Cooking
- Something to block direct flame and sit right on the coals. This is going to get very hot so pick your tool right. The small Big Green Egg plate setter works perfect!
- You will need a seriously robust skewer. The one we used was 1/4" steel rod that was enameled. It was custom made for the tandoor in an a restaurant. It was also 4 feet or more long. You’ll need a lot of space.
- You will need gloves that can deal with 700 °F. I used very serious gloves put they still let heat through when holding the skewer after it came out. Be prepared to deal with a very hot item.
This is a good example of what a Big Green Egg looks like when it’s full blast, north of 700 °F. And it can get hotter!
Pork shoulder on the Big Green Egg.
After 10 hours.
Two pork shoulders to go on the Big Green Egg tomorrow at 7am!
Burger Jones First Impression
Tammy, Mazie and I joined my sister-in-law Angie, Mazie’s cousin Nora and Grandma Olson for lunch at Burger Jones today. We’d been meaning to try out Burger Jones since before it even opened and this was our first opportunity.
First impression was good, but unfortunately the whole experience just stayed there at just good. I got a burger because, hey, you’re at Burger Jones. I ordered the burger medium, but it came well without any pink at all. It was a pretty uninspiring burger and I would take a burger of my own off of the Big Green Egg most any day. We also tried the cheese curds as they were supposed to be very good. They were pretty good, when they had cheese in them. The way they were prepared made a lot of the cheese come out of the breading. Mazie and I decided to give the Nutella Malt a try and it was good, but how can you do a malt wrong. Lastly everyone split the stack of fries trying the regular fries, sweet potato fries (my absolute favorite) and waffle-cheese fry. The sweet potato fries seemed like they came right off of a Sysco truck and into a fryer. Another yawn.
For the cost, I would have expected something better. It was all fine, and everyone left happy, but there wasn’t anything about the food that left me wanting to return quickly.
Flank steak off the Big Green Egg for lunch today.
Racks on the Big Green Egg.
Big Green Egg Tandoor!
About a week ago I stumbled upon a blog post from a fellow Big Green Egg enthusiast that explained how he had attempted to do tandoor style cooking using his Big Green Egg. If your unfamiliar with a Tandoor there is a good write-up on Wikipedia, but the essence of it is captured as:
The food is cooked over a hot charcoal fire or wooden fire . Temperatures in a tandoor can approach 480 °C (900 °F), and it is common for tandoor ovens to remain lit for long periods of time to maintain the high cooking temperature. The tandoor design is something of a transitional form between a makeshift earth oven and the horizontal-plan masonry oven, and is used almost exclusively for live-fire, radiant heat cooking.
If you’ve ever had Tandoori Chicken at an Indian restaurant you’ve eaten food from a tandoor. It has a very distinctive flavor, and is not easily reproduced at home.
I read this other guys first try “Big Green Egg as a Tandoor Oven?” as well as his second try “Tandoori Experiment 2”. I sent these links to my friend Senthil who is from India. He’s from southern India and tandoor cooking is a northern India thing so he was as unfamiliar with a tandoor as I was! He has a connection with Taste of India and we were able to secure some of uncooked Tandoori Chicken from them. This was important since we would be able to isolate the taste based on cooking method, rather than the marinade and preparation.
Preparation
Preparing the Big Green Egg to be used as a Tandoor was simple. I topped off the firebox as I would with any high heat preparation. Getting that hot uses a lot of charcoal. I let the fire get going with the top completely uncovered and the bottom vent fully open. Once we got to 400 °F we quickly climbed all the way to 600 °F.
There was flame in the Big Green Egg with that much air going through. Very, very hot blue flames. We needed to make sure the chicken wasn’t torched in the flames so I took the plate setter from my small Big Green Egg and put it upside down, straight on the charcoal, in the large Big Green Egg. This worked great. It pushed the open flame to the sides and still allowed plenty of air for high heat cooking. It also gave us a stable, flat surface on the bottom to hold the skewer in place.
Putting the plate on the charcoal stunted the temperature momentarily but it quickly regained its footing until we reached a roaring 680 °F. Now, that’s not the 900 °F that a true tandoor may reach, but it’s plenty hot enough.
Cooking
We placed the chicken on a skewer that was about four feet long and placed the hook down so that it could not slide off. We then simply slid the entire thing through the top of the Big Green Egg, never opening it. It is important at this point to make sure that you skewer the chicken in a manner that will allow it to fit through the top. We had to do some maneuvering for some of our pieces but it worked fine.
After 8 minutes we pulled it and checked the for temperature but it wasn’t done. We put it in for about 5 more minutes. Ultimately, we probably could have pulled it 2 minutes earlier.
Results
Oh my! The results were amazing! The thing that hit both Senthil and I was how incredibly juicy the chicken was. It was cooked in an inferno but the meat was incredibly succulent. It had that wonderful red color that you get from tandoor cooking. It absolutely looked and tasted like the real deal. In fact we both felt that it tasted better than the Tandoori Chicken we’ve had at most Indian restaurants.
This is really easy to do and I encourage Big Green Egg owners to give it a try. Equipment wise you will need some specific items:
Other than that, just enjoy some amazing tandoor cooking at home. We want to try cooking bread next!
My first deep dish pizza on the Big Green Egg.
Starting to work up three racks of ribs for Mothers Day dinner on Big Green Egg.
