Where there's smoke, there's ethernet ports.

A couple of weeks ago Dawn and I bought a Primo grill. We bought it as an anniversary/big summer gift to ourselves. I think the deal is I get to play with the grill and Dawn gets to eat grilled meat. It’s a win-win.

The Primo is very similar to the more popular Big Green Egg grill. We’ve been calling ours the Evil Black Egg.


The background.

Both Egg grills are variants of a much older grill called a Kamado grill. Apparently it’s a 3000 year old cooking apparatus. The basic idea is get a thick ceramic vessel with a hole in the bottom and a hole in the top. Charcoal and food go inside the vessel. By controlling the amount of air that gets to go in the bottom hole and out the top hole you can control the cooking temperature in the grill. A single load of charcoal will last for several grilling sessions or a single 12-13 hour grill-a-thon. Unlike a normal charcoal grill you get to choose the temperature the grill is at.

What this means for Dawn is she gets to eat wonderful smoked meats that have been cooked low and slow and she gets to eat flash-seared meats the still moo in the middle. I’ve already gotten my grill up above 750° a couple of times.


The Siren Call.

So the appeal is obvious, the Egg is a versatile grill, an outdoor culinary chameleon. How could you possible improve upon something so fundamentally satisfying as smoke and fire? How about a big helping of technology!

I ran across this device which is pure genius. If the amount of air that gets to go into the bottom of the grill controls the temperature, isn’t there a more interesting way of controlling that air than a silly old sliding vent? How about a little fan which is controlled via a micro processor which constantly monitors the internal temperature of the grill and the internal temperature of the meat via probe thermometers?

That would be cool, no? Damn straight it would be cool. But can man, in his infinite inventiveness top it? I say he can. And he has.

For instance, what if someone has more than one Egg, and they want to cook in all the Eggs simultaneously, and they don’t want to play favorites by outfitting only one Egg with the BBQ Guru Competitor Temperature Controller (shown above). Well they would be in a quandary….unless they had a Stoker Temperature Controller. It can control multiple Eggs at once. That not enough for you? Ok, how about this. It has an Ethernet port on the back so you can plug it into the internet. The unit sports a light-weight web server so that you can monitor, configure, and control all of your grills from anywhere that you have web access. Stop and think about that for a second.


Some of you will find yourself drawn to it. It’s ok. I, myself, have already spent time imagining scenarios where that technology would be absolutely essential in order to provide substance to the hungry. I think given enough time I will be able to craft an argument which rationalizes it as imperative.

The mix of smoke, fire, and superfluous technology is a potent combination that the y-chromosome can not resist. There is no defense for such a precisely targeted contraption.