High-Que’s Upgraded Fire Grate & Gasket.

There are two common complaints that I’ve heard from many Big Green Egg owners. The first is that, after years of ownership, it is harder and harder to get the egg past ~350 degrees or so (500 – 750 needed to do proper sears or cook a pizza). In particular, the fire grate included with the BGE is a big metal plate with a bunch of ~3/4″ holes drilled in it. It just doesn’t let a lot of air through to start with and, after years of use, any kind of ash build up and/or clogging of the holes in the ceramic firebox leads to even less air getting through.

Related, for those that do achieve high heat on a semi-regular basis, the factory installed woolen gasket quickly wears out.

Fortunately, there exists High-Que.com who specializes in upgraded components for the Big Green Egg. Pictured at left is their upgraded fire grate and their Nomex based high-heat replacement gasket.

For BGE owners, I cannot recommend these two products highly enough. Gasket upgrades have been around for quite a while, but most involved spray adhesive or fireplace-safe adhesive combined with a gasket that would often fray, leaving the risk of metal bits in your food (most of the gaskets were really re-purposed oven or kiln gaskets). High-Que’s gaskets are more like the original BGE gasket in physical design, but are much more durable and can withstand a higher heat. Like the original gasket, High-Que’s uses a high-heat adhesive backing that is exposed by removing a bit of paper; no toxic spray-on adhesives involved.

High-Que’s fire grate is equally as well considered & built. It is a very heavy gauge stainless steel grate that will not clog and allows for much greater air flow. As it comes with a 5 year warranty, clearly High-Que believes the product works.

Venison/Beef Burgers Seared Beautifully.

And it does. The combination of the two products has vastly improved the cooking experience with my BGE; it is easier to light, achieves a higher temperature faster (literally, takes about 12-15 minutes to reach ~600 degrees whereas I had a hard time cracking 400 without a fan before the upgrade), and the gasket looks like it is going to last much longer than the BGE wool gaskets (I won’t know for sure for another ~6 months or so).

And there was a fringe benefit that was a nice surprise; every BGE owner who has cooked at high heat has learned through quite a bit of hair loss that you have to “burp” your egg when opening it at temperatures greater than ~500. If you don’t, this rather ominously beautiful cloud of flames (seriously — check out this set o’ photos!!) will burst out of the egg and take all your arm hair right off!

With the increased air flow of the High-Que grate, the Egg doesn’t exhibit anywhere near the same degree of flashback as long as the bottom vent is wide open. What a nice surprise! To be clear, the egg will still flashback if the bottom vent is closed or if you open too rapidly at high heat, but the problem is vastly reduced!

Replacing the gasket is a bit of a chore. Click through for full details. Since the Egg needs to come apart for this anyway, a full cleaning is in order, too.

This is pretty typical for an Egg after a few years and a couple of hundred pounds of pork butts.

The woolen gasket has both lost all of it’s “spring” due to a combination of being burned off by the occasional high-temperature cook and because it has happily sucked up about a gallon of meat juices. Think what happens to a wool sweater when it sucks up water. Now replace the water with fat. And compress it. And heat it up to ~400 degrees. Yeah — not so happy.

The fire box is caked with pork fat and meaty fallout. Note that the vent holes around the firebox are mostly to fully clogged. This both prevents achieving higher temperatures and is pretty much unavoidable.

At this point, you’ll really want to take the lid off the BGE. Which comes to a very critical safety not.

Make sure you tie your hinge shut!! When the weight of the lid comes off that hinge, those springs are going to pull the lid’s metal band violently apart. It will hurt you. It might break a bone.

That wire was not entirely sufficient. Enough to mute the effect of the springs, but not sufficient. Ideally, you still have the bits of plastic that were used to clamp the hinge shut during shipping. If not, you’ll want to wrap up the left and right hinges separately.

Do not skip this step. (Ow)

Next, you’ll want to remove the old gasket. It should peel up pretty easily using a putty knife or scraper. What is left behind, though, is not so easily removed.

To remove the layer of greasy adhesive and gasket remnants requires a combination of tools.

I started with a wire brush on an eletric drill. This got the largest chunks out of the way and generally reduced the problem to a bit of a greasy slurry.

To remove the grease, I used the soaped up steel wool pot scrubbers. From there, I used shop-towels (the disposable paper towels) that were soaked in cheap vodka (food safe).

Quite a bit of elbow grease later and the rim looked like this.

However, it also needs to be nice and dry.

