How much charcoal

Skip to content Main Menu. View All Recipes. Write a Review Read Reviews. How-To Section Think of this as your charcoal reference manual — how much to use, heat ranges, and a simple visual guide to popular charcoal arrangements.

How much charcoal should I use? Exactly how hot are the coals? See below for basic and more advanced configurations. Direct-heat grilling Coals are spread out in a single layer across the bottom cooking grate. The two-zone fire Your go-to configuration for almost everything. Two-zone fire: parallel configuration Coals spread along either side of the grill, with an empty space down the center.

Additional coals later. The charcoal snake Unlit coals and smoke wood are arranged in a circle around the inside edge of your grill. Smoking Smoking is a low and slow cooking method where meats are cooked over indirect heat at low temperatures for hours at a time.

Bubble Learn more. How to: bone-in chicken pieces How to: light the coals. Your reading list. Member of the CLX family of brands. Roughly speaking, the above percentages will work out well for you if you follow this rule. The cooking temperatures are assessed once the coals are spread out and have mostly ashed over. As a handy tool, use your hand to determine how hot your grill is. You can roughly approximate the temperature by how many seconds you can hold your hand over the coals.

If you can hold your hand over the coals for seconds, you are dealing with low heat. Clearly there is some variation here, especially with how each person perceives pain. Once you are comfortable with the above information try grilling something like boneless skinless chicken thighs.

Generally, this is a difficult thing to grill correctly. However, if you understand your heat and direct vs. The type of grill you are using will also come into play. Also, some other grills have grill grates that can be lowered to come closer to the charcoal. The closer your grate is to the coal, the hotter your cook will be.

Hi, really good tips here. I will be grilling for the first time tomorrow, and using a cheap charcoal grill that I do not believe even has a chimney. How would I go about filling with charcoal to cook steaks? Just use the hand tip to make sure the grill is hot?

Thanks in advance! I will be hosting a family reunion of approximately people. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Hi Carol, I would have a medium high area for grilling and some areas with no coal at all for keeping things warm. In this no coal area if its windy or cool out you could always put about lit coals spaced out just for some light heat.

After 45 min the hot area will then be your medium cooking area for any late cooking. If you do the twitter thing let me know how it turns out grilling24x7 or post back here. Good luck! Excellent information.

How much charcoal do you think I will need to maintain this configuration for about an hour? Any shorter than that and you risk burning everything up. That final portion of the bag can be spread on top of the already lit coals if you start to loose heat during your cook maybe 40 min in? Then pour the chimney full of coal over top of your unlit already arranged coals. If you are using something different then use this information as a guide and adjust accordingly.

The temperature of your grill will be determined by how much charcoal you use and how much air is available to the charcoal. In general, more fuel and more air creates a hotter grill. How long the charcoal burns at the temperature you want will depend upon how the charcoal is arranged and lit.

This is a case where you are going to want some high heat for about an hour. I am figuring an hour because you might be doing the burgers in batches or maybe you want to cook the chicken separate from the burgers. In this case I would fill a Weber charcoal chimney completely full of charcoal.

This will take about 90 briquettes of Kingsford Blue which is about 4. Use the chimney to light the charcoal and, once the coals are ashed over, spread them evenly across the charcoal grate. Keep the bottom and top air vents completely open. In this case I would fill the chimney halfway full with about 45 briquettes of Kingsford Blue. Use the chimney to light the charcoal and, once the coals are ashed over, dump them into a pile in the center of charcoal grate.

The charcoal is going to burn hot for longer than you really need but will be hot enough in the time you use it for some serious searing action. Not everything benefits from Hot and Fast grilling and there are times when Low and Slow is the better option. In these cases I like to use around 30 briquettes , about 1. I like to light one side of the charcoal bed with either a paraffin wax cube or even a propane torch. Let the fire slowly burn across the charcoal bed while your meat cooks on the opposite side of the grill.

If the fire gets low before the food is finished you can always add more unlit briquettes on top of the lit charcoal to extend the cooking session. So today I smoked a 9 on pork butt. I use a Weber grill with indirect heat. Is there a better way to do this? Like maybe get the initial heat going with the chimney and instead of using the chimney over and over again maybe add some coals onto the already lit coals to keep the temp up?

Will that work? Place 5 briquettes on each side every hour.