Loading and Lighting your Big Green Egg
Loading and lighting your Big Green Egg correctly is key to you being able to successfully cook on it. It will help you achieve incrdible result, as you’ll be in control of your cook.
The key elements to this are:
- Knocking off the ash and moving older charcoal to the edges.
- Topping up the charcoal to the correct level.
- Lighting your charcoal for the cook your about to do.
- Warming up your Egg before you pop in cooking surfaces.
- Selecting the temperature you want to cook at.
- Adding the cooking surfaces.
We’re goign to assume here you have already cleaned out your Egg of ash if it was required.
Every Egg, no matter how old or new, should be able to get to 180°C (350°F) within 15 minutes of lighting, if your Egg is slower than this, you probably need to clean out your Egg.
Loading and Lighting Video
We made this video to show you how we light our Eggs here at Meat Smoke Fire, and how we keep the smoke to a minimum.
Raking your charcoal to knock off the ash
If there is one tool I would say is compulsory to buy with your Egg, it is the ash tool.
Use your ash tool like an oar, and get down deep into your charcoal to stir it all up, and let the ash drop into the bottom of your Egg.
I then move the older charcoal to the edges of the fire bowl, creating a well in the middle where I can top up with new charcoal.
If your charcoal has loads of tiny pieces, as you’ve used it a few times, take these out and add them to the top of your next cook. They will block the airflow through the holes.
Top up your charcoal
The key to good temperature control, in my opinion, is to fill the fire bowl with charcoal each time you cook. Don’t try and scrimp and save, you’ll still burn the same amount of charcoal.
Fill your fire bowl to the top where it meets the fire ring.
Lighting your charcoal
Create a small indentation in the middle of your charcoal big enough to pop a fire lighter into.
To light your Egg you only need one fire lighter. We use the natural firelighters from Amazon, not Big Green Egg’s own brand. The wood wool natural firelighters are much cheaper, and just use parafin wax, just like the Big Green Egg starters.
Pop the firelighter into the indentation and light it. Place a few pieces of charcoal over it, but don’t smother it. You want the flames to be able to come through. Leave the dome of the Egg open fully and open the draft door fully. Leave your Egg 10 minutes for the middle of the charcoal to get going.
After 10 minutes, the middle of your Egg will be alight, but the outside will still be cold. If you’re getting a lot of smoke, you’re smothering the flame.
Close the dome, open your top vent fully, and leave your Egg for 5 minutes. Your Egg should reach 180°C. Don’t panic, even if youre wanting to cook at a lower temperature, adding cold surfaces will bring down the temp.
Warming your Egg up is key
Fire needs three things: fuel, oxygen and heat. No matter what temperature you’re cooking at, you need to warm your Egg and charcoal. This will stop acrid smokey flavours you sometimes will get if you rush starting the cook.
Once your dome feels warm and you’ve reached 180°C. You’re ready to set the temp you need and add cooking surfaces.
Setting the temperature of your Egg
Ignore the forums that tell you to control the temperature of your Big Green Egg using just the draft door, or the top vent. While this can work, it’s really difficult.
It’s much simpler to control the temp by adjusting the vents together. My rule of thumb is to have the draft door open about twice as wide as the rEGGulator.
Have a look at our guide to setting the temperature, where we have photos of the settings.
When you make changes, make small adjustments, and allow your Egg time to settle. Don’t make big changes all the time; you’ll yo-yo the temperature.
Add your cooking surfaces
When you add your cold cooking surfaces to your Egg, you’ll see the temperature drop. Try and resist adjusting the vents, the Egg will recover to the temperature it was at.
If you Egg has been at 180°C and you want 110°C, shut the top vent to 2mm wide, the bottom to 5mm wide and add your convEGGtor. You’ll see the temperature drop and stabailse at 110°C.
The Egg gets hot easily, it cools very slowly
Warming an Egg up is easy, just open the vents to give it more oxygen. In a couple of minutes you’ll see the temperature rise.
Cooling an Egg is more difficult, especially if you’ve superheated the ceramics. Opening the dome to let out the hot air is not the way to cool it down, you’re just giving the fire more oxygen and it’ll get hotter.
Shut the vents almost completely and the fire will die down. If it’s taking too long, just add a pan full of cold water, this will soon draw the heat out of your Egg.