Cobb Premier

Great all round cooker, but don't be in a hurry – We got the one with the lot, which has proved to be a very versatile solution to cooking just about anything. While it's easy on the heat beads, the indirect cooking can take some extra time and skill to master a perfect result. And preperation is best done ahead of time with cooking started before camp is set up. Options to get creative are… Read more

only limited by your imagination. And there are times a frying pan may seem the better option but for a decent meal with little input and attention this one is hard to beat.

Although it 'probably' falls outside the limits alowable in National Park re fires it has proved very safe after the coals have been lit. No coal or sparks emit during cooking, easy to shelter. And say a portable gas cooker with a gas can inches from the flame (which can easily leak if not checked...) the COBB is a great companion for healthy cooking. Cleaning is another story, low soot coal or charcoal is best. Soak if possible, standard wet wipes work great and BBQ wipes sort out the rest.

Absolutely awesome – I love the versatility of my premium Cobb, I use it on my boat take it camping or even down the beach, I just cook on my tailgate of my ute. I put Jarrah chips in a jar with dried chillies and rosemary and then fill jar with port. I let that sit for at least a day. I put this on heat beads with one full stubbie of beer in moat and smoke a roast lamb. Absolutely delicious. Only need 8 heat beads as well. Awesome.

Great for camping and home – I love the Cobb. Slow cooking and roasting great. It is slower than a BBQ but I take it with us every time we have been out back. Can't live without it. Also great for 2 people cooking at home. Forgot it one year and had to buy another one while we were away. Easy to use, clean and store.

Awesome – I have the Cobb Premier and all the accessories. Bought it in 2012. Hated it. Never got hot enough and gave the food a funny taste (using the Cobb labeled fuel). I nearly threw it away. Then, giving it one more chance before I sent it to Jesus, I tried roasting a chicken using normal hardwood charcoal briquettes. What a difference. I camp a lot… Read more

and the Cobb premier has gone from being my most hated piece of equipment; to my most loved.

It does take a bit of practice to learn different combinations of equipment usage. For example I use the wok pan as a warming drawer. Place it on top of the expansion ring and the dome on top of that - example - keeping bacon, fried tomato, onion and mushrooms warm while frying eggs in the flat frying pan.

I have made pizza, roasts, breakfasts, cakes, bread, stir-fry, steaks etc on mine.

The only piece of the Cobb equipment I don't like is the BBQ kit. It makes the Cobb very dirty and very difficult to clean. All the other accessory equipment works very well.

I have cooked meals for 6 people on the Cobb Premier. I line the moat with double foil wrapped veggies (foil because less mess = easier cleaning; and the veggies don't burn)

One modification I made was to make a double foil liner just inside the mesh base. This reduces breeze through the base which can suck heat away. The heat is then directed where you want it and not lost to the environment.

This is a very well made piece of kit. If you have one and don't like it please persevere. Change the fuel, start cooking when the coals are almost all gray, not definitely all gray etc. Use between 8 and 12 briquettes depending on what you are cooking. I chucked away the fuel grate (allows you to add 2 extra beads) and put the fuel beads directly in the center fuel holder (don't know the proper name).

I use mine about 3 or 4 times a week. My kitchen stove and Weber have applied for unemployment benefits.

Love it. Use it all the time – I love this cooker. I have slowly added accessories. It is super efficient. I must admit that we are a family of three, but I often do roasts, or mini-roasts, that last for the rest of the week. I mainly use the rack for roasting, but have used the deep pan to do lamb shanks in red wine. It does take a bit of getting used to, but once you… Read more

understand it there is no looking back. I use the purpose made wagon-wheel shaped solid fuel when I want to be ready to cook in 4 minutes. It is wonderful, because it stops smoking so quickly. For the last few weeks I have been heating up pies from the Willunga Farmers Market. They are hot and crispy in 20 minutes. Then I take them off and put on individual apple pies (frozen).

Another 20 minutes and they are done. Then I look around and wonder what else I can cook, because the cobb is still so hot. After the initial burning of the fuel, and the short bit of smoking, I close it up for cooking, carry it upstairs through the house, and place it on the upstairs outside deck table. If I want to do a long, slow cook, I use good quality heat beads or briquets. If one has a spare fuel cage, you could easily lift the plate and replace the fuel with already hot fuel. But I have not had the need. I like heating up and browning already cooked pies or desserts, because there is no cleaning to do. And with roasts I use a small roasting foil pan, or a bit of Al foil underneath. Then again there is very little cleaning to do.

But cleaning is simple enough. The individual, high quality parts are easy enough to clean. I just run a basin of hot water, add a bit of washing soda, to soften the water, add some detergent, and scrub. Or wet the parts, sprinkle some baking soda, and scrub with a brush, then rinse off. Easy enough. Much easier to clean than any other barbecue I know. At least you can begin again with a very clean cooker. This holiday I plan to take the Cobb down to the beach with my daughter, find a picnic spot, and do some pancakes, using the griddle pan and a ready to go pancake mix. Should be easy as. Can't wait to camp with it.

The Cobb Cooker; Absolutely Love It! – I bought a Cobb Premier from Anaconda a month ago and am loving it more and more each time I use it. The reason I bought it is because I got hooked on camping last year and decided I needed some sort of camp oven. The Cobb was the logical choice; you can cook just about anything with it, and it is ridiculously economical to run. But for me the… Read more

selling point was a claim on an internet forum that you can cook a frozen meat pie in the Cobb.