The easiest way to do this is to re-assemble the top and bottom parts of the egg, reattaching the hinges, etc. Put the hinge back on and clamp it to the bottom gently (no need to crank it down yet. Put the top back on and then make sure that the top hinge is pushed up as high as possible against the rim of the egg (see photo below with the new gasket installed). Crank down the high clamp bolts and remove your hinge ties.

Because it was a bit of a cold day, I dropped a random Halogen work light into the BGE and let it sit for a few hours.

(Pictured at right with the gasket installed — more on that in a second).

This did a great job of drying out the interior of the BGE.

Once dry, installation of the new gasket is straightforward.

Simply cut it in half, then peel a bit of the paper off the back (no more than an inch).

Press the exposed adhesive onto the rim of the BGE and then slowly go around the entire rim, peeling off the paper as you go and aligning the gasket as you move around the edge.

I put the edge of the gasket at the back of the egg, out of the way. I also was sure to offset the edge of the gasket for the top vs. the bottom. There will be a bit of a gap or a bit of rise at the gap and you don’t want to compound the potential problems by stacking the gaps directly on top of each other. This is the one part of the upgrade that is a little bit fiddly; you need to make sure the gasket is fairly well aligned as you go and it really wants to go in a straight line. As long as you don’t press down on the gasket as you go, it is pretty easy to lift and re-align as needed.

Once the gasket is installed, close the lid and let it sit for at least 12 hours, ideally 24. Since it was still a bit cold and damp, I left the work lite in the egg for about six hours to help keep things dry and warm.

Note that the cord for the worklight was going through the vent at the bottom to prevent the cord from causing the lid to sit funny during the set-up process.

This is what the gasket looks like after 24 hours of curing. A nice air-tight, very clean, seal. Enjoy the newness of it all because it likely won’t stay that way for long!

The next step is to test it out. Since I had recently picked up a meat grinder, I threw some skirt steak and venison through the grinder and made some burgers (which really need a nice high heat to get a proper sear).

Up until very recently, I typically use a chimney starter on top of a turkey burner to start the coals which are then dumped into the BGE. As can be seen through the vent door, the High-Que grate allows for significantly greater air flow and will not become clogged with ash.

All in all, it took about 15 minutes to go from cold to 650 degrees; much faster than previously (if I could even get the egg past 400 without a fan!).

All in all, the High-Que products work really well! The company has been very responsive and, in talking with them, they have some other BGE upgrades in the works that I look forward to reviewing in the future. Clearly, High-Que has confidence in their products as evidenced by the 5 year warranty on the fire grate and that they sent me the gasket for free as a review knowing fully that I would be brutal if the product did not meet expectations.

Some recipe as below, but:

• Nearly double the number of tomatoes. Ended up with three layers and filled in the gaps with cherry and pear tomatoes.
• Put the basil and garlic only on the first layer. Half the amount of garlic. Do not mince the basil leaves. Pile tomatoes on top.
• Sprinkle with Italian Seasoning instead of crushed Thyme and considerably less dry spice than before.
• Cook for about 2.5 hours at about 220 – 270 degrees.

That’s right, smoked tomato sauce.

As we are in the midst of a kitchen remodel, we have no oven. Or, I should say, we (and by “we”, I mean “I”) are using some combination of the Big Green Egg and the Cobb to do our baking and baking-like cooking.

Coincidentally, my community garden plot is producing Tons of Tomatoes. That is about it. Everything else this year has been a failure due to weird plant mojo and neglect. But tomatoes? I got em!

In any case, if you want to make a tangy, slightly smoky, incredibly tasty tomato sauce, it is quite easy! No need for a Big Green Egg, either, as this sauce could be made quite easily on a gas grill, in an oven, on a charcoal grill, or in anything else that can hold a temperature between 300 and 400 degrees for a couple of hours.

n[ate]vw asked about “off flavors”:

Could you elaborate a bit on tomatoes getting “roasted such that the heat totally changes the flavor”? When we’ve made tomato soup and spaghetti sauce, they’ve both ended up with an unexpected “off” flavor from what we’re used to — hard to describe, but it’s almost like the sauce is too fresh or something. Could this have something to do with the cooking temperature? Or would it have more to do with things like the tomato variety, us blending the skins and seeds together, or that we don’t pump HFCS into our mix like the store bought stuff?

The sauce had no off flavor, but I know what you are talking about. The food mill I used prevented almost all skin and seeds from making it into the sauce. I could easily imagine that pulverizing the seeds could quite distinctly change the flavor and in potentially unfavorable ways.

