The Egg Genius
For most people, the Big Green Egg is a grill they are happy to use and control themselves. Adjusting the vents to control the temperature of the Egg is all part of the cooking process. The Egg is very forgiving, too, making temperature control way, way easier than on a standard metal BBQ.
However, there are times when it’s nice to be able to leave your Egg and know your cook is being taken care of. An overnight cook is a great example of this. You’ll sleep so much better knowing your cook is totally under control.
We also like to use the Egg Genius when we’re baking, as having the correct temperature is key to success.
Forced Air Controllers
There is a category of products called forced air controllers, where a small computer-controlled fan blows the perfect amount of air through your Big Green Egg, controlling how much oxygen is available to burn the charcoal and control the temperature. These devices will have a thermometer that you attach to your grill grate so it knows the temperature inside your Egg. By monitoring the temperature, it knows whether the grill needs to heat up (blow in more air, burn more charcoal), is just right (carry on blowing just the right amount of air), or is too hot (don’t blow in any air).
The ‘forced air’ part of the name is because controllers of this type can only work if they have to force air through your grill. If you leave the top vent open too wide, your grill will naturally draw air, increasing the temperature. These controllers don’t have a way to stop this. Therefore, you need to make sure that your top vent is closed slightly more than it would usually be for the specific temperature you are after.
Over the last decade, these controllers have become WiFi enabled, meaning you can not only view what’s going on with your cook from a webpage or app, you can also change the controller’s settings from the app. There’s one big thing here to take into account, your controller needs to connect to a WiFi signal. I’ve seen too many people say their controller is rubbish because it keeps dropping out or won’t even connect. It’s not the controller that’s the issue; it’s the fact your house WiFi doesn’t extend to the area of the garden your grill is in. If there is no WiFi signal to connect to, guess what? It won’t be able to connect. It’s time to install a better WiFi solution than the cheap off-the-shelf WiFi router provided by your broadband provider.
£320.00 – £434.00
Is it any good?
We’ve been using the Egg Genius since it was launched, and it our go to controller. So yes it’s a great product.
I think I even used one at Big Green Egg when I worked there before they even made it to the market. We actually own two of them. I think that tells you that it’s a product that we like and trust so let me tell you more.
We’ve used a good few of these type of products and own:
- BBQ Guru Digi Q DX2 – one of the original controllers, no WiFi here.
- HeaterMeater – a self built, 3D printed controller – uses poor quality probes.
- Flameboss 300 – Good but now out of date
- InkBird Temperature Controller – good product let down by poor software.
The Genius isn’t actually made by Big Green Egg. It’s manufactured by FlameBoss. If you look carefully at their range of controllers, you’ll see that the FlameBoss 400 looks very similar. They’re not identical, however, as the Egg Genius has been built so that it can accept three meat probes, whereas the FlamBoss 400 can only use one. This means you can monitor three different pieces of meat on the same grill or three different areas of the same piece of meat. Both will only control a single grill, though.
The Software
The Egg Genius is controlled using an app on your phone or tablet. Once set up, the app connects to the controller, and you can set the temperature you want your Egg (pit temperature), and also the temperature you want to cook your piece(s) of meat to. You have the choice of using the Big Green Egg branded app, or the standard FlameBoss app, both work. As I had another FlameBoss device, I’ve always used the FlameBoss app, as it allowed me to see both devices.
The graphic here shows a previous cook. This one was a large piece of pork shoulder (also known as pork butt) that I cooked for a neighbour. The red line on the graph shows the Pit Temperature, here a very constant 110°C, except where I opened the Egg, once at the beginning around 17:15 to load the meat in, and then 4 times to check it and wrap it (07:00) before finishing the cook at 12:40.
The yellow line shows the temperature of the meat. Before 17:15 it was reading the ambient temperature, around 30°C, a lovely warm day. Then we pop the meat in and it reads 8°C, the meat wasn’t long out of the fridge. You then see it rising and going into the stall around 70°C. Eventually we wrapped it, as we needed to speed it up at around 9:30 am, and we saw it rise to its final temp of 93°C, when it was all probing tender.
Below the graph you can see some notes. I always like to keep notes on my cooks, so I can then go back and see what I did. So at 6:58 am on this cook I moved the probe as it wasn’t in the coolest part of the meat, and at 9:28 am I wrapped the pork shoulder in foil.
During a cook the app will show you the live pit and meat temperatures. You can also change the temperature of your Egg from the app, anywhere you have an internet connection. Therefore, you could watch and control the Egg from work, the pub, the golf course…
Each of your cooks is saved into the cloud. This is a good thing as it allows you to go back and look at your cooks, to remind yourself how the last cook went. The only downside to this is FlameBoss have had issues with their servers reaching capacity on Christmas Day, 4th July and Thanksgiving on several occasions. It’s never been an issue for us,as we’re in a different time zone, but I have seen many others complain about this.
The Hardware
The main fan unit contains the controller. It’s into this unit that you plug the thermometers/probes for measuring the pit temp and also the meat temperature.
The controller itself clips into a plate that slides into your draft door (as seen in the photo). The unit comes with two different sized plates, one for the MiniMax, and the larger one that fits the Large and XL Eggs.
As standard, the device comes with one pit probe and one meat probe. You can add an additional two meat probes, but each one of these will also require a Y-Splitter cable, as there are just two jack sockets on the controller. The pit probe has a crocodile clip in the end to attach it to your grid. The meat probes are pointed to push into your meat.
There is a 12 volt power supply that can be plugged into a standard 3 pin socket. We normally run our Egg Genius from a phone power bank though, using a 5v USB to 12V USB cable. We’ve written another page on this detailing power options.
Sadly, there is no pouch or box to keep it all in.
Conclusions
This is a great controller and it’s the one we use here at our cookery school.
This isn’t the cheapest on the market, but cheaper products tend to have software that isn’t as good. Would we recommend it, absolutely.Â