The Cobb cooker is basically a solid-fuelled convection oven. You could also think of it as a miniature kettle barbeque. There are no gas burners, no closable vents, nor indeed any moving parts. The device goes together and comes apart like an oversized Lego Duplo set and is simple to clean. When I say simple to clean, I mean that it takes no special skills and doesn’t require expensive brushes or cleaning agents. The actual process of cleaning can be pretty involved and can take upwards of an hour, depending on how fussy you are and what has caked up in the moat after cooking, but it is well worth it.

The Cobb is not very large, but you can fit decent sized pieces of meat inside it. My first, and so far, only roast in it was a 1.3 kg leg of lamb. I said that I bought it because it was claimed that it could cook a frozen meat pie. And it can. As a matter of fact, I’d say you could cook most frozen foods in the Cobb. My first time using it, I made lamb sausages and teriyaki marinated stake for three people for dinner (The steak was beautiful!), and when I was done I tossed a frozen pie in, using the trivet accessory, and for a lark added a handful of frozen chips. An hour and a half later and they were cooked to perfection… well, as perfect as decent store-bought meat pies and chips can be. I bought the Cobb Premier for camping, but I find myself using it frequently at home. I have cooked half a dozen pizzas with my Cobb (I now use it instead of the oven when making pizza) and am still impressed with how beautifully they turn out. I use Lebanese bread as a base and it comes out of the Cobb nice and crispy.

There are plenty of negative comments on the Cobb Premier out there on the internet. Some people, for one reason or another, cannot get it to work for them. I think the problem is heat loss. The stainless steel mesh outer base is certainly attractive, but is as good at retaining heat as a colander is at being a teapot. It’s a design flaw, sure, but it just means that the Cobb Premier is not as efficient as it could be. Using a windbreak and avoiding opening the lid will alleviate the problem. A better solution, and the one I went with, is to buy an Australian-made product known as the Cobbra. The Cobbra is a strip of canvas that wraps around the base to keep heat from escaping. Judging by how warm mine gets, it is very effective and illustrates just how much heat the Cobb loses. There is a trade-off, however. It seems the only reason you can pick the Cobb Premier up while it is lit is because it is venting heat, which obviously stops the outside of the base from getting warm. Now that I’m trapping that heat inside the device, the base is too warm to handle. This is good, though, because that heat I was losing is now being used to cook food.

The Cobb uses very little fuel. I have been using eight Heat Beads per cooking session and in the last month have used roughly two kilograms of fuel during at least 8 cooking sessions ( I haven't actually counted). I find this both amusing and impressive, particularly since I haven’t been reusing any of it. Fuel could be another reason people can’t get the Cobb to work. Consensus on the internet seems to be that cheap briquettes are hard to light and don’t give off enough heat.

So, what else is there to say? Ah, yes, accessories. My Cobb came as part of the Cobb Kitchen in a Box set. This includes your Cobb, as well as most of the accessories available for it. The Kitchen in a Box comes with the griddle, frying pan, wok, trivet, dome extension, and chicken roasting stand. I could bore you by telling you what each of these accessories do, but it’s not necessary, all I really need to tell you is that you will find yourself using them. I use the frying pan for pizzas, and sausages and onions, and the griddle for steak and onions, and the trivet for roasting and baking. I have yet to use the wok or chicken roasting stand, but probably will someday. The Teflon coating on the frying pan and griddle are easy to clean and look and feel well made. I get the impression that these, like my Cobb, will LAST a good long while.

Something I also have to say is about shopping for a Cobb Premier. I made the decision to buy one last December but waited until the Easter sales this year. The Cobb Kitchen in a Box is excellent value and worth spending the extra money on. The Cobb Premier on its own is roughly $220, while the Cobb Kitchen in a Box is about $390. The accessories it comes with, on their own, will set you back $296 in total. I was rewarded for my patience when, at Easter this year, Anaconda put the Cobb Kitchen in a Box on sale for $290 and for just $70 more than the normal retail price of the Cobb Premier, I got the Cobb and all the accessories. Bargain! My point, I guess, is to wait for a sale and buy the Cobb Kitchen in a Box. You will definitely use the accessories it comes with and will save money in the long run. Even buying the Kitchen in a Box when it isn’t on sale will still save you money.

I love the Cobb Premier. I love it so much that I have done something I have never done before; I have written a 1,117 word review about it. I think it is just so brilliant, so useful, that I had to tell people about it. It’s a South African invention, made in China, but it feels really well made. Thanks for reading my review!

No Satisfaction Guaranteed with the Cobb – I've had six goes at the Cobb that my wife bought me for my birthday. It is the big oval shaped model. I've used every type of brickette, their own bricks, everything. Tonight, after three hours I got soggy crackle, ditto potatoes, just very ordinary all up. Have rung and explained my frustration to the Australian distributor. He told me not to… Read more

use it if it's too windy, not to raise the lid, and finally not to follow the instructions in terms of putting half a cup of water/wine in the outside well. He refused to accept a returned item on the basis of performance.

I give up. I'm sending the thing back regardless of refund. Just hope the next potential purchaser reads this before being landed with one.

Enjoy the outdoors cooking on your Cobb stove – We have found our Cobb stove to be the best way to cook sensational meals when we are away in our caravan or even at home if we want to cook outside and enjoy really tasty food with a smoky flavour. Best of all it only uses three firelighters and a few briquettes and the results are fantastic. It can be used in so many ways, roasting, frying,… Read more

baking, smoking, even pizza. You can even pick it up and move it while it's cooking, as the outer casing is insulated. It's a must for caravanners and campers. What's not to like? Easy and inexpensive to use, healthy, tasty and compact.