As I’m interested in this subject, I did a bit of research and found that tomatoes are exquisitely complex little beasties. They have dozens and dozens of uniquely identifiable organic compounds that contribute to the flavor, texture, aromatics, and cooking qualities of the fruit.

In particular, it seems that storage temperature can grossly impact tomato flavor. Specifically, cold storage — in the fridge — for any length of time can radically change the flavor, and not necessarily for the better!

Of the numerous articles I found, this one was particularly informative.

Given the acidity of tomatoes, I would also recommend avoiding cooking in aluminum or reactive metals. I could only get away with cast iron because the wok is both well seasoned, providing a layer of oil as a seal, and I was cooking a relatively large volume for the surface area involved. But, still, there was a hint of iron flavor in the final sauce — nothing unpleasant as cast iron is a relatively non-offensive metal — but it would be really bad with aluminum or other reactive metal.

Read on for details!

I used a large cast iron wok to cook the tomatoes. In the oven, a couple of baking dishes would work fine, too. Whatever you use, make sure it has relatively high walls as the tomatoes will ooze out a ton of juice.

Start by cleaning a bunch of tomatoes. The amount depends entirely on how much volume of tomato cookery you have at hand.

Halve the tomatoes and lay them out in the cooking container(s).

On top of the halved tomatoes, toss on some finely diced garlic, basil, olive oil, salt (tuffle salt works well), black pepper and, optionally, some thyme, oregano, and/or a touch of chile peppers.

If you have a particularly deep baking container, lay down a second (or third) layer of tomatoes, covered in the various ingredients at hand.

Once I had created a double layer of tomatoes, I remembered I had some eggplant on hand, too. Thus, I diced the eggplant and tossed it on top of everything.

Into the oven or grill the tomatoes go.

Roast for about an hour and a half at somewhere around 300 to 350 degrees. I would suggest cranking the temperature a bit near the last 15 to 30 minutes — I opened the vents and let the Egg crawl up to about 400 degrees before pulling off the wok.

The end result will be squishy soft tomatoes that have been roasted such that the heat totally changes the flavor, bringing out that distinct tanginess of cooked tomatoes.

If you look closely at the picture to the left, you’ll see that the tomatoes are sitting in quite a bit of juice. I highly recommend spooning off some of the juice and soaking some bits of bread in it!

Take the tomatoes and most of the juice and run it through a food mill into a deep sauce pan. I used hand cranked food mill.

Bring the mixture up to a boil, mix in a liberal amount of white wine, and then simmer for a while to thicken the sauce.

Works great on pasta. The chefs at Apple — whom I gave a taste in our ongoing food adventures — suggested that it would work really well as the sauce over baked red snapper. Gotta try that!

This weekend, I’m going to make another batch of sauce and then slow cook a hunk of beef roast in it. Should be good!

When we arrived home yesterday, there was a generic USPS flat rate large box. As I wasn’t expecting a package, I had no clue what it might be.

Within about 5 yards of the door, I knew exactly what it was. There was this delicious, sharp, fresh, slightly spicy smell in the air.

Could it be?

Yup — it was a box full of fresh New Mexican Chile Peppers from Andrew Stone. Awesome. Brought back vivid memories of the summer (1992 or so) some friends and I lived with Andrew and worked on Stone Studio (now Stone Works). We lived on black beans, chile peppers, eggs, goat cheese, and fresh baked bread, mountain biking in the Rio Grande river valley every day. Good times.

Chile peppers are a celebration in New Mexico every bit as much as Garlic is a phenomenon in Northern California. And late summer is chile pepper season. Slashfood has a good summary of the chile pepper scene.

And, of course, with fresh chiles at hand, it was obviously time to make Chile Rellenos!

When people hear Chile Rellenos, they often think of the soggy, over-breaded, deep fried chile rellenos so often served at mexican restaurants. Personally, I can’t stand that type of rellenos. It is a disgusting, greasy, mess that lacks distinctive flavors and any kind of texture. Yuck.

But it doesn’t have to be that way! Baked or grilled chile rellenos is much better. And it is really easy to do.

As with many chile recipes, you first need to skin the peppers. I like to use a plumber’s torch.

