dirty6

Hi all, I cooked some Cornish hens w direct heat tonight on my new KJC. I added three wood chunks and cooked at about 300 for 70-85 minutes. The birds turned out quite well, good smoke, good skin, good moisture, great flavor. My question is this: the wood chunks were only partially consumed, so what should I do with those? Put them back in the wood chunk basket? Toss them? I’d imagine I need to make sure they don’t go into the used charcoal bin bc they aren’t pure carbon like the lump is. Appreciate your insight and help. Thanks!

Nope, just arrived into the Columbia area. I’m military, moved here from overseas. Enjoyed the Revelry.

Unrelated to my issue but here’s my new friend and an apropos beverage

Hey all, after finding a screaming deal on the KJCII three days ago, I am up and running in style. Don’t have any thermometers yet so we are keeping it real simple for starters. I have the KJ on the stock cart, and when I went to lock one of the two wheels down today the locking mechanism detached from the actual brake. I can see how the mechanism and brake are supposed to interact, but I can’t quite figure out how to get the brake depressed far enough to get the mechanism back in the proper place. Anyone else have this problem/familiar with these wheels? Peace, -j

Looking to cook this tonight...any suggestions for time and temp?

Good eye sir! Ive been waiting for months to buy a CJII at the Costco Roadshow. Was all prepped to drive 4 hours round trip to pull the trigger Monday.... Instead I went to my Lowes 20 minutes away and snagged essentially the same price plus Lowe’s threw in a military discount of an additional *10%*! Went home with the CJII, two bags of KJ Big Block, a bag of apple chunks and a bag of hickory chunks for 1134 or somewhere in that range. Happy camper am I.

I thank you all for your kind and thoughtful responses. We are feeling better about this as the shock of the surprise news wears off and we accumulate the information that helps us to make sense of it. CentralTexBBQ you are spot on, while -66 is a very shocking number, it is the *record* low, not at all to be considered normal. It is also the *low* for a day, which isn’t the same as the temp at say 5-8pm at night when you might be trying to cook up some dinner. My concern was more for the viability of doing an overnight smoke in extreme temps. I’m also a little concerned about any kind of cook at very low temps given the nature of ceramic. Also, the search suggestion for blizzard/bomb cyclone was helpful. I had searched for “extreme temp threshold” but that query wasn’t returning the info I was looking for. I didn’t consider searching for the weather phenomena that produce such thresholds, so, thank you. acr, I appreciate the perspective of framing it as a relative-temp math problem. I can see how smoking and roasting in the winter should be very feasible but pizza night might be a summer affair. I can live with that. We visited a KJ dealer today who advised that using a KJ at very low temps is fine provided you don’t fire the cooker up too quickly, ie, use only one fire starter instead of a half dozen and a loof...let the fire build gradually. I also connected with a colleague who said that ceramic grills are the only thing cooking (outside) up there in the winter b/c nothing else holds heat well enough. So I’m feeling solid on the purchase. I’m back to obsessing about Big Joe vs Classic Joe, but there’s plenty of reading material on this site for me to sift through in making that decision. Again, thanks for the input and feedback. More to follow on the adventure ahead.

Good evening, lurker turned user here. Bottom line up front, my question is: based on your actual experience, what’s the outdoor low temp threshold for reliably/safely using a ceramic grill? I’m a military member who’s been pining for a KJ for almost a year now. Until very recently, the word on the street was we were headed to North Carolina in six months. Since that’s a BBQ friendly place w a BBQ friendly culture and climate, all looked to be in order. Well, the phone call I got yesterday is less North Carolina...and more Alaska. As in Fairbanks, Alaska. The average low temp is near or below freezing 9 months of the year...and in the single digits or negative (Fahrenheit) for 5 months of the year. Record low of...-66? So what's the collective wisdom? At what point does it get so cold outside that even a wonderful ceramic insulated cooking machine of a grill loses capability? Or is it sort of like a modern airplane: could fly far longer than any human pilot could safely keep it going? Thanks for your feedback. Just trying to keep from laying out a lot of cash for something that I will only be able to use for a handful of months over the next three years.