Grilling 101_ How to Start a Charcoal Grill Fire - NO Lighter Fluid!

Hey everybody I'm Joey and today I'm back with another bite-sized cooking hack. Today I'll show you a couple different ways to start your grill without using lighter fluid. So follow me and let's get fired up. All right so today the first method we're going to show you is starting with that classic chimney. It's filled with jumbo lump charcoal from Rockwood Charcoal. It's a local owned company. I know the owner and love the product. I don't use briquettes and haven't for probably about 15 years. So now that we got this filled there's a couple of different ways to start the fire from here. One thing I like to do is rather than using newspapers I'll just use this bag right here and begin to rip it away. Make this into little balls and get it underneath. What we want to do is get that nice and full with paper. Now once that's full it's pretty easy from here. You just light it right through there and that paper is going to catch all this charcoal on fire. Matter of fact it takes very little fire to start this product. I've started it in other ways with probably about 20 to 30 seconds of fire. But this is just one way you can start this chimney. I'm going to show you a couple other ways. So another method we can use is a paper towel or maybe even a cotton ball and some olive oil. And what I want to do is I just want to wind this paper towel up really nice and tight. I try to just twist it this way long ways first. Once I get that really nice and tight like that I just continue on and make it into something that resembles a ball. But I want to keep those fibers again very tight. Once we have that done I'm just going to take some of this olive oil right here. Pour it over the top. Put it right down here and let me get my lighter. From here simple. From here simple. From here simple. Simple. Simple. From here. It's a little windy out here guys. Give me give me a second. Simple. Simple. Simple. Simple. Here. Simple. Simple. Simple. Here. Simple. Simple. Simple. Here. So it took us a quick second to get this going because it's a little bit windy out here but now that it is I just as I said you can see the flame going really well. That's going to burn nice and hot for a while. Just get it right underneath here and let it do its magic. I'm going to go ahead and put this out now so I can show you the other method but as you can see it's burning very long and I can already hear the sound of what I call it's like a broken glass. That's when you know that charcoal is getting nice and hot. But again we're going to put this out so I can show you the other way. Okay so I've put out our olive oil soaked paper towel. It was doing the job just fine but I want to show you this other way and that's just a pretty common fire starter. Royal Oak sent me some of their tumbleweed fire starters. Again not a paid endorsement here. I just really like the product. I've used them many times. A lot of companies have a brand very similar to this but you can use this right here with your charcoal chimney. Very simple. Same as the olive oil and towel. Get this out of the way so the camera can see what we're doing here. But this is a really easy simple method. Of course it's the only method that we've shown you that actually costs money. It requires you to purchase something else. I assume most people have olive oil or a substitute in the home but this is it just doesn't get any easier than this. Very simple. Get it started up here right away. As you can see no problem. Went much quicker than the olive oil soaked towel and from there you don't need any paper in the bottom of this at all. Just set it down. Set it. Forget it. It's going to take about 30 minutes for all this to get going right here. Also I just want to say that I typically would not start the chimney on top of this wall. I wouldn't want it to be able to fall over and burn someone. I'm doing it for the camera. So the next thing I want to do is show you how to start your pit without one of these chimneys. So follow me. The first thing we need to do is remove this grill grate and as you can see it's absolutely filthy from my last cook. We show you how to clean this thing in another video and by the way throw away your wire brush if you're using it. It's downright dangerous. We show you how to do that and why that wire brush is dangerous in another video. So first we're going to get that out to the side. Second I have an aftermarket grate in here. This is the kick ash basket and you can see it's just awesome. Again not a paid promotion. These are just really products I use and love and I want to share them with you. So the neat thing about this is I picked this right up. As you can see I'm using some old gloves so my hands don't get dirty. But you pick this up and you can literally shake out all the old ash and look what you're left with. Just usable charcoal. So we're going to go ahead and set that to the side. Next what we want to do is just go back to our charcoal bag. Here I have the remnants of one that I finished through and so you're going to do just like the chimney. You're going to just rip this apart. Get this into some balls. Now this is thick paper so you really don't want to wind it up too tight. Otherwise it can be hard to light and we're just going to get this down in the bottom. Fill it up. Now one little trick I like to do with this is I like to light this from the bottom. This Weber kettle has three air vents. Three air holes right in the bottom. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take this and get one of these pieces so it just hangs out the bottom. That will make it super easy to light after I add in the charcoal. Okay so now that we have that filled up we're going to go ahead and get our kick ash basket right back on top. Get that charcoal right in the middle and we're going to add some more to it. So now that the charcoal is in there I just want to bring it into just like a campfire a little pyramid structure. Allow it all to get nice and hot. It's one of the advantages using these gloves. They look like hell. They're well worn. They're dirty but what difference does it make? I'm just rearranging charcoal. All right so now that we got that stacked up let's go ahead and get it started. You want to follow me? That fire is going to work its way up through those air holes and ignite the rest of the paper that's in the bottom of that pit. Now as I mentioned earlier this is an extremely easy product to light. I don't recommend it but I have started it with minimal amounts of just to kind of test it out. I've been able to light it with as little as about 30 seconds worth of direct contact fire. It's getting a little smoky as you can see it's catching on fire. It's really going now and just like I said about that charcoal chimney once you start to hear that ping ping ping sound it sounds to me again like broken glass. You'll know that you're on your way to having a fire started. This charcoal had about one minute of contact with actual fire. Now this is a great method it's an easy method but it does come with one downside that is there's additional ash left over in the bottom of your basket. So if you want to avoid that the easy way to do it is just to build that charcoal base and drop either that fire starter or that olive oil soaked paper towel right there let it catch on fire and then dump the charcoal right on top. In this video we've showed you a couple different easy ways to start your fire without using that nasty lighter fluid but we'd love to hear from you in the comments below. How do you start your grill? While you're there you know the drill. Go ahead and hit that big thumbs up like button or even better subscribe to our channel so you can keep learning how to cook meat made easy. Now we have some wings in the fridge and we're going to get them on this piping hot grill. I'll see you next time.