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| Fireclay Brick Hints And Tips |
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| What Are Fireclay Bricks? -- Fire bricks are specially made high temperature bricks for use in fireplaces, circulators, stoves, barbecue grills, furnaces and inserts. They are made from ceramic material and can take up to 2000 degrees. Since most modern ceramic cookers are good up to this temperature, clearly you can use fire bricks safely in a ceramic cooker. The bricks are sand colored and somewhat fragile. You can take two of them, grind them together and fairly easily turn them to sandy gritty dust. They are not as hard as traditional red clay bricks. It is like a full-sized fire brick, but only half as thick. You may wish to buy both sizes of fire bricks as you come across different uses for them in your ceramic cooking. Also, fire brick can be broken into pieces to create special different sizes. For example, full sized fire bricks cut in half make nice posts to place a second grid on in order to make a raised grid.
Why Would I Use Fireclay Bricks In A Ceramic Cooker? -- Well, first of all, you do not want to use traditional bricks in a ceramic cooker. They are prone to cracking when exposed to high heat and this cracking can be rather violent. There are also suggestions floating around that a wet brick can explode if heated. We can't say for sure if this is true or not. Informal polls yield mixed results and web searches were inconclusive. We lean towards saying that they will not explode. Perhaps the most persuasive argument came from the person who asked the question, "Do you see exploding bricks in a house fire?" We also found reports on the web of exploding rocks in campfires if the rocks came from a river. But all we found were admonitions against using wet rocks. We found no actual factual information on the topic. In the long run, we usually adopt the "better safe than sorry" approach, so if you are going to use bricks, use fire bricks. However, we can't say that bad things will happen with ordinary bricks.
But why would you want to use any bricks? Well, they can be used to provide a barrier between the hot fire and the food for indirect cooking. Also, they can add ceramic mass to the cooker to help even out temperatures. Finally, they are a safe material to use in propping up grates in order to make raised grates if you don't wish to go to the trouble of using stainless steel washers, nuts and bolts.
How Should I Use Fire Bricks? -- The first thing you can use fire bricks for in a ceramic cooker is to raise the cooking level of a pizza stone. If you think about it very long, you'll figure out that in order to use a pizza peel to put the pie on your stone and then remove it, the stone has to be at a level high enough in the cooker so that it clears the opening. You can't stick a peel down in the cooker and then expect to get a pizza out. So, for pizza, the bricks serve two purposes: first to raise the stone and second, to add another layer of ceramic between the pizza and the fire. Adding more ceramic helps keep the stone at a constant temperature for long term cooking of several pies. In the photo on the right above you can see how we have used four fire bricks to provide a base to rest the pizza stone on. First, place a grid on the fire ring and then place the bricks on the grid. Then you can place the pizza stone on the bricks. You might wish to use five bricks to make a larger base for a larger pizza stone as in the photo on the left. You could also put a sixth brick on edge to the front to fill in that gap showing in this photo.
Another reason to use fire bricks in a ceramic cooker is to provide a barrier between the fire and the food for indirect cooking. Also, we feel it is better to have your drip pan sitting on a layer of ceramic to shield it from the fire, to prevent burning juices, etc. So, starting with the five-brick base shown in the photo above, left, you can add your drip pan and a grate to end up with the setup to the right for indirect cooking. (Again, you could add a sixth brick on edge to fill in the gap between the front brick and the three bricks lying on the lower grid if your drip pan is smaller than what we show, or if you aren't going to use a drip pan at all.)
One last use we can think of is to take a whole fire brick (versus the splits shown in the photos above) and cut it in half. This will result in short pieces which can be used to prop up a second grid in order to make a low-tech raised grid. You can see how this was done in the photo to the right of some spatchcocked chickens cooking on a raised grid. In this case, we wanted to cook direct on a raised grid, so we didn't want to make a ceramic barrier. We just used the halves of the bricks as posts to raise the second grid. You could do the same thing with splits, but whole bricks cut in half provide a more stable prop for the upper grid. |
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