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Old King Coal

Whether backyard brazier or high-end smoker, the charcoal grill is hot again

By David Zimmer

It’s fun to imagine what cottaging must have been like at the beginning of the last century, when outboard motors were upstart contraptions, water came in buckets, and bass jumped right into the boat. Times were simpler then and cottage living was too, bearing little resemblance to the complicated antics we get up to these days. Surely, with the exception of a stalwart few, who probably call their cottages “camps” anyway, our modern version of enjoying the lake has little in common with the way they did it back in the sepia-tinted days of yore. Or does it? Look more closely at that foxed and faded photograph, past the pipe-smoking men in their thick wool pants, past the eight-dozen trout skewered on a willow branch,past the smiling woman with her hair piled and pinned and her sleeves rolled up. There. To the left. It’s a charcoal fire with a cooking grate on top, spitting wisps of smoke from what may be two halves of a mid-sized chicken or an entire rabbit, split down the middle. Behold the eternal flame. 

charcoal bbq by the lakeOf course, back in those high-collared days, cottagers had no choice but to conduct their outdoor cooking over wood and charcoal fires. Yet we still cook over charcoal today, and with good reason: Food cooked over live coals just tastes better. And the cottage has always been
a bastion of charcoal cookery. Maybe it’s simply because of the relaxed atmosphere, where we can take the time to cook and enjoy food, but I like to think it’s because the spirits of our cottaging forebears are there, urging us on in ghostly whispers and wiping succulent juices from their lips.

There’s been a bit of a charcoal renaissance lately, and whether you're considering getting into live-fire exercises for the first time or just want to upgrade that rusted-out ash pan on legs that came with the cottage, there have never been more styles of charcoal cookers to choose from. But before you shop, there are some things worth knowing about fire-breathers, starting with the cooking methods a charcoal grill may – or may not – be able to perform.

Direct grilling requires only an open brazier, and is done over very hot coals with smaller, quickly cooked foods such as burgers, steaks, and chops. Indirect grilling, on the other hand, places the food over a drip pan off to one side of a covered grill and the hot coals on the other, making it possible, for example, to cook larger cuts of meat longer without burning them.

Smoking, or true southern barbecue, involves cooking cuts of meat, often very large ones, with indirect heat at very low temperatures (225°F–275°F/105°C–135°C). True barbecue requires extremely long cooking times (some grandmasters can take 18 hours to cook a pork shoulder), and uses smouldering logs or hardwood chunks to flavour the meat – hence the expression “low and slow” cooking. While a version of true barbecue can be attained on a covered grill, dedicated smokers have specialized features to better regulate the heat over long periods of time.

One nice thing about shopping for a charcoal-powered cooker is that the variety of makes and models available to Canadian consumers is relatively slim compared with what’s available in the U.S. It might sound odd, but with less choice, it’s actually easier to find yourself a well-built grill. The key, though, is to comparison shop at actual barbecue retailers, not just big box stores that tend to carry a very narrow selection of brands and styles. And remember the old rule about getting what you pay for: If a no-name grill sells for a fraction of the price asked for a name-brand unit, you’d best take a closer look. Finally, because charcoal cookers are so much simpler than their gassy cousins – no valves, burners, or heat deflectors to deal with – getting a well-built grill doesn’t require a training session at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

“First of all, you want a stable grill, something that feels solid,” says Steven Raichlen, host of PBS’s Barbecue University and award-winning author of the Barbecue Biblecookbook series. “With something that could potentially burn your deck down, make sure it’s not going to collapse or push over.” It’s the very simplicity of a charcoal cooker that makes assessing its build quality rather straightforward: If you choose a grill that’s steady and sturdily built, chances are you’ve picked a winner. That’s the easy part. It’s deciding which style of grill best suits your needs that gets a little more complicated.

The basic brazier: open fire!

