Even though its huge versatility and extravagant design could lead you to think about its functioning as a really a difficult and convoluted matter, in fact it’s really simple and follows a series of principles held by thermodynamics laws. It is not needed advanced physics knowledge in order to understand it, so the handling of these extraordinary cooking tools is very intuitive and will require few previous notions. With these notions and, overall, with the knowledge and stock the accumulated experience provides, getting the most out of a kamado in a short period of time is an easy task within everyone’s reach.
After all, a kamado is nothing more than a closed ceramic recipient that holds a huge amount of heat inside, its embers, and which counts with a lower small door that allows the entrance of fresh air, and thus, of oxygen, which facilitate coal combustion, and which is completed with a ventilation net or duct that interacts with the mentioned door generating a chimney effect allowing exit the of hot air.
The combined usage of the mentioned gadgets and the different potential opening degrees make possible the precise regulation of the air flow and temperature, which in kamados, depending on the usage, can vary between 50ÂşC for smoked food or slow cooking at low temperatures and the 450ÂşC established for high temperature roasting.
This impressive range of temperatures is feasible thanks to the materials implied in the manufacturing current kamados, made with ceramic compounds of high performance as cordierite, with excellent refractory properties that allow them to resist high temperatures for long periods of time suffering no damage, which is a remarkable improvement in respect of primitive kamados, made out of mud, a material with excellent properties, but way more fragile and brittle.
Another virtue that helps telling kamados apart from other kitchen tools and one of the keys hidden behind its superb culinary results is its magnificent thermal isolation, determined once more by its construction materials, but also by its ovoid shape and its closed structure, that holds the heat and smoke inside avoiding heat leakages as may occur with opened barbecues or grills. It allows up to 30 or 40 % of combustible saving in opposition to other kitchen tools, and keeps the ingredients moisturized, so they don’t overheat or dry out and get cooked uniformly on the inside of the kamado resulting in terne, juicy meals, slightly smoked tasted, a flavour that can be increased by adding different aromatic wood shavings. And all of these with barely any smoke emissions to the outside, and the surface of the kamado doesn’t get excessively overheated even at its highest performance and with no danger of jumping sparks if working with its dove closed, which allows, if following the required precautions and if your specific location normative in means of security doesn’t prohibit it, the usage of kamados on terraces, balconies and even interior if done under the proper security measurements and cleanliness, which makes it especially attractive for restaurants and homes, as long as the regulation allows it and always under a smoke extractor.
But if we were to define kamados by just one feature it would be its versatility, a polyvalence in which the mentioned characteristics play a vital role along with the possibility of cooking with either direct or indirect fire thanks to one of its most unique elements: the baffle, placed on top of the embers to avoid the direct incidence of hot air over the food, which makes a perfect for ally for smoked plates or for slow cooking of any kind of plates for hours with a surrounding heat that, as said before, seals the food helping to keep its juices and providing an unique flavour and texture.
All these features combined make for a polyvalent kitchen tool able to perform as a ceramic oven, coal kitchen, grill, roaster… and that consequently allows the making of any kind of food and plates, from meat and fish to vegetals, stews, paellas, pizzas, bread, confectionery recipes, etc. and all of these with no big difficulties and with no need of complex previous work. You will only need to ignite the fire, wait until the coal is burning, place the elements needed as, say, baffles, grills or griddles at the adequate position and, reached the desired temperature, which will obviously depend on the kind of plate wishing to make, insert the food, close the kamado’s door and wait the time considered as needed or required by the recipe for the food to get perfectly cook at its best. An extremely simple operation from which you will obtain succulent results that will amaze your diners by its perfection and exquisiteness.
In order to get these excellent results, kamados’ manufacturers provide their clients with a large list of accessories designed to allow the cooking of any type of plate and to ease making simultaneously several complementary tasks. This equipment, sold apart by many brands, include many kinds of instruments: from pins made to grab and change the height of the grills without getting burned, to pokers meant to stir the embers, stones, wooden shovels and pizza cutters, electric roasters, melted iron stew pans as holland ovens or woks, special stands to roast ribs, fowls or vegetables, grills and griddles made out of different materials, mud containers for stewing or baking bread and a long et cetera of kitchen tools that allow the customers to make the most out of their kamados.
At this point, having considered all of these fantastic qualities we can’t help but doubt if there is, as usual, any inconvenience hidden, maybe within its cleaning and maintenance. Well, to the disappointment of its detractors, given that they exist, the cleaning and maintenance of kamados is as simple as its usage and is limited to simple cares which barely need any additional task. Thus, in concern of its cleaning, kamados act as a pyrolytic ovens, raising a lot its temperature in order to burn and dissolve the remaining fat leftovers, meaning its cleaning is in short just taking out the ashes generated by the sliding ashtray included in barely every kamado to that purpose.
Same happens with its conservation, which neither demands high manteinment. It could be summed up to the sporadically changing the insulation joints in those models in which these are made out of fragile materials as felt, but some manufacturers have taken this into account introducing in recent times joints made out of stronger and more resistant materials such as carbon fiber, which will end up cutting down or at least reducing this small inconvenience.
Having all of this in mind, it’s easy to understand the huge success reached by these marvellous kitchen tools and its unstoppable spreading since they were first introduced in the Western world half a century ago, finding them today at the cresp of their fame and completely spread up all along the United States and north Europe and starting to spring up in many other countries -say Spain- in which they are yet starting to get known due its later incorporation. A delay we are positive will get solved as the main public starts to get familiar with the extraordinary features and uncountable advantages of kamados, which is, nevertheless, the reason hidden behind the birth of this website as well as others in the last times, even though any of them is as specialized and offers as much information as the current one.
