Stretching a Bag of Charcoal
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Charcoal is expensive. What can we do as grilling enthusiasts to keep the party going? My friends have called me cheap and I wear that badge of honor with pride (sometimes). Buying cheap charcoal though is on my list of don’ts, I find that when buying briquettes only “blue-bag” will do for me, the off brand stuff is just not worth it. I’ve been burned (get it?) too many times by cheap briquettes to do it again.
Kingsford claims that I should get 10 uses out of that 20lb bag of charcoal. Now a 2 pack of charcoal at my local Costco or Sam’s Club costs about $20 at the time of writing this (summer of 2020). So for the “about 10 uses” per bag, you’re looking about a dollar per use then right? Pretty good huh? I have a method that I use that can double the amount of uses you are supposed to get per bag.
There is a disclaimer though.
This method is for what I call “weeknight grilling”, meaning i’m not cooking anything that takes longer than 20-30 minutes of total cook time. If you are cooking something like ribs or brisket, you might not even get the 10 uses they claim.
Also, I’ve only tested this on my Weber 22” Kettle.
So let’s get to it then.
First, let’s talk about the key to making this work. Shutting the grill down after cooking. On my weber kettle there is both a top and bottom vent. After the last piece of food comes off and I clean off my grates with my brush, the lid goes on and the vents get closed. I also try not to disturb the kettle by moving it or bumping it. You’re depriving that fire of oxygen and it will go out in a bit. The ash built up on the coals too will help suffocate the fire, so it’s important to not disturb them during this process either.
That’s it!
Well not really, but that is probably the biggest contributor to this method. The second part of my technique is to be stingy with fresh coals. I will use my small chimney starter and load it about a third to half way up (depending on how many coals I have left in the kettle). I counted them out, and it’s about 15 coals.
Fill the rest of the chimney with the leftover coals from the last cook. If you’ve done it right you should have used about ½ of the coals from the last cook to fill the chimney up. I light it with a Weber lighter cube (Amazon sells these for $6.00 for 24 of them).
I repeat the process above until the process until the bag is finished. I decided to keep track of a bag one day and I topped out at 21 cooks from one bag. These were mostly weeknight cooks (like cuts of grilled chicken, sausages, and some pork chops). There were even a couple tri-tips in there too which are about 30-40 min total cook times. So if I really got stingy and didn’t do any long cooks I could probably squeeze a couple more uses out of a bag.
Now let’s do some math.
A 2-pack of 20lb bags of Kingsford costs $20 at my local club store, so that’s $10 per bag. If I used one bag let’s say 20 times (for simplicity) that’s about $0.50 per use.
The lighter cubes cost about $6.00. There are 24 per pack, which makes them $0.25 per cube.
You could then say, it costs me $0.75 to fire up my grill for a quick meal!
So friends, for less than a dollar a day YOU could be enjoying this grilled meal. Join me in our mission to get out there and grill!
(On the cheap)