Big Green Egg Cookbook: Celebrating the Ultimate Cooking Experience (Volume 1)

Bought this for my sister in law who loves to grill on the big-egg! I didn’t look inside which is why I didn’t give it 5 stars because not sure how good the food is. But the quality and price of the book is nice!

a great gift

Having read the comments regarding this cookbook and being new to the Big Green Egg...I thought "ok" I need instructionand didn't care if they were pushing accessories because there is a "learning curve" to this marvelous Egg BBQ, smoker, ceramic oven.. I've been an enthusiastic amateur chef for 40 years and just love learning new techniques and making various ethnic dishes as authentically as possible . Cooking is my hobby. I'd been making my own sausage, smoking meats, baking pizzas on an Emile Henri ceramic pizza stone, baking breads, making tajines, trying to make authentic naan, pita, etc. for years.When. I started to research kamado grills I knew I just had to have one. Lasts a lifetime, uses wood rather than gas or petroleum/saw dust laced briquettes, lets you cook outdoors in any weather and was extremely versatile. Sort of a throw back to the communal ovens I'd seen when traveling years ago.But back to the cookbook....I loved it...and that's no small thing! I've also been collecting cookbooks for years and pretty muchhad decided there was not a lot out there regarding BBQ to get excited about. So buying this cookbook for whatever it couldoffer regarding using my kamado grill, I wasn't expecting much from the recipes but then again that wasn't why I was buying itI was looking for technique.I was pleasantly surprised as the recipes for rubs, sauces were good (not surprising) but the recipes for other items was something beyond... in terms of the usual BBQ fare get a Weber Cookbook or any of the 1000's of BBQ cookbooks or just go online.The Big Egg Cookbook provides temperatures for various projects, the uses and tastes nuance of a wide variety of "flavoring" woods, how to utilize cooking stones, planks, grills, the baking properties of a ceramic oven...love the radiantheat of a kamado type grill. The recipe for BBQ oysters...delicious and loved the recipes using a baking stone forMediterranean Bread, Apricot Bread with Rosemary & Coriander Butter, lavash with sea salt and toasted sesame as wellas pizza, naan, pita. Just fantastic! Smoked almonds in 8 minutes.I believe in learning technique and the basics of any food preparation and then once mastered letting my imagination goto work...it keeps cooking exciting and interesting even after 40+ years. One has to eat so why not make it an adventure.

I've had a Big Green Egg for a couple of years, and I have to admit that I'm a little intimidated by it. It's not like any other charcoal smoker/grill and, like anything else, it takes a little practice to get good at it. I'm not afraid to ask for help. One of my buddies has a Big Green Egg; he told me how much he liked it; and he gave me some cooking tips. After a dinner party at his house, where he grilled ribs, a beef brisket and Boston Butts on his Big Green Egg, he told me he'd cooked the beef brisket at 225 for 14 hours, and it was fabulous.Two weeks later, I was set to go. I rubbed-down the brisket, got the Big Green Egg ready (get a Looftlighter), put a water pan below the brisket on indirect heat and adjusted the temperature to 225. I checked on it and the water pan a couple of times, and I took the brisket off and wrapped it in aluminum foil after 12 hours. Maybe my friend was playing a joke on me about his cooking time, because my brisket turned out to be like beef jerky.When I ordered my Looftlighter from Amazon, I ordered this cookbook. There's a beef brisket recipe in it, and it says to cook the brisket for 6 hours at 225. With this cookbook, I'll get it right, next time.

Don't get me wrong- I love my Big Green Egg- but for a big clay pot with two holes, it takes a while to master. Cooking at medium or high temperatures is a snap, but I was hoping this book would cover things like how to control the fire. How to build a wood fire best suited for pizza? How do you build a fire to smoke a brisket all night without it going out or destroying your brisket? If your fire is too hot, should you close the bottom vent a little? Close the top vent a little? Close them both equally? Unequally? How long can I expect different kinds of wood to burn?Instead, the first quarter of the book extolls the virtue of your purchase, how it makes you smarter and sexier, but not a smart and sexy as you'd be with every single accessory they make. Then you get recipes for bruscetta, quiche, and cobbler.Those are not the thing I bought the BGE to cook. I doubt you did, either.I'm fine with having to learn by doing, but spending $100 on a brisket and then waiting 12 hours to find out if you guessed how to not destroy it seems to be a time consuming way to learn how to use the BGE.And again- I love it- when IO cook stuff at temps above $350 or so, it's solid gold. Chicken is not something I get too excited about normally, but it's a whole new thing in the BGE. I did our turkey in it this Thanksgiving and it was the best turkey I have ever tasted. I don't want to sound immodest, but it was the BOMB, yo! And I am a man who buys a whole organic turkey at least once a month and cooks that up weekly.Still, the perfection of the low and the slow eludes me. Sigh. The internet is strangely silent on this too- or my googling skills have yet to ferret out the secret of how to cook something for 16 hours with drying it out.

I am quite disappointed with this cook book. I only found a few recipes that I would cook but the rub and marinade section had some good marinades in it but over all I was disappointed. I certainly would not recommend it as the cook book I thought it was going to be. Very disappointing.

Decent

This is a really useful, well designed and colourful book, especially if you have a Big Green Egg. Some looking up is needed as there are American ingredients that do not have an English alternative name but so far so good and no problems. Lots of good recipes that go way beyond burgers which we will try if it ever stops raining!!

Quite a good book. Very glossy. Could do with having more on how to work the egg. A lot seems left to trial and error and of course the text is American English we you cannot assume to understand just because you can read it.

Good background info on the Egg and how it works. Would have liked some more basic recipes, as we are new to the Egg,but I think it will get more useful as we become more experienced and want to try something different.