The charcoal cooker most people are familiar with is the brazier, basically any bed of coals with a cooking grate suspended over top. Braziers can take the form of a Hibachi, a campfire, a bisected steel drum, or one of those round coal pans on rickety tripod legs that helped generations of suburban dads incinerate hamburgers and hot dogs on smoky summer evenings. Many cottages feature built-in braziers, where the coal pan and cooking surface are integrated into a brick or stone monolith. Braziers are designed for quickly cooking things like steaks and chops, small pieces of chicken, or fish fillets. And, of course, burgers and dogs. Small, portable models are handy for picnics or shore lunches and, if direct grilling is the only style of cooking you do, a brazier might be the only charcoal cooker you need. Might be. Lacking a lid, braziers can’t be used for indirect cooking or to perform smoke cooking.

Kettle grills: the cover story

In 1951, tired of wind and rain ruining backyard cookouts on a brazier, George Stephen had a eureka moment that forever changed the world. At the time, Stephen worked at the Weber Brothers Metal Works in Palatine, Ill., a company that made marine buoys. In a flurry of creative genius, he fit a grill rack on top of one of the bowl-shaped metal buoy components, then added a similarly shaped lid, and cut vents into the top – creating the world’s first kettle grill, a design that lives on as the ever-popular Weber kettle. And by fitting a lid to a brazier, Stephen not only kept the rain off his coals, now he could cook with indirect heat, effectively making an outdoor oven.

Kettle grills come in many shapes and sizes, from portable table-top units to immense grills large enough to accommodate a small pig. Some are dome-shaped, others square or rectangular, and still others a classic barrel shape with a hinged lid and a smokestack. Most kettle grills regulate the airflow to the coals with one set of vents underneath the coal pan and another in the lid, above the food. Regulating the air supply controls the heat in the cooking chamber, from relatively high roasting temperatures, to very low ones necessary for real barbecue. Cook without the lid and you’ve got yourself a brazier. 

If a Most Valuable Player award for all the kettle grills on the market were given out, it should surely go to the Weber kettle. “It’s pretty tough to beat a Weber kettle,” Raichlen agrees. “It’s sort of iconic and it’s one of the few things in modern life where you understand how it works and it does everything it’s supposed to.” While Weber kettles come in a variety of sizes, David Burt of Ontario Gas Barbecue in Concord unreservedly recommends one model in particular. “The 221⁄2-inch is better, because of the larger cooking surface, but also because most of the accessories fit that model,” Burt explains. “If you want a rotisserie or a lid holder or a work table, they only fit the 221⁄2.” Also, look for a model with a hinged cooking surface that allows you to flip up a section of grate to access the fire pan below, convenient for adding extra fuel or aromatic wood chips.

Water smokers: rack, stack, and snack

Cooking foods in the presence of smoke, whether for short periods, as you would to lightly flavour fish, or for the long periods necessary to create true barbecue, is part art and part science. And while you can perform rudimentary smoking on a kettle grill, a dedicated smoker, purpose-built to cook low and slow, can really help with the science part. Usually resembling either a monstrous suppository or a tiny nuclear missile silo, water smokers are compact units that stack the food, be it a beef brisket or a pork shoulder, over a source of heat and smoke and a water pan. Vents control combustion to maintain the 225°F–275°F (105°C–135°C) temperature necessary for honest-to-goodness barbecue, while the liquid in the water pan adds humidity, allowing Joe Cottager to create authentic southern eats without the construction of a commercial barbecue pit. “You can produce barbecue as good as any on a water smoker,” says “Rockin’” Ronnie Shewchuk, cookbook author and barbecue evangelist, whose champion “Butt Shredders” team uses water smokers on the competitive barbecue circuit. “Those devices are so well designed that they emulate a big barbecue pit extremely well.”

At $100 to $280, water smokers are relatively inexpensive, but those built with heavier-gauge steel will hold an even heat better than lightweight models. And because water-smoker components stack – the water pan sits on top of the coal pan and the cooking grates sit on top of the water – with some units you must disassemble the whole kit and caboodle each time you add fresh coals, water, or wood chunks. Better models have sliding doors that give access to the coal and water pans.

