The Cobb Grill is way more than a grill. It’s a grill and an oven, with a sauté pan, rooster rack, flattop plate, and (optionally available) rotisserie that packs like a stack of Tetris blocks into a package deal you’ll be able to simply carry over your shoulder.
Don’t let the grill in the identify idiot you, the Cobb is a summer time cooking extravaganza in a bag and properly well worth the cash if you wish to up your camp cooking sport.
Corncob History
It’s been six years since I had an oven. Technically, the 1969 RV I call home does have an oven. It simply doesn’t work, which makes me successfully ovenless. In the previous six years, I’ve compensated by using a waffle iron as an oven and discovered to prepare dinner with a Dutch oven over coals. The Dutch oven expertise has given me a new appreciation for older strategies of cooking. That’s partly why I jumped on the alternative when Cobb Grills reached out about making an attempt its cooker.
While the Cobb is way more than a grill, I perceive why the identify is important in the US, the place we by no means see folks cooking over the sorts of small clay grill/ovens the Cobb cooker was impressed by. The Cobb hails from South Africa and was initially manufactured from clay (like most rural stoves all over the world) to burn corn cobs (therefore the identify). That preliminary design grew into the Eco Cobb, an all-metal stove primarily based on the clay model.
Fast-forward some years, and the Cobb has developed into a light-weight cooker that packs up ingeniously to present you a moveable cooking system that may grill, bake, sauté, smoke, fry, and boil in a package deal that’s smaller than most portable grills.
Cooking on the Cobb
There are a number of fashions of the Cobb. I examined the Premier Air Kitchen in Box, which prices $330 and contains some extras, like a roast rack, griddle, grill grid, frying pan, wok, and rooster stand. I discovered the Premier Air to be simply sufficiently big to feed my household of 5, although issues did get crowded at occasions. Cobb additionally makes the Supreme ($290), which lacks a number of the equipment of the Air however is bigger and can be a higher decide if you happen to’re trying to prepare dinner for greater than 4 on a common foundation.
The design is comparable in all of the fashions. There’s an outer wire shell that holds the “moat,” which catches fats drippings or could be stuffed with liquids (wine for instance) to season no matter you’re cooking. I typically threw some potatoes in the moat and allow them to prepare dinner in the fats of no matter was grilling above. The outcomes have been excellent. Just contained in the moat is a gasoline basket that holds your briquettes and directs the warmth upward to whichever accent you are cooking with.
At first look, I used to be able to hate on the Cobb as a result of it arrived with a field of customized charcoal, and there’s nothing I dislike in a grill a lot as customized charcoal. What a blatant cash seize. Fortunately, Cobb’s customized charcoal referred to as Cobblestones—bonus factors for that pun—aren’t essential. After a couple of take a look at cooks with the Cobblestones, I did all the things else over briquettes or coals scooped from a fireplace. It is a little trickier to get the warmth exactly the way in which you need it with coals, however I discovered briquettes labored positive and have been easy to make use of.
To be sincere, I did not “grill” that a lot on the Cobb. It works as a grill, however it lacks one part I think about important: direct flame. An absence of direct flame eliminates flare-ups and smokiness (the Cobb is generally smoke-free), however you do not get that good sear and taste of cooking over flame. To me that is positive. I have already got a moveable grill I like. What I haven’t got is an oven, so I did a lot of baking, roasting, and even sautéing on the Cobb. I made lamb and feta flatbread, roasted entire chickens, baked cobblers and crisps with recent summer time fruits, and even tried stir-frying up some yakisoba. All of which is to say, the Cobb makes a wonderful out of doors range and oven that options an OK grill.
