The Big Green Egg Book

The Big Green Egg, an egg-shaped grill with thick ceramic walls to better retain heat, is a modern riff on an ancient cooking method: the clay kamado grills Asian cooks have been using for centuries. The grill’s ability to maintain a consistent temperature makes it ideal for low and slow cooking as well as high-heat grilling for meat. In what is little more than a lushly photographed owner’s manual, editor Koppes shows Egg owners how to get the most out of their grills, with more than 50 recipes and tips from 15 chefs. There are no-brainer dishes such as pizza, as well as recipes for pulled pork with coleslaw and cilantro mayonnaise, and braised beef short ribs in five-spice sauce. The recipe for Indian lamb spareribs with chapatis and apple yogurt does a great job of illustrating the grill’s uniqueness: after grilling the ribs, cooks are instructed to raise the temperature to 570 degrees in order to bake the chapatis against the inner rim of the grill, much like a tandoor. The grill’s popularity among European chefs becomes more apparent in the book’s latter half, with dishes such as goose livers and smoked pork belly with celery root sauce, parsnip chips, and pine tops syrup; that one may be better ordered at a restaurant than attempted at home. Almost all the dishes can be replicated on other grills, and hardcore grillers may find the recipes useful, but Koppes closes with a rundown of various models and features of the Egg to make it clear that this book is made for Eggheads. (Oct.)