Panhead John Here’s my reasons for using lump. When I bought my first Kamado Joe the salesman told me that they used lump charcoal, they even included a bag of B&B oak lump and a box of Rutland fire starter squares with the cooker. I tried a couple of cooks and realized there was more to it than just dumping in some charcoal and lighting it. So my learning experience with lump began. My kamado came with a cast iron plate with holes in it as a charcoal grate even small pieces of lump stopped it up. A kick ash basket solved that problem. This is a pattern that has repeated its self many times in my life. If there’s a problem all you need to do is spend more money to fix it. Any way I had returned to AR after spending some more money to fix a marital problem and let sanity return. Here I found articles on building a fire in a kamado with lump, the kamado is a chimney, and such. Those posts got me to the point that I could smoke on my kamado with confidence. I haven’t found that lump is hard to maintain a steady temp with at all. With a Smobot I can normally go through an entire cook with no more than a 5 degree temp swing. With the kick ash basket I can give it a shake and have the leftover lump ready to use again. I like that there’s enough energy in lump to get my kamados to 700 degrees or more to clean them. Good lump isn’t going to impart any flavor or do anything more than provide the heat for cooking. There are no added ingredients that I know of. Knowing that the ash, the small pieces and dust from the bag are just carbon and ash I can throw them on the compost pile at the back of the pasture. I haven’t written this to change anyone’s mind it’s just to say why I use lump. It’s in all honesty probably because lump is what I learned to use in the beginning and get great results with it. I have no desire to change. It’s like the transmission in a nice sports car, I want a standard, some people want an automatic, no one is wrong.
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I use lump in my BGE for the same reason as Oak Smoke. It came with a bag of lump. The BGE instructions said to use lump. The suggestion for first cook (1.25” thick ribeyes) was written for lump. So I learned to use lump. If you had a kamado, you’d probably use lump in it.
Conversely, for the Weber Kettle I’ve only used briquettes. They work exactly like I expect them to. Every now and then I think about trying lump in the Kettle, but there’s no reason to; what would I expect that I’m not getting with briquettes?
Regarding temperature variation in a kamado using lump, I think Lynn would agree that using controllers like the Smobot and blowers is really just a convenience; before I bought mine, I still did long cooks with no temperature variation. A kamado will hold whatever temperature you set it at until it runs out of fuel. I’ve tried that, without any added devices. And mine is very sensitive to settings: tap the top and bottom open a bit (like 1/16”), the temp goes up a couple degrees, tap them closed a little bit the temp drops a couple degrees. Using lump.
Whatever. It doesn’t matter. The food either tastes good, or it doesn’t. Everything else is posturing. If your food tastes good, you cooked it right. There is nothing else.Comment
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