i do not like the coals with the instant ligt added--taste gets ito the food i think. I bought a bag of off brand charcoal at our local Family Dollar a while back---anybody wants it it is still in my garage, give it to you for free.

 

I prefer the flavor of kerosene on my burgers..... I cook them in a torpedo heater.

 

Ya know, those torpedo heaters will run on deisel !!

 

I have a little smoky Weber (the cheapest one they make).

After waiting 45min to cook two burgers, I got a nicer propane grille.

Propane for me. The charcoal was such a PITB that I never think about the charcoal anymore.


I'd love to get a decent charcoal grille, but that's not something i have time, patience, or money for yet.

Maybe once I get a job and know where I'm going to live, then I can mess with this kind of thing.

jh

 

Neither

mesquite wood for me...

Rick

 

Hehe thats why you dont BBQ 2 burgers.. get a george foreman grill if ya only need two!

 

Well, you can't squeeze much more than that on a lil smoky!

 

The Okie is right

 

45 min to cook 2 burgers on a lil smokie? what kind of charcoal were you using? it takes 15 tops to do 4 burgers on our Weber One Touch.

http://www.weber.com/bbq/pub/grill/2...hSilver18.aspx

 

as little as steaks get cooked when i'm grilling them for myself you could probably cook it with a cigarette lighter in about 5 mins.

 

I've tried the Kingsford (with and without mesquite) Matchlight and non-matchlight. I also tried some stuff in a big orange bag.

The problem isn't the charcoal, it's the grill.

The Lil Smoky has a design flaw, and the grill is different than all the other Webers I've seen-- I regret not noticing it sooner.

The flaw is that the smoky has only 1 grate, not two. In other words, the charcoal rests right on the bottom of the grill, not on a secondary grate that gets it up off the floor.

That means that the ventilation is very poor. The coals can't get any air, and they take FOREVER to get going. Once they are finally going nice and hot, the ashes will block off the ventilation and kill the heat.

Finally I made my own secondary grille out of some expanded metal (and a couple cutoff discs-- woulda been nice to have a plasma!). This helped immensely.

But the problem now is that the grill is too shallow. Once I get the coals up off the floor, they are VERY close to the food grate, which we all know isn't so good for cooking evenly. The only way to give the food a little space is to have the coals arranged in a single layer-- but coals don't burn very well when they are only one layer thick!

This is a terrible grille design, and I'm glad it was so cheap.

That last proof I offer that this little grill sucks is this: I bought one of those charcoal starter chimneys. They work very well! I can get those coals HOT HOT HOT in about 10 min. Then I dump them out of the chimney and into the lili smoky, and they lose so much heat that they almost stop burning!


Here's what I've learned about charcoal through this whole ordeal:
-- The lil smoky is not a real Weber. It sucks. It's not even worth the $30.
--the alternative starting fluids with Methanol in them actually work pretty well (the orange smelling creamy stuff).
-- acetone is the best charcoal start of all. Zero to hero in seconds. Be careful of the detonation hazard


JMO

 

what about a foreman grill?

brett

 

for a small grill i would go with the Weber Smokey Joe. we had one and it worked really well.

 

That's the very grill that's given me all the grief.

Could be operator error, I suppose.

No problems with the propane Char-broil, tho...

 

May need to drill some holes in the bottom of that lil smokey like we did the brinkley smoker. It helped the brinkley a bunch with maintaining heat for 5 and 6 hours.