love the consistency and airflow that I get with this setup so we're gonna go ahead and close our dome we're going to let this come up to temperature and so for today I'm just gonna simulate if we were doing low and slow at around two hundred and fifty degrees so once we get a little bit closer to 250 degrees I'll pick you up and show you how to start adjusting your bottom draft door and how to adjust your control tower top vent so that the temperature lands and stays exactly where you want it all right our grill is up to temperature apologize we're losing light quickly but I'll do the best to stand under the light here so you can still see and hear what's going on so I don't know if you can see on the camera but our grill is reading 300 degrees that's a little bit warmer than what we want that's okay remember this is not the true temperature we have the plates in an open configuration so any flames are coming up and giving an artificially high reading I normally want to start this process anywhere from hitting my target temperature to 2030 degrees beyond 50 is okay even the more example here that I can show you how to adjust and land where we want so what I'm gonna do first is we're going to close our plates into the resting position that we want so we're gonna push those right against one another then I'm going to close the bottom draft door to about two fingers width this is my go-to setting for low and slow if you have really thin really wide fingers you adjust as necessary but for me so two fingers width let's go ahead and slide that into place we're going to close our control tower top and I'm gonna want to bring that to just past the first line on my control tower top so we're going to let that stabilize but before I do let me just bring the camera a little bit closer and I control you what I was seeing in okay so as you can see I pushed the to diffusion plates together installed our grid so we have nice even space all the way around so we're getting good good air flow all right all right so it's been about an hour and a half since I last saw you and the temperature hasn't moved a bunch since we left let me bring a little bit closer I don't know if the camera is gonna pick that up as is darkness here we are aiming to set up four to fifty and we're sitting right on to 50 right on the button and so again we put the control tower top on the first needle position and then we put the bottom draft or vent to about two fingers width so since I'm not cooking anything on this tonight I'm gonna go ahead and open it up and just show you how much charcoal still remains after we lit it about an hour and a half two hours ago let me show you and again the reason we're doing this is just to show the charcoal efficiency that we don't need to pack this thing fold for the brim of charcoal when we're filling it out just make it easier to grab with heat proof gloves I like to slide one grade back so we could get under the divide-and-conquer and just twist and slide them nope so if you remember the beginning we added about two or three chunks of charcoal we are we still have our two large chunks and the one chunk on the bottom is lit and ignited so this will go for another six hours or so maybe and so that's plenty plenty of charcoal for most low and slow cooks viewing ribs you're doing a pork shoulder you can do that six to eight hours if you're doing something overnight you want a little bit more no problem go ahead and add a little bit more so thanks so much for tuning in and checking out this video this again has been the most requested question that I get which is James how do I set up a quemado cooker for low and slow operation and not have to worry about the temperature shooting up going down you want to see some other tips and tricks around hot and fast or different grid configurations and different types of cooks let me know in the comments below I'd be more than happy to make a video for you until next time please hit that like and subscribe button and we'll see you then

Channel: Smoking Dad BBQ

Views: 212,486

Keywords: charcoal fire management, kamado joe, how to build a slow burning fire for smoking meat, kamado joe classic, low & slow, low and slow, smoking dad bbq, bbq, how to operate Kamado joe, set it and forget it, low and slow smoking, control temperatures, kamado joe classic 3, kamado joe fire management, clean smoke, kamado joe clean smoke, kamado joe temperature control, 2021, how to control kamado temperature, how to use kamado joe grill, how to use kamado joe classic 3

Id: L1qU89KAl-0

Length: 12min 22sec (742 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 27 2020