The Cobb Grill is way more than a grill. It’s a grill and an oven, with a sauté pan, hen rack, flattop plate, and (elective) rotisserie that packs like a stack of Tetris blocks right into a package deal you possibly can simply carry over your shoulder.
Don’t let the grill within the title idiot you, the Cobb is a summer season cooking extravaganza in a bag and nicely well worth the cash if you wish to up your camp cooking sport.
Corncob Historical past
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. Prior to now six years, I’ve compensated by using a waffle iron as an oven and realized to prepare dinner with a Dutch oven over coals. The Dutch oven expertise has given me a brand new appreciation for older strategies of cooking. That’s partly why I jumped on the alternative when Cobb Grills reached out about attempting its cooker.
Whereas the Cobb is way more than a grill, I perceive why the title is critical within 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 title). That preliminary design grew into the Eco Cobb, an all-metal stove based mostly on the clay model.
Quick-forward some years, and the Cobb has developed into a light-weight cooker that packs up ingeniously to offer you a transportable 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 consists of some extras, like a roast rack, griddle, grill grid, frying pan, wok, and hen stand. I discovered the Premier Air to be simply sufficiently big to feed my household of 5, although issues did get crowded at instances. Cobb additionally makes the Supreme ($290), which lacks a few of the equipment of the Air however is bigger and could be a greater choose for those who’re seeking to prepare dinner for greater than 4 frequently.
The design is analogous in all of the fashions. There’s an outer wire shell that holds the “moat,” which catches fats drippings or may be stuffed with liquids (wine for instance) to season no matter you’re cooking. I usually threw some potatoes within the moat and allow them to prepare dinner within the fats of no matter was grilling above. The outcomes have been excellent. Simply 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 may be nothing I dislike in a grill a lot as customized charcoal. What a blatant cash seize. Happily, Cobb’s customized charcoal referred to as Cobblestones—bonus factors for that pun—aren’t crucial. After a few take a look at cooks with the Cobblestones, I did every thing else over briquettes or coals scooped from a fireplace. It’s a little trickier to get the warmth exactly the best way you need it with coals, however I discovered briquettes labored fantastic and have been easy to make use of.
To be sincere, I did not “grill” that a lot on the Cobb. It really works as a grill, nevertheless it lacks one element I think about important: direct flame. A scarcity 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 fantastic. I have already got a transportable grill I like. What I haven’t got is an oven, so I did quite 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 contemporary summer season 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.
