Charcoal questions
My wife and I grill about every 4-5 days, whether we're at home or on the road. At home, we have a Char Broil infrared gas grill that does pretty well. For the road, we bought a highly rated portable...
Forum Discussion
DandD2015 wrote:
Thanks for the input, everybody!NYCgrrl wrote:
I'm a little confused by your first question so please bear with me: Are you saying you cook in the fire pit, in the charcoal starter or use something else?
Yes, we're cooking in the fire ring.
To backpedal a moment, when we got our (first) camper in October, we knew we would be grilling. Even at home, I grill every few days. We make steaks, turkey, fish, chicken, sausages...asparagus, onion, cabbage.... So we got a tabletop gas grill from Home Depot and we took it on one trip. It was ok but really, we knew how much grease and ash we were going to have, based on our home experience. And our Chinook doesn't have that much storage room for hauling it around, anyway (Once we put the dog, two computers, my camera stuff, clothes, food, yadda yadda, we're full.)
So we ended up reverting to our old friend. Like I said, we use a chimney to start the coals quickly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q90WH2_e-U8
Those things are awesome---no lighter fluid needed, so no lighter fluid taste. And if you could remove the grate from those "grill on a pole" things you see at campsites, that's what we'd use. But we can't easily get the coals from the chimney into the box that holds the coals. I think they're welded so that you can't walk off with them. Maybe we could use tongs to transfer them individually or something.
The other thing is, if we use the fire pit once we finish grilling the coals give us a start on a campfire. Throw on some wood, grab a glass of wine, maybe play a little guitar.
So, better charcoal and a grate to allow air to circulate underneath better.
OK got ya now...........prolly I hadn't enough caffeine when I posted earlier, LOL.
Most campground fire rings I've seen have air holes in them so my guess is lack of air flow isn't the problem.
Do you pile the charcoal in a mound to cook with or spread it out to facilitate the start of the night's wood fire? Mounding first will give you a quick and concentrated grilling fire. You can spread the embers out after for a fire. I travel with my own fire pit/grill and generally still have live embers the next morning to start up breakfast. One of my fav local state parks only rents fire pits (gives new meaning to a money pit) so buying my own made sense but it had to be easy to store since I've neither a garage or attic. It's a multi tasking tool that I consider one of my best pieces of camping gear:
Snow Peak portable fire pit/grill
For the same reasons I bought a collapsible chimney:
http://www.amazon.com/AMOS-Barbecue-Collapsible-Foldable-Thermoplastic/dp/B00YEGBVYU
similar to the one in the link except my version has a handle that swing locks to the side thus even easier for storage. Think they don't make it anymore so I'm holding on to it for dear life:).
HTH and have fun out there!
