Claire

I’ve had the Cobb cooker (https://mycobb.ca/) for close to 3 months now but I haven’t cooked on it very much. We have a solar oven, we’ve had for several years now, and it really is our go to cooking method when it’s sunny. 

I’m not an experienced barbecue/grill cook. I briefly had a hibachi grill in the late 1990’s. Other than quite a bit of campfire cooking, I’ve only cooked with electric stoves and small appliances. Not many of recipes in my repertoire are a good match for cooking with charcoal. 

Charcoal starts with a blast of high heat that has a long slow cool down. There is no easy way to control or adjust the heat. Figuring out how to use that pattern has been a challenge for me. It’s been difficult to find information for using it to cook the way I do, i.e., starting with ingredients rather than packaged food. I would appreciate any tips or recipes anyone wants to share.

The Cobb isn’t really a grill or a barbecue although you can certainly do both with it. It has a grill rack and a shallow teflon frying pan as well as a deep dish stainless steel frying pan/wok and a non-stick cake pan for baking. So far I’ve mostly used the deep dish frying pan for cooking and the cake pan for quick bread.

What I’ve learned so far:

1. Use much more charcoal than you think you need. Charcoal is a relatively affordable fuel. For longer cooking, add more charcoal as soon as the fuel is well started and you are ready to cook. It’s fairly easy to add charcoal while cooking but it’s difficult to judge when to add it to make sure it catches. I expect I will become a better judge of how much I need in time. Note: As long as it’s not “self lighting”* spent charcoal can be added to compost or dumped directly into a garden bed.
2. Have all ingredients completely defrosted and close to room temperature. Cooking with the lid off really drops the temperature of the cooking surface (see point 1 above), using partially thawed food without being able to crank the heat as you can do on an electric stove drops the temperature even further and slows down the cooking drastically.  
3. Give yourself some flexibility on when dinner will be served. There’s a reason why barbecues tend to be social events with everyone sitting around drinking and chatting. The cooker needs constant attendance (this will also likely be less of an issue as I become more experienced) and timing depends on too many variables (outdoor temperature, wind, cloud cover, volume of fuel etc) to really be predicable.
4. When baking,  follow recommended baking times and monitor it closely. Putting the baking in right away, when the charcoal is hot, can get the bottom and sides cooked more than you’d want. As far as I can tell this is due to the fact that, unlike an electric oven, it’s strictly bottom heat. I haven’t yet tried baking with the residual heat after I’ve cooked something else. That will be my next experiment.

For now the solar oven will still probably be our preferred outdoor cooking method in sunny weather. It’s not as flexible as the Cobb but it can be set up and left to cook while we do other things. It only needs periodic checks and adjustment.  

The Cobb is a redundancy that will allow me to cook outdoors in cloudy weather and in power outages which typically occur during the winter when it’s rainy and overcast. The variety of cooking styles possible on the Cobb are also appealing. Expanding my cooking repertoire is always inspiring. Cooking can get boringly repetitive sometimes. I haven’t yet tried “potjie”, a traditional African method of making one pot meals that seems to be well suited to cooking with charcoal.