Craig Tabor - Mastering the Big Green Egg® by Big Green Craig

Craigs creativity on the grill and knowledge of fire use is remarkable. This book delivers his tasty recipes to your home. With easy-to-follow instructions and a great variety of dishes, you are going to want to grill every night!

LINKIE MARAIS, yacht chef, Food Network Star (Season 8)

Craigs passion for grilling anything and everything shines through amongst these pages. Sit back, give it a read and grab a napkin to keep the drool off the pages!

CHAD ROMZEK, creator of Kick Ash Basket

This book is a must-have for anyone who wants to broaden their cooking knowledge, create unbelievable recipes and WOW their guests!

CHRIS GENTRY, Gentrys BBQ & General Store

This book is a must-own for anyone who wants to elevate their live-fire cooking game!

SHANE DRAPER, pitmaster of Drapers BBQ

This book is a spectacular collection of well-written recipes, specific methods and stunning photography.

BOB HACK, Sales and Marketing Manager, Flame Boss

For any Big Green Egg enthusiast (or any Kamado lover!), I highly recommend picking this book up and learning from Craig how to level up your Kamado game!

STEVE McELROY, creator of Stoked on Smoke

Craigs well-written methods and recipeswritten in laymans termswill not only enable you to create tantalizing dishes, but will lead you into a deeper understanding of Kamado-style grills.

JEFFREY B. ROGERS, creator of The Culinary Fanatic

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the authors copyright, please notify the publisher at: http://us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

Copyright 2020 Craig Tabor

First published in 2020 by

Page Street Publishing Co.

27 Congress Street, Suite 105

Salem, MA 01970

www.pagestreetpublishing.com

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

The Big Green Egg is a registered trademark of Big Green Egg, Inc.

eISBN 978-1-64567-025-4

Our eBooks may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension. 5442, or by e-mail at .

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019943011

Cover and book design by Ashley Tenn for Page Street Publishing Co.

Photography by Ken Goodman

This book was written in memory of my little brother, Derek. You are my inspiration for food perfection. I hope you are watching from above and like what you see. I miss you.

I have grilled and smoked for most of my life and have always enjoyed the craft. A gas grill is convenient to use for a quick midweek meal. In August 2009, I hauled a $500-ish stainless-steel gas grill to the curb for the trash collectors to pick up because it had rotted through and was falling apart. This was gas grill number three over the course of about six years that had died and gone to live in the landfill. I felt that there had to be a way to stop the bleeding of money that I was throwing away and an easier way to generate a high-quality barbecue product. A few days later, I was explaining my frustrations to a friend of mine, and thats when he opened my eyes. Ive got this ceramic grill thingy that I fire up on a Saturday night, put on some meat, wake up the next day and, abracadabra, barbecue! I explained that there is no way that this could be possible. I had to see it with my own eyes. Enter Kamado-style cooking.

I started researching these ceramic thingies online and found a killer deal on a used Big Green Egg on Craigslist. The ad was for an XL Egg that was heavily seasoned, which is exactly what I was hunting for. I went to meet the guy selling the XL Egg, and it ended up following me home that day. Superexcited, I immediately visited my local big-box store to pick up supplies to build a table. Commence table construction! After an exhausting weekend, I was finally ready to fire up this ceramic thingy. I was blown away with how little attention this cooker required during low and slow barbecuing. Ribs and pork shoulders were a breeze and a family favorite. However, that was the extent of what I was cooking at the time.

In March 2010, my wife walks in and says, Thats it, Im done. Im never cooking again. I hate it. Its just way too much work and Ive lost my passion for it. From here on out, its frozen dinners for us. This conversation was much longer than that, I promise, but I gave you the Craigs Notes version to save you the boring details. This was a real problem in the Tabor household! I dont think yall understand! My wifes family is Italian. Her grandparents emigrated from Naples, Italy, in the 1920s and settled in one of the Italian burbs of Chicago. There was never a shortage of food around her family. I just couldnt see how this was going to work with Stouffers frozen dinners! HAHA! I was at a fork in the road: Do I turn in the direction that leads me to frozen food or do I turn the other way and assume the role as the family cook?

Obviously, you know which turn I took because you are still reading this book. I did assume the role of the family cook, but could my family live on ribs and pulled pork? The answer is yes, but that would get really boring after a couple of weeks. At that point, I was not using the cooker deemed the ultimate cooking experience to its fullest potential. It was time to step up my cooking game.

From this point forward, I started broadening my horizons and challenged myself to cook something new every time I lit a fire. I added all sorts of new proteins and started using different cooking methods and techniques. Every day was full of research and recipe planning. I was on my path to learning how to make a Kamado cooker sing. Like everyone, I experienced fires going out, smoky-tasting pizza, grease fires, dirty smoke, burnt gaskets, frustration with temperature control, spiked temperatures, running out of charcoal, cracked pieces of ceramic and everything else that comes along with cooking on a Kamado cooker and slowly learned how to combat these issues.

I started posting pictures of what I was cooking on Facebook long before it was the cool thing to do. My wife urged me to take those posts to another social media platform. I opened up a Twitter account and started posting there under the name @bgewithcraig. Instagram was next. As my cooking and photography skills increased, so did my following. People started noticing that I possessed a high level of quality and enjoyed the content. A good friend of mine decided that I needed a branded logo and designed one using a play on words, and so the Big Green Craig brand was born. As the Big Green Craig project began to gain steam, I started to become friends with some really cool people who shared my interests and passions in the grilling, smoking and barbecue world.