Offset barrel smokers: handsome heavyweights

The basic operating principle of an offset barrel smoker is the separation of heat and meat, with the cooking chamber and the firebox divided by a baffle. A smouldering fire of small hardwood logs, or charcoal and aromatic hardwood chunks, in the firebox sends heat and smoke across the meat in the cooking chamber and out a tall smokestack. “The chief advantage of these is that they really do operate at the low temperatures you need for low and slow true barbecue,” Raichlen explains. “It’s hard to get a kettle grill to stay at that low 250-degree [Fahrenheit] temperature, but with an offset barrel smoker it’s fairly easy because the fire and the food are separate.” One bonus feature is that by adding some cooking grates, both the firebox and the cooking chamber on an offset barrel smoker can be filled with charcoal and used as a high-capacity brazier – or a kettle.

The thing that separates a quality offset smoker from the wannabes is heavyweight construction. Cheaper models are made from sheet steel, while better ones are usually constructed of welded 1⁄4" steel plate and weigh hundreds – or thousands – of kilograms, the better to hold their heat.

Offset barrel smokers range in size from units with a 40-cm-diameter cooking chamber that’s 90 cm long for about $1,000, to 75-cm-diameter giants with cooking chambers that are almost three metres long (not counting the firebox!) all mounted on a double-axle trailer for easy towing (base price: about $12,000). “My dream is to own one of those one day,” pitmaster Shewchuk says. “I’ve cooked on them and they’re quite amazing.” Okay, while the largest offset smokers are really designed for the pros, the smaller models – just as heavily built – could be the last charcoal cooker you or your children will ever buy. And let’s not forget an important psychological trump card. “You cannot discount the coolness factor,” says Raichlen. “I’m not sure how you quantify this, but offset smokers are just more manly – they scream you mean business.”

Kamado cookers: enter the dragon

Based on enclosed earthenware cookers developed in Asia a few millennia ago, the modern kamado cooker uses high-tech ceramics to make a very efficient charcoal cooker. Kamados tend to be tall and deep, with a small firepan in the bottom accessible through a sliding door. The cooking grates are suspended well above the coals and a high-domed lid gives the clearance necessary for large items. With an open lid, kamados do brazier work, but with the lid closed, and a ceramic riser plate in place, they also perform indirect cooking or low and slow barbecue, depending on how you adjust the airflow. “I like them because they go from very cool to very hot very quickly because of the way they’re vented,” says Raichlen. “And they’re very fire efficient. You can get them banked down so low that one chimney of charcoal would last a very long time – which is a good thing.” 

Because of a kamado’s incredible insulating ability – retailer David Burt says you can actually touch the outside, briefly, when it’s 900°F (480°C) inside – they have the ability to maintain low barbecue temperatures in winter, when even the best water smoker or offset barrel smoker will struggle to keep an even heat. However, their ventilation system is so precise that it sometimes requires a bit of practice. “At first, we tell customers to just take it home and give it a go because there’s a bit to figure out,” says Burt.

Kamado cookers are expensive, ranging anywhere from $650 to almost $3,000, and heavily built; some feature a stainless-steel exterior, while others are finished with a heavy-duty coloured glaze. “I think they’re great machines,” says Raichlen, who owns two kamados. “If the Weber kettle is like the car that gets you to work, the kamado cooker is a bit like a Hummer. It’s for the enthusiasts – the gearheads.”.

While being the first kid on the lake with an extreme piece of charcoal-burning equipment might be appealing, you don’t have to be a gearhead to enjoy the simplicity and the unbeatable flavour you get from cooking over live coals, even if all you use is a simple brazier. And once you get comfortable working out on the firing range, charcoal cookery can even get a little addictive. Without charcoal to light, coal beds to arrange, and vents to fuss around with, cooking on a gas barbecue can seem downright boring by comparison, the same way a gas fireplace doesn’t command a gaze the way a real wood fire does. It’s kind of spooky actually. I wonder if those ghosts of our cottaging ancestors have anything to do with it? 

