Self Cleaning & Deep Cleaning your Kamado Joe

hey guys i'm john setzler welcome back to atlanta grill company today i'm going to show you the proper way to do a high temperature uh cleaning burn on your kamado joe so let's get started [Music] my kamado joe classic 3 here is fairly greasy and cruddy on the inside because i cooked a boston bud in it the other day with no drip pan uh so what i want to do i want to do a high temperature burn to clean out this grill this is not something i would normally do after just one cook but you can do this periodically to clean the crud out of your grill you can see how it's built up i do not recommend putting these in on your high temperature burns you want to keep these out unless you're going to keep your temperature down high temperature promotes rust on stainless steel so if you're going to take this up over 700 degrees which is not hard to do it'll promote rust on these and i don't want to do that so i'm just going to take those out i used my sear plate here as a heat deflector on this cook and it's pretty cruddy so we're going to include that in our high temperature burnout and what i'm going to do is i've got a lot of charcoal left over from that cook i'm just going to take the smoking wood out that i can still see there that didn't burn and we're going to use the charcoal that's in the grill already to do this and since i want to leave my grill grates out i'm just going to use the accessory rack and i'm going to bring it up to the upper position if you have any heat deflectors that you want to clean out also you're going to want to put them on here and i'm going to set these on the accessory rack these aren't that dirty i'm just going to put those on there for demonstration purposes i'm going to set them on there like that and then i'm going to set my my sear grate here like that and let that clean out but the first thing we want to do obviously is get the fire lit so i'm going to light up a couple of my kamado joe fire starters i'm just going to use two of them because it'll help me get this thing up the temperature more quickly i don't know if you can see in the video here or not but there's a good bit of grease actually even on my charcoal down in there so what we want to do is light a couple of fire starters get our bottom vent fully open and then just let this burn for a few minutes before we move on and as that fire gets going i can already hear it sizzling because some of that grease that's actually on my charcoal is down there burning already if you want to speed this process up you can just throw out the charcoal that's got all the grease in it and put clean charcoal in that will uh improve the process here and make this go a little quicker so i'm going to do like i said i'm going to set my heat deflectors in place here because i want to clean them off and i have gone ahead and scraped off some of the buildup that was on my sear plate and set it on there and then we're just going to close the lid i'm going to make sure that the bottom vent on my classic is fully open and to begin with up here on the top i'm just going to pull the top vent completely off and we're going to watch this and we're going to let our temperature in the dome come up to about 500 to 550 degrees after just about 10 minutes here i've already gotten my classic up to almost 500 degrees in the dome so what i want to do now is go ahead and set the top vent back on i know it's a little bit hard to see here but i've got smoke coming out of there and we're going to throw the top vent back on and open it up fully and we're going to monitor the temperature here we don't want that temperature to climb much over 550 degrees so once it starts getting there we're going to back the top vent down a little bit more and as you can see now that i've reduced the airflow i've got a good bit of white smoke rolling out of there and that white smoke can be really thick depending on how greasy it is inside your grill and our objective here is to just let this burn at five to five fifty long enough to make that white smoke stop we're about fifteen minutes in here and my hovering around 500 i'm gonna open that slider up just a little bit more to uh let a little more airflow come through there because i want this thing ultimately to come solid at about 550 and we'll adjust our vents as necessary to uh try to get it there so we've been going about 20 minutes now our grill is nice and hot and i've still got a lot of that white smoke coming out so we're just going to let this keep going our objective is to keep the temperature right around this mark and let it go until there is no smoke we're about 30 minutes into this process now and everything's still going smoothly i've still got a good bit of white smoke coming out of the top but there's less than there was before so we want to keep this going and one other thing i want to stress strongly here is you do not want to open the dome lid when you're running this hot and got all that white smoke coming out because that is a perfect condition for a flashback and those are quite ugly so keep the lid shut while you're doing this this is also a good time to work your top vent if your top vents a little sticky because now this guy's nice and hot so you just want to take the slider and turn it a few times like that while it's nice and hot you can see how freely that moves and you want to do the same thing here just do it a few times and it'll make this guy stick free we've been going almost an hour here and i've still got a little bit of white smoke coming out of there so i'm going to let it continue to go like i said we want to get to a point where we've got practically none so we'll be back momentarily we're about an hour and 20 or an hour and 25 minutes in and my smoke here has all but stopped so what i'm gonna do next is i'm gonna crack the grill open i'm gonna burp the grill by raising the lid slowly and at this point i'm going to go ahead and set my grill grates in there because we are going to bring the temperature on the grill down now by closing the bottom vent i'm going to close the bottom vent and once the grill temperature starts to fall about 50 degrees or so i'm going to close the top vent and now that my temperature's falling down below 500 degrees there i'm just going to close that vent all the way and we're going to let that cool now that my grill temperature is down below 250 degrees i'm going to speed this process along i'm going to open the grill back up i'm going to take my grill grates out we're gonna get the cast iron