Hello everyone, just bought my first house a few months ago, and this weird brick structure is in my yard from the previous owner. I am assuming it’s some sort of grill, but it needs some repairs and I want to know for sure what it is so I can get a game plan to get it up and running again. Thanks in advance!
by Fit-Monk7160
14 Comments
Home crematorium.
Oyster pit? Looks like a decent place to cook oysters and then the sides could have your crackers, hot sauce, cocktail, etc. just grab from the grill and shuck.
Nah that’s from BBQGUYS rustic outdoor living space collection circa 1982.
In a park. And – people urinate in there from time to time.
I’ve seen worse. It is technically a grill
My aunt and uncle had one in their backyard. They had a pool and a huge yard. Their place was the place for all 30+ of us to gather in the summers. Needs a sign, thousands and thousands of burgers and dogs roasted here.
How it used to be done.
Sacrificial altar, for sure
No it’s a plumbus….🤦🏻♂️
A least one piece of actual chimney liner there at the top, hopefully they did a decent job with the rest. Fireplace/bbq? They’ve been building some permanent BBQ pits at a local park and they look pretty much like this.
You could cook on this. Look at r/castiron and you can see how to make a simple electrolysis setup with a car battery charger to get the rust off of your cooking grates – once cleaned though they need constant maintenance and/or use not to look like this again quick sitting in the elements. If you got really into it you could have some stainless grates fabricated but it would be pretty spendy so you would want to make sure this type of cooking is for you.
You would want to clean everything out really well and make sure the chimney is clear. Hopefully there is a bottom grate and or some kind of elevated shelf for the coals you would use to cook. If these are there and they are metal, you can use them without cleaning the rust if they are structurally intact. One warning, the only thing that you want to avoid when putting this back together is anything that is galvanized in terms of grating or hardware that will be in contact with high heat- the zinc in the galvanization vaporizes and gives off nasty toxic fumes ☠️
This would be a live fire cooking setup so you would need seasoned firewood instead of charcoal. Watch a lot of live fire cooking videos – learn the lesson that in live fire cooking you NEVER want to cook on “live fire” , as in you don’t want flames, they have tons of nasty combustion gasses that make the “char” on your food taste bitter and acrid. Real live fire cooking means letting the logs burn down until they are completely just embers, these make great radiant in infrared heat which is perfect to cook on. From there it is about fire management. You would have several zones on a cook like this and you would have to maintain those by how high you bank the coals (how high you pile them up to get them closer to the top cooking grate. This would require a lot of attention. Live fire cooking is very dynamic and requires a lot of monitoring and near constatnt adjustment. You will need a big sturdy fireplace shovel and poker with a hook to move stuff around and pile coals up.
The thing that would be specific to each live fire setup would be airflow management. That is going to be varsity level activity on this guy since the cooking grate is long and the chimney is at the end. You want there to be a tunnel of air that flows through that whole pit coming in at the front, flowing over the coals in the length of the pit and going up the chimney. It will be some trial and error to learn how to shape your coals and have enough of them to make that happen.
You could definitely cook on this but it’s going to be expensive to get set up unless you are a good diy guy. In which case you could wab a lot of stuff yourself especially if you grabbed a cheap Harbor Freight or FB marketplace welder. Then the actual cooking is going to be a skill you have to learn. Again, searching “live fire cooking” is where you will find that. You will want to have a lid you can put over stuff like poultry, just don’t a cheap Weber kettle on marketplace for the lid to use here. Actually if you don’t have a lot of grilling experience, learning charcoal grilling on a kettle will teach you a lot of the skills you will need here. That’s how most of us start to learn, you get good there then you try live fire at a campground, in one of there pits with the food down grates- then you’re off to the races.
Once you learn the core skills you can cook over anything. I could walk up to this thing and be cooking on it in a couple of hours. Personally I think live fire cooking is the most challenging, the most fun and produces the best final product. You can get intense high heat plus there is always wool smoking and smoldering at the edges of your fire to infuse everything with that great smoked taste, it can’t be beat.
If you run into any questions about how to revive/use this feel free to DM and i will help you out
Good luck
Le grille!? What the hell is that!
Well, whoever built it had some idea about how a chimney &fire place works. I would check the flue to make sure it’s free from debris before using it.
Home compost drier.