To get cooking, you simply fill the Firebox with natural lumpwood charcoal. Be sure to avoid any charcoal that contains chemicals as this can affect the taste of your food and the Big Green Egg’s ceramics. Our expert found the self-clean process a doddle and highly effective, but if any super stubborn food residue remains you can use a scrubber brush to remove it. For the Egg’s ceramic outer surface, be sure to use a soft non-abrasive cloth to avoid damaging its signature hunter green finish. Next, you need to add a fire starter followed by a few more charcoal pieces on top – a charcoal garnish for your firelighter, if you will. Open the draft door fully for 10 minutes and wait for your charcoal to glow. Then it’s time to open the other vent, aptly named the ‘reggulator’ and – patience please – wait up to five minutes for your Egg to be sufficiently heated. Finally, add your cooking surface and you’re ready to start the art of barbecuing. What can you cook in it?

A handful of Kamado Joe-brand accessories, including the JoeTisserie rotisserie attachment, will fit the Big Green Egg. Many kamado users also love the addition of a ceramic surface to deflect heat. This allows for indirect cooking, and many cooks use it to turn their grill into a smoker or outdoor oven. Both Big Green Egg and Kamado Joe have their own version of this ceramic piece, and you can use them interchangeably between both brands. As with all charcoal barbecues, there wasn't too much maintenance to be done with this grill, but the next time it's in use you should rake over the coals so that they fall into the lower part of the Kamado, and you can remove them and start afresh. How does it compare to similar BBQs? Kamado grills are made from heavy, engineered ceramic material and once heated or 'heat soaked,' they will cook very efficiently for hours with minimal effort," explained Paul Sidoriak of Grilling Montana. "They can be used to smoke a prime rib, roast veggies, bake a cheesecake, and grill up burgers—all in the same day! There’s almost nothing you can’t make on a kamado grill." Built in a Kamado style (that's Japanese for stove) you can literally grill, smoke, bake, cook, roast anything you need. Whether you want it raging hot or smokin' low you can adjust the temperature easily. The Pig Bluey is MEGA efficient and needs very little charcoal to get going. It’s made of shuttle-quality ceramic that’s treated with a protective green glaze, and then baked at 1,300C for several hours. The brand is supremely confident in its craftsmanship, hence the lifetime warranty.Cooking with a kamado grill can be quite a learning experience, but this one is unlike any other. The Akorn Auto-Kamado has a large cooking area—445 square inches—and is pretty light comparatively speaking. But perhaps the coolest feature is how it's used with an app on your phone! Sure, you can adjust the temperature via the knob on the LCD control screen, but it's arguably more fun to use use the app when the grill is connected via Bluetooth and/or Wi-Fi. It can also be used as a low and slow cooker – that means cooking with a low heat over a long period. This method is ideal for cooking BBQ favourites such as pork shoulder, lamb shank and brisket. Picture it – you light and load your Big Green Egg in the morning, leave it to do its thing and 12 hours later you have a showstopping piece of meat for your dinner party. Very. In fact, the fuss-free clean-up was one of our favourite things about it. For the Big Green Egg to ‘self-clean’, you simply fire it up as normal, close the dome and let it burn at 300C for a solid 20 minutes. Any leftover food scraps will be burnt to ash, ready for you to collect from the fire grate through the draft door at the bottom. Just be sure to leave the vents open while cleaning is in progress.

Once the preheating was done Ibegan cooking with one of the ultimate BBQ foods, beef burgers. I started off with two patties, thinking that the grill could only hold that many. It became clear soon after that I could fit more on (even if they took a little longer to cook), so I squeezed four onto the space. Founded in Atlanta in 1974, Big Green Egg took inspiration from East Asian-style, wood-fired clay ovens – invented more than 3,000 years ago. After a stint of importing kamado-style ovens from China and Japan, creator Ed Fisher eventually developed his own model. These days, Big Green Eggs have gone techy: they’re made using top-quality ceramics, developed in part by Nasa. You can read loads more about our Kamado-style BBQs and accessories here. We also do a BIG PIG BLUEY, which boasts a whopping 21" grill. Show-off. Kamado grills do have a bit of a learning curve, especially if you typically cook on a gas or pellet grill. To control the temperature of a kamado grill, you have to adjust the vents at the top and bottom of the cooking chamber. For high temperatures, you'll want to open the vents more to let oxygen into the grill, and for low temperature, keep the vents partially closed.

You work at BID, what a legend.

Lighting a kamado grill is very similar to lighting a charcoal grill. You'll want to open its air vents all the way to ensure oxygen can enter the chamber, then you can use a chimney starter or electric starter to light your lump charcoal. Kamado grills are fairly unique in their design, and these grills stand out from other charcoal grills thanks to their egg-shaped form and ceramic walls. The ceramic exterior retains heat better than traditional metal grills, and it also helps to keep moisture and smoke sealed inside, giving your food a richer flavor.