Koppes Dirk - The Big Green Egg Book

CONTENTS

TIME for a new tradition

Twenty years ago, I dug a hole in the ground, filled it with wood chips, and lit a fire. I threw in some wild mint, followed by a suckling pig, and covered the pit with sod. The glowing embers burned all night, and the next day friends came over to eat the roasted pig. They had never eaten pig cooked that way. Yet this method couldnt have been simpler.

Grilling is the epitome of slow cooking, but some people are more inclined to buy a cheap grill, add charcoal and starter fluid, and cook their first pork chops. What they will end up with is a petroleum taste and a poor-quality product. There is a better way.

Time for a new tradition!

About ten years ago, I discovered the Big Green Egg. It was love at first sight, and I had to have one. I am a gadget man at heart, but the appliance must serve a purpose. There is only so much room at my restaurant, De Librije, so I am selective about my cooking equipment. It was an easy decision to make room for the Big Green Egg.

De Librije was one of the first restaurants in the Netherlands with an EGG, and we have now been serving dishes cooked in it for over ten years. The best thing about the EGG is that it cooks foods very evenly, especially when you close the lid. Fish and particularly meat can be cooked until it falls off the bone. The Big Green Egg is a grill and oven rolled into one.

The moment the grill arrived, we started it up right away with birch wood chips in flames filling the dome. In no time, the wood chips were reduced to embers, and we were ready to cook. We had breakfast next to the EGG, which seemed similar to an open-pit fireplace. At that time, I was experimenting with wood chips and gale, a species of flowering plant that grows locally and is used in beer making.

The taste of gale is quite bitter, but the aroma is delicious. When you grill with a mixture of wood chips and gale, you get a heavy cinnamon-like fragrance. If you grill sweetbreads, they will turn out delightful. We still cook sweetbreads this way, but with juniper berries in place of the gale.

The Big Green Egg is mobile, so every once in a while we take it out to the restaurant patio and serve mini pizzas with an aperitif. You start by placing pizza dough rounds on the grill. The high heat cooks the pizzas quickly, which makes the dough crispy on the outside and tender on the inside. They are great for a quick bite.

When I owned a boat, every Sunday my wife, Thrse, the kids, and I would go sailing while the EGG was cooking. We would fire it up in the morning and four hours later we would be eating lobster or fish. When I am enjoying downtime with my family, I really go all out with the EGG.

It is time for the Big Green Egg! You can have so much fun with it. Dont stash it away in the closet. Instead, experiment and use it as an oven. You can add flavor to vegetables, fruits, or even chocolate. Or, add variety through or equipment. The key is to be creative. Sometimes it takes only a minute for the flavor you desire and other times it will take much longer. Throw on some sweet potatoes or eggplant and see what happensbrilliant!

I dont want to become the poster boy for a new tradition, but I do hope this book will inspire you to try the recipes my colleagues and I have been enjoying over the years. I wish you many culinary adventures.

Jonnie Boer, Restaurant De Librije

the culinary future

The origins of the Big Green Egg actually go back two millennia. Originating from cookers that were not much more than clay vessels with lids, todays EGG is a modern ceramic marvel known for producing amazing, unique flavors and culinary results that inspire both home cooks and chefs at three-star restaurants, all looking for new ways to create great food.

Cooking outside on an open fire awakens our primal instincts. As a species, our survival is dependent on finding sources of food. The writer James Boswell described man as a cooking animal. The beasts have memory, judgment, and all the faculties and passions of our mind, in a certain degree; but no beast is a cook. We benefit from cooking with fire because we can consume different varieties of seeds and roots without having to chew on them all day like cows do. This saves us valuable time to pursue other fun things.

Scholars differ over the exact time period humans started cooking and learned to master fire. Sigmund Freud thought we reached our aha moment when man overcame his insistence on putting out brush fires by urinating on them. Then, voil, the fire, and cooking became an important element of how we prepare our food.

The Greeks saw Prometheus as the founder of the first cooking method used by humans: he defied the gods and stole the fire for mankind.

The Chinese have their own version of grilling dating back thousands of years to the use of egg-shaped clay bowls for preparing food. Those little bowls would be transformed into egg-shaped cookers.

Origin

The first large clay cookers in China appeared during the Qin dynasty (221 to 206 BCE). The Japanese spent the next three centuries coming up with the kamado (a Japanese word meaning stove or cooking place), which was similar to an oven or fireplace. In time, people adapted these units so that the food cooked on a grid above a fire pit and moved them into kitchen-like areas, where they were used for grilling and roasting meat.

Over the centuries, the kamado took on various forms: one for the kitchen, a portable version for traveling (the first real grill), and a mushi-kamado for cooking rice. Many Japanese used at least two of these units for cooking.

After World War II, American troops learned how to cook with the kamado from the Japanese. They discovered that it retained heat and moisture better than a standard grill and turned out better tasting, more aromatic dishes, so when it was time to return home, they brought the kamado back to the States.

Invention

Navy Lieutenant Ed Fisher first came across the kamado in Japan during the 1950s. Although he wasnt quite sure what to do with it, he did notice that whenever he prepared chicken in it, the neighbors wanted to come over for dinner. In 1974, when Fisher opened the Pachinko House in Atlanta, Georgia, he sold pinball machines and an assortment of kamados. Business was not great, and the kamados collected dust on a back shelf. Customers were allowed to take a kamado home to try it out, but they typically returned it, complaining that it cracked or broke apart.