Checking in on the ribs in the Big Green Egg. Warning: this picture may cause hunger. 🙂
Ribs are up to temp! Capping the Big Green Egg and will let them sit on it until dinner!
Ribs anyone? Big Green Egg FTW!
Getting ready to put dry rub from Mike Rock on the 7.5 pound grass fed brisket.
Brisket rubbed and ready to rest for the night before meeting the Big Green Egg tomorrow morning.
Last prep tonight for tomorrows brisket, soaking chips. Black Cherry. Mike Rock and I eat well tomorrow!
I really believe that the James Brown mega-funk playing while the brisket was rubbed will make it taste better.
Problem: Sun has now come out and started to raise the temperature of the Big Green Egg past 220 °F. Solution: Umbrella.
Tonight’s brisket is on the Big Green Egg! Dinner in ~12 hours. Bet Mike Rock can smell it at his house.
Smoke.
For those following todays brisket here is the 6-hour check-in. More cherry chips added.
Forgot the picture of the brisket.
Brisket at hour 12. Hoping Mike Rock and I get to eat soon. 170 internal temp. Surly whetting the appetite.
Brisket done. Time for Mike Rock to carve.
Brisket is unbelievable. Amazing! Very moist too! Mike Rock and I very happy.
Next brisket is going to get started at 8:00pm the night before and cook while I sleep. It was amazing, but 9:30pm dinner is too late.
I was super lucky this year and got a good number of these amazing sausages made by my friend Kevin. These are the best sausage I’ve ever had. Delicious.
At Clancey’s getting large hunks of meat to bring to the Big Green Egg!
Reviewing The Cook’s Bible by Chris Kimball. Chapter 28. How to Roast Meat.
Just finished pepper rub on tenderloin with Mike Rock and firing up Big Green Egg. Surly flowing.
Big Green Egg is in action turning whole tenderloin into magic.
Making plans for tomorrow’s breakfast. Old Recipe Johnny Cake on the Big Green Egg.
Best day in months. Wow. Awesome everything. Spent hours outside. First shorts day of the year for me. Big Green Egg at dinner too!
Be Smarter, Calibrate your Thermometers
I’ve been firing up the Big Green Egg throughout winter and as the weather has started to get a little nicer I’ve been grilling even more. I’ve been really frustrated lately though with my grill not coming up to temperature as fast as I thought it should. I also have been getting some odd results. I recently put a couple of racks of ribs on and they came out really dry and overcooked. I had the temperature right the whole time, and couldn’t figure out what was wrong.
Then things got confusing. I took out my Thermapen and a couple of other thermometers and started getting really odd temps all over the grill. Today I fired up a pot of water to calibrate the thermometer that sits in the dome of the Big Green Egg. This is the one I use constantly to know the internal temperature of the grill.
Whoa! That’s not just off, it’s horribly off. I was shocked that the thermometer was reading -60 °F lower than it should be. A quick turn of the nut on the back and it was calibrated!
Why am I posting about this? It’s a really simple thing, but I bet a lot of people don’t do a calibration. Your out there grilling away and you need to know your temps. I’m not sure if being outside all winter causes the calibration to get all screwed up. Either way it was off so much that I was grilling at temperatures that were just way too hot.
I had the newly calibrated thermometer in tonight for some grilling and things were so much better. Lesson learned. Get a pot of water boiling and make sure all your thermometers and probes read 212 °F on the nose.
Firing up Big Green Egg to smoke two racks of ribs.
Baked Ziti from April 2009 Cooks Illustrated. Looks great!
Fired up the Big Green Egg and did a 3 lb. grass-fed beef tenderloin on it tonight. Basic preparation with a little salt and pepper. Turned out really nice, but I still have much to learn. Controlling the heat on the Egg at 400 °F was harder than it should have. I could have done a better job building the fire.
Thermapen, Grill Like a Pro
A few months ago my neighbor Mike and I decided to put my Big Green Egg through it’s first real trial with a 12-hour brisket session. Mike is a stellar cook on all counts and I wanted to learn anything I could about grilling. As we were working the brisket through the hours we probed this large hunk of meat for temperature dozens of times, in dozens of locations. I’ve always had temperature probes and such, but Mike was using one of these high-end instant read digital thermometers and I realized this was a must for grilling.
I decided to be patient and put a Thermapen on my wish list for Christmas. Now that I’ve used it a few times I feel like every grill owner should just get one of these with their grill. Why?
First, a large piece of meat is going to have several different temperatures throughout the cut. The Thermapen is fast enough that you can take several readings and get “x-ray vision” into the meat. Before you even slice it, you know where the cut will be more rare and more well.
Secondly, when you are grilling at really high temperatures the grill itself gets so hot that it’s really hard to hold a probe in place for 10-20+ seconds waiting for a reading. Yes, you can put a big huge glove on but that takes a lot of time and results in fewer temperature checks. The Thermapen is so fast that you just probe it, read, and remove. 2-3 seconds tops.
If you love to grill, get a Thermapen. It gives you a lot more confidence on the grill. You can stop overcooking to be cautious. And since you can take a temperature so fast you can temp every single item on the grill before it comes off. Each and every cut can be just perfect.
We’ve been enjoying the reprieve from -20 °F to 20 °F with some great winter grilling on the Big Green Egg. Tonight is a chicken on the vertical roaster.
