Grillin'

It's been a little over a month since we bought the Big Joe. We've done quite a bit of cooking on it since then:

1. smoked salmon
2. barbecue pork
3. pizza
4. bread
5. Baptist Chicken
6. steak
7. burgers

to name a few. One thing we haven't cooked is ribs... we should rectify that soon.

The Big Joe is a great grill: easily the best I've owned. It's not been perfect, but the folks at Kamado Joe have been quick to respond when I reached out to them. They really stand behind their product. I would definitely recommend one to anyone who wants to buy a ceramic grill.

The Big Joe is the only grill I've ever worked with that could properly smoke fish. The difficulty with smoking fish is to keep the temperature low enough that the fish doesn't overcook while keeping the fish exposed to the smoke long enough to cure it.

I had some salmon a neighbor caught that lay forgotten in my freezer for a few years. That fish was pretty much inedible after a couple years in the freezer; only smoking it seemed like a feasible rescue strategy.  After curing the salmon with salt and brown sugar overnight, we put it on the grill between 175° and 180°F for about nine hours over a fire of mesquite and alder.

Even a ceramic grill has trouble below 180°F: the fire did go out once, but we managed to keep it going more-or-less steadily from about 3:00 PM until midnight.


The finished product was really, really good. It was chewy and smoky, like salmon jerky. I'm not a huge fish-eater, but I definitely love some smoked salmon!

It's ironic that smoking salmon is primarily a method of preserving it. But once you smoke it, it becomes really, really difficult not to eat it up entirely within a few hours. I did manage to squirrel some away in the freezer, but most of it was eaten within a week.