sear plate out i'm gonna get my heat deflectors out and just set them in a safe place because they are hot i'm gonna get my accessory rack out and one of the great things about the kamado joe charcoal basket is that it connects to the divide and conquer rack so what i'm gonna do is take that out and i'm gonna go set this over my ash bucket i've got a charcoal bucket an ash bucket that's metal that i use for stuff like that and uh i just dump that hot coal in there and put the lid on it it'll snuff that coal out and then i can use it later so you can see what's going on inside my grill here all that black that's still there is okay because all of the residual grease has burned out of the grill and i'll let you have a look here in the dome as well the dome is still black but it's grease free so what i'm going to do now is let this grill cool down and for a typical high heat cleaning burn this is really all you need to do but since i've already cleaned uh you can either stop at this point let your grill cool get the ash out and start cooking again or you can do a total cleaning which i'm gonna go ahead and do and show you how to do in this video as well so i have to let this finish completely cooling but with the lid opening the charcoal out this will cool rather quickly so i'm going to pause here and let this storm come rolling through and then we'll come back now that my grill's cooled down the next thing i'm going to do is take the fire ring off and i'm gonna set it aside and we're gonna lift all these petals out of the grill and once those are out i'm gonna lift out the center piece and then i'm going to get the ash pan out and then all i'm going to do is i've got this soft bristle plastic brush that came with a dust pan all i'm going to do is just use that and lightly brush down the inside you don't have to worry about getting everything off because we've already burned everything out of here that's going to cause a problem for us so what i'm going to do next is use that same brush to pile up all of my ash to one side of the grill where i can use my dust pan to get it out if you want to take a shop vac vacuum this guy out you can certainly do that or you can use the 30 seconds or so that it takes to get it out with a dust pan there may be a little bit left in there i'm gonna go ahead and get it all and now to reassemble this i've done this so many times it's pretty easy i'm gonna set my ash pan in there and align it with the vent opening and then i'm gonna take my fire ring set it right in on top of the ash pan and make sure i kind of have that stuff lined up and centered as good as i can and you're going to want to check the drawer to make sure the drawer is going to slide out easily and then we just set our pedals in i'm going to show you an easy way to do this also we're going to set each pedal back in place to where it's leaning against the back wall but they're going to be overlapping at the bottom and have a gap at the top here to start with and then when you get all these in you want to kind of spread them out a little bit where the gaps fairly even between each of them and then in the next step you're going to take a regular everyday paper towel and kind of ball it up and lift the pedal forward and stuff the paper towel down behind each petal to get that petal to stand forward and then once you have that paper towel behind the rings or behind the pedals you can just set your uh fire ring right back on there and it will sit in place perfectly right on top of those rings and there's no uh stress struggle or anything to go along with that i actually should have done this next step before i put this back in there if you want to clean your fire ring uh i have a little cheap wire wheel on my drill that i got at harbor freight for about four dollars you can use that and it will take any debris that's built up on that ring right off and i use the same drill with the same wire wheel if i want to clean up my divide and conquer i'm sorry my my slow roller components this uh guy cleans these right up and with the slow roller components the main part that you want to be concerned with is these drain holes you want to keep them from getting clogged up so just hit this guy with a wire brush or a wire wheel as well and it'll be good to go and then you just put your components back in the grill i'm going to set my charcoal basket back down in there we're going to set the base piece for the slow roller back in the grill it's at the base of the divide and conquer flexible cooking system get the remaining two pieces of the slow roller and then get my grill grates back in place and we have a clean grill that's ready to cook so that's the process for a clean burn and what i call a deep cleaning of the grill all rolled into one you don't have to do the deep cleaning that often in fact the average person i wouldn't recommend doing that more than once a year there's not going to be enough ash collecting behind the pedals of the heat deflector that it's worth taking it apart to do that but once a year is pretty good on that uh also i want to reiterate the point that the purpose of doing a high temperature uh self cleaning is so we can burn the built up grease and residue out of the grill we don't need to turn the inside of that grill white again all we want to do is burn out the grease it's going to cause smoke that's going to produce possibly unwanted flavor on the next cook that we do a lot of times when i do a boston butt or a brisket when i'm finished with that cook instead of just shutting the grill down i go ahead and run my temperature up and do that self-cleaning uh every time because i never know what i'm going to cook next if i want to cook a pizza or bake something or a loaf of bread i definitely don't want to cook it in that white greasy smoke a lot of people talk about using a pizza as a clean burn and that's a good thing but when you fire that grill up and run that temperature up you still need to wait till all that white smoke clears before you put your pizza on or it's going to taste horrible so guys i hope you have a good time trying that if you've got any questions about what i've done here or why i've done it leave me a comment on this video and i'll be happy to answer it until next time this is john setzler with atlanta grill company

Channel: Atlanta Grill Company

Views: 34,067

Rating: 4.8322582 out of 5

Keywords: Atlanta Grill Comany, self clean, deep clean, kamado joe

Id: 0xXIF1MiAi0

Length: 16min 21sec (981 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 19 2020