Torch Skinned Chiles

For each pepper:

• With a plumber’s torch, sear the skin of the chile pepper until it is black and/or bubbly all over. A long pair of locking hemostats can be clipped to the stem end to keep the flame away from your fingers. Blue flame is Hot!
• Once seared, immediately drop the chile pepper into a paper bag and close the bag. A grocery bag with the top folded over works well.
• Repeat for each pepper, then wait about 5 minutes after the last pepper is dropped in the bag.
• To skin the peppers, simply rub with a dish towel or non-metallic scrub pad (something abrasive, but not so abrasive that it’ll shred the peppers). The skin should peel off really easy. Don’t worry about getting every last bit.

End result? Chile peppers ready to be used in whatever recipes you can imagine; chopped up in an omelette, on a burger, or… of course… CHILE RELLENOS!

Grilled Chile Rellenos

• Prep: You’ll need three large plates for dredging action; one covered in flour, one in a couple of thoroughly mixed eggs, and one containing bread crumbs and/or finely crunched fritos.
• Prep (if grilling): Make a little baking dish out aluminum foil. Oil it with canola oil or some other relatively high heat oil.
• Slit each chile pepper down one side.
• Remove some of the seeds, if there are a lot. I never de-vein the peppers, but you can do so if you want to eliminate some of the spiciness.
• Slide a strip of cheese into the pepper. I usually use jack cheese, but sometimes cheddar or smoked gouda. Or a mix.
• Optionally add smoked pork, crab, or onion. Or other yummy stuff.
• dredge the chile in flour, making sure all of the exposed outside is floured
• dredge the chile in egg, making sure all the flour is moistened with egg.
• dredge the chile in the crushed fritos / bread crumbs / dry spices.
• Place chile, slit side up (so the cheese doesn’t escape), in the oiled baking dish.
• Toss on a 300 degree or so grill for about an hour.

Resulting is cheesy chile deliciousness with a bit of crunch on the outside. Depending on the chile peppers used, they may be mild or spicy.

Often, the rellenos will be hotter closer to the stem end. Always fun: “Here is a mild one! Chomp… WHOAH!”

While in Missouri, My mom taught me a neat trick for stuffing garlic (or other chunky spices) deep into a piece of meat. We made a roast leg of lamb on Dad’s new Big Green Egg and it was delicious.

Upon my return home, I decided to recreate the magic, so to speak.

Pictured at left is the result. Rare, garlic infused, leg of lamb. Smoked over big chunks of rosemary wood, which is evident by the beautiful red smoky color of the end piece on the far left.

I paired it with a bit of mint jelly (of course!) and some baked aspargus that had been tossed with salt, pepper, and sesame oil.

Delicious. Click on through for pics/instructions on jamming the garlic yumminess into the meat.

First, you’ll need a nice sized leg of lamb (or leg of pork, etc). I started with about an 8 pound leg.

Trim almost all the fat off the outside; fat blocks smoke flavor uptake.

Skin and slice a lot of garlic into fairly thin strips.

You’ll also need a clean pair of stainless steel needle nose pliers. Such a tool can easily be found at Radio Shack, Fry’s or Amazon. Again, make sure they are clean. You might want to boil ‘em.

Grab a chunk of garlic with the pliers and shove it into the meat. Or use the pliers to puncture the meat and open them to make a cavity, then fill with garlic.

I shoved about a full head’s worth of garlic into the meat.

Finally smoke the lamb until it has an internal temperature of about 135 to 140 degrees. Tent it and let it rest for a good 10 minutes.

Last Wednesday, Dad and I went out and bought Dad a medium Big Green Egg.

Since then, I have cooked (while teaching Dad how to use the egg):

• Lamb chops — basic chops
• Beer butt chicken — rub on the outside, stuffed with spices under the skin. Juicy and delicious.
• London Broil — Salt, pepper, and oil rub. Took it to an internal temp of about 135 and tented it for 10 minutes. End result was perfect medium rare london broil.
• Salmon — covered it with dill, a touch of dried peppers, and thin slices of orange with the skin side heavily salted. Cooked to an internal temp of 135. Excellent.

Next up? We might try a pie or baking some bread. Dad picked up a plate setter which, when reversed, makes an excellent surface for cooking pizzas, breads, and pies.

Of course, we picked up a probe thermometer to go with the BGE. It appears that Taylor has largely moved to using silicon covered probe wires. Awesome! Not only can the probes handle slightly higher heat — though not flare-ups — but they also don’t fray over time.

Without the Stoker, I’m not sure if I’ll attempt pulled pork. But I might do some ribs.

