Oh happy day! The answer to this one is that you really don’t have to clean the cooker out! Obviously, you will want to clean the grid and occasionally clean out excess ash, but the walls of the cooker itself will turn black with use. They will build up a layer of smoke, fat, ash, whatever. This is ok! The cooker isn’t supposed to stay white inside. You may find that this layer of build up will flake off from the inside of the dome over time. You probably want to help this along by scraping with a crumpled ball of aluminum foil so that the big flakes don’t fall into your food. But there really is no need to do any cleaning of the inside of your cooker.
You will find many people recommending that you do a “clean burn” which involves taking your cooker up to 600°F or more for an hour or two in order to burn everything off the inside walls of your cooker. There is just simply no need to do this. Again, if the buildup is thick enough to flake off, you can scrape that off. That’s it! In addition, you will find over time that clean burns will be less and less effective at returning your cooker to its pristine new color. The “stuff” of cooking will penetrate the ceramic with time and it will become permanent.
Post time: Oct-09-2022