Charcoal versus briquettes

After wood, the most popular fuel in most of the world for live-fire grilling is lump charcoal, wood partially burned in the absence of oxygen to create a lightweight, clean-burning, readily available fuel. Lump charcoal – look for brands that specify “100%hardwood” to avoid low-quality softwood filler – is easy to light, burns very hot, and doesn’t adversely affect the flavour of food.

Charcoal briquettes, first invented as a by-product of Henry Ford’s auto plants as a way to use leftover wood scraps, are uniform cakes of ground charcoal held together with binders and, depending on the brand, can contain additives including borax, limestone, sawdust, and sodium nitrate. Briquettes burn longer and more evenly than lump charcoal, a bonus when long cooking is your goal, and their consistent size makes it easier to control how big a fire you’re building. But briquettes create a lot more ash – making them inappropriate for something with a small firebox, like a kamado cooker. Some cooks (myself included) don’t like the smell of briquettes, although the vast majority of pitmasters on the pro barbecue circuit use them exclusively, for their even heat. If additives bother you, look for all-natural briquettes that contain only charcoal and plant-starch binders. And stay away from “match light” briquettes – if you can light them with a match, you probably don’t want that chemical flavour on your food.

Chips and chunks

It’s a bit ironic, but the very process that creates charcoal from raw wood robs the finished product of the aromatic compounds that make wood smoke smell so darn good. That’s why pitmasters cook over hardwood logs or let fist-sized chunks of real wood smoulder on their charcoal fires – to impart a splendid smokiness. Smaller wood chips are also available for smaller cookers. “I never use charcoal without using a flavouring agent,” says Ron Shewchuk, author of Barbecue Secrets: Unbeatable Recipes, Tips and Tricks from a Barbecue Champion, published by Whitecap Books. “If I’m grilling something, just before I throw the stuff on the grill, I’ll toss a handful of wood chips through the cooking grate so they land on the coals. If I’m cooking something for longer, using indirect cooking, I’ll throw one or two chunks of hardwood right amongst the coals.”

Of course, the wood used for those chips and chunks will affect the flavour they impart. Mesquite, for instance, is very strong and usually reserved for beef. Hickory, often associated with pork, and oak aremedium-strength players. Lighter flavours on fish and chicken may come from fruitwoods like apple and cherry. Almost any hardwood can be used, as can grapevine cuttings or dried herbs. Softwoods, such as pine and spruce, are far too resinous and should never be used to flavour food.

Chimney starters

For charcoal grillers, the best way to get fuel hot, bothered, and ready to cook is to use a chimney starter, a device so simple and effective that you’ll wonder how you ever got by without one. Chimney starters are basically a round or square section of pipe, with holes around the bottom, an internal grate, and a heat-proof handle. Lump charcoal or briquettes are dumped in the top, on the grate, and a couple of crumpled sheets of newsprint get stuffed in the bottom. Once lit, the paper quickly gets the fuel going, the chimney acting like, well, a chimney – drawing air in at the bottom and force-feeding it to the coals, which can reach cooking temperature in about 10 minutes. Once they’re ready, grab the handle, dump the coals in your cooker, and start grilling. That’s it. No lighter fluid, electric starters, or nasty-smelling cubes of accelerant. Not bad for a $10 to $30 accessory.

“Chimney starters are great because of the vertical configuration of the coals, which means they light uniformly,” explains barbecue guru Steven Raichlen. “In the old days, you’d douse a mound of coals with lighter fluid and they’d light in the centre and be unlit on the periphery.”

 

Published in the July/August 2005 issue of Cottage Life magazine.


Copyright © 2005 by Cottage Life. All rights reserved. Reproduction of any article, photograph, or artwork, for other than personal use, in whole or in part, without the written permission of the publisher is strictly forbidden.