Yes, yes it does. Pictured at left is 75 lbs of smoked pork all wrapped up and ready to be picked up by a friend as the main course in their friend’s daughters wedding.

It took me four days — 3 overnight cooks — to produce 75 lbs of smoked pork. Each round was about 30 lbs of smoked pork (4 shoulder cuts each round) that had been dry rubbed with my special blend of salts/sugars/spices, then smoked for 22 hours over hardwood lump charcoal with bits of apple wood (that had been soaked in gin and red wine for several days) at a bit over 200 degrees.

Delicious stuff. Took a bit of eating logistics to clear out the fridge enough for the pork.

Now that I have exchanged food for payment, can I drop “professional chef” on my resume?

Nah — probably not without offending real professional chefs.

Christine brought home 4 beautiful thick cut pork chops with a request that I grill ‘em. They were of a quality that I didn’t want to mask their porky goodness with too much goo.

So, I mixed up a sauce…

• Soy Sauce
• Honey
• Dried Powdered Ginger
• Apple Cider
• Salt
• Pepper

… in a bowl. It should be slightly thick, but not goopy. Drizzle over pork chops and let sit for at least an hour, flipping them periodically to make sure both sides are coated.

Toss chops on a medium hot grill. Simultaneously, set extra sauce in a sauce pan on low heat on the stove. You want it to bubble, but not boil.

Whenever you need to flip the chops — I flip them 3 times so I can make that classic criss-cross sear makrs on the outside — baste the chops with some more of the now-simmering sauce.

Grill to an internal temperature of 140 degrees.

Ridiculously good chops are the result.

Update: Scott recommends a simple brine. Totally agree. If you have excellent quality meat and want an overall Very Meaty Experience, brining is totally the way to go. I simply wanted something with a bit more flavor.

Between the soy sauce and the salt, my sauce is very brine-like in that it has quite a bit of moisture and a whole lot of salt. No, the end result is not salty.

I’m thinking the same sauce would go brilliantly on salmon bellies or hamachi (yellowtail) collars/heads. Maybe with a little lemon juice.

A while ago, I wrote about some pretty funny / cool hot dog roasters sent to me from the folks at roastmyweenie.com.

Work well enough, and pretty amusing, but not exactly practical for even a modest sized cook.

I really wanted a roaster that could hold more than one dog. After thinking about it a bit, dawned on me that some creature with tentacles would be perfect and easy enough to cut on roastmyweenie’s water jet based cutter.

Now, I could have a gone with a squid based design as they will, in fact, eventually rule the living world.

But, nah….

Then it hit me! Cthulhu! Perfect! Tentacled devourer of souls and bastion of chaos would be perfect for roasting dogs!

We went back and forth a bit on designs, eventually settling on the one you see here. It looks a bit more Punisher-esque in steel than the original designs on paper. But suckers on bendy tentacles are hard to water-cut and don’t really lend themselves well to roasting dogs anyway.

It works brilliantly, to. Plenty of support for th dogs, keeps them nicely off the grill surface, and looks pretty damned chaotic evil sitting on the grill hissing away as little bits of grease shoot out of the ends of the dog to spatter and explode on the hot food grade steel.

Completely kicks ass. For the moment, it is unique. This is what it looks like before being bent into shape.

I’m sure that if you were to contact the folks at Roast My Weenie, they might make a few more.

(I also really like their Dog Cooker design).

Byron from Roast My Weenie also posted this video to YouTube of the Cthulhu weenier roaster being cut on their Water-Jet cutter.

If you are considering the purchase of a BGE or kamodo style ceramic cooker, go have a read of said article as it might help.

In other news, Ben Holt has completed the documentation of his Terra Cotta Smoker. It is quite well constructed and he has done some great cooks on it. Next up? He is going to hack together some kind of simple temperature control system that can be used to do longer term cooks without having to futz with the cooker every 10 to 15 minutes. Nice hack!

Update: In a post responding to this one, Auroralux indicated interest in constructing a terra cotta smoker. Specifically:

I know we already have the biggest part, the large terra cotta pot, because we purchased it several years ago to help heat our oven evenly for making roasts.

Neat. I hadn’t heard of doing this, but it certainly sounds like a good idea. Anyone have any more information?

Excellent. I might have to build a second cooking device using some combination of prefab ceramic and bricks.

Actually, given the ease of casting adobe or clay, I bet it would be fairly straightforward to build your own controlled and effective cooking device to whatever specifications you need.

First up, however, is the cold smoking rig using the Egg, a dryer duct, and a cooler.