Before you light your Wild Goose Kamado, let’s talk about Charcoal...
• Charcoal type and quality are very important.
• Never use lighter fluids or self lighting charcoal.
• You load probably far more charcoal than you may expect.
• You can put the WGK out at the end, and save the charcoal.
• The leftover Charcoal can be re-used.
Why Charcoal type is so important
To cook in your Wild Goose kamado you should ONLY be using restaurant grade lumpwood charcoal. This is
generally available from places like Booker or Makro or readily available mail order on the internet.It tends to come
in bigger plain bags with no printing on it and it is usually in bigger lumps.
If you buy lumpwood charcoal from a garage, supermarket or DIY store it will usually be useless, in too small pieces
and you will struggle to get your WGK up to temperature.
Briquettes,anykindofprocessedcharcoalandselflightingcharcoalaresimplyforbidden!
They are full of nasty Chemicals and will transfer those nasty smells into the porous ceramic of your WGK and this
will taint your food.If you have half a bag of this left in your shed, we suggest that you chuck it away now to avoid
using it in a charcoal emergency in the future!
Remember that cooking on a Kamado style grill is slower than normal barbecuing and the meat gets immersed in the
charcoal flavour.Therefore you should consider the quality of your charcoal to be as important as the quality of your meat.
Why you should never use lighter fluid
For the same reason that you shouldn’t use self lighting fluid – that the chemical smell gets absorbed into the
porous ceramic and will impart a nasty flavour to the cooking.You can use a normal firelighter if you must, or follow
our method below.
How much Charcoal should we put in?
Many first time users make the mistake of putting too little charcoal in because you do need more than a normal
BBQ in a Kamado, however, this is not extravagant because remember that your WGK is completely controllable by
the air vents and you can close these up at the end of cooking and the charcoal will actually go out. You can then
re-use this charcoal next time so none is wasted (use up to three times).
Understanding the air vents
As you already know, the air vents are the key to the control when cooking on your Wild Goose Kamado.So it is important
that the air can get to your charcoal from below.To this end,you should always place big lumps of charcoal one by one
by hand over the cast charcoal grid to allow a good flow of air through. Never just pour your charcoal in,thesmallpieces
and dust can clog up your air flow- resulting in poor performance.You want all the dust and small pieces left in your
charcoal bag when you have finished it rather than blocking your vents up in the WGK. Clean the ash out from underneath
the charcoal grid on a regular basis and always before an extreme cook such as very low and slow or very hot for pizzas.
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