Why Smokin' Seal?

Kamado-style Cooking

As longtime owners of Kamado-style ceramic cookers, we love the versatility that these cooking appliances provide. From smoking locally caught trout at 200F to blazing Neopolitan-style pizzas at 800-900+F, these grills can just about do it all, with wonderful results.

This is the exact reason we purchased a Kamado-style cooker in the first place. Over time, we found one particular weakness in the design - and that is the felt gasket. 

An opportunity to improve Kamado-style Cookers

Our biggest issue with this style of cooker is the felt gasket. When brand new, the felt gasket solution works very well, offering a good seal with good temperature control. We have discovered that over time, however, these gaskets tend to wear and harden as they are exposed to smoke, sauces, and grease during everyday operation. This tends to compromise the sealing performance between the lid and the base, potentially leading to temperature control issues, increased fuel costs (more charcoal burned), or both.

Additionally, we have had issues with the adhesives on these felt gaskets failing over time, causing these gaskets to separate from the ceramic surfaces, and also breaking any type of seal that they may still have provided.

Very high temperature cooks, such as this delicious Neopolitan-style pizza are a sure way to destroy even the best felt gaskets.

When the time inevitably arrives to change these felt gaskets, it meant a fair bit of down time scraping off the old material, any remaining adhesive material, and then installing the new felt material.

Our Solution

Since we tend to use the full spectrum of cooking options with our Kamado-style cookers, we've had to replace the felt gaskets frequently. And when we didn't have time to change another failed gasket, we just gritted our teeth and cooked through the hassle of runaway temps, having to add more charcoal during longer overnight cooks, and sometimes fetching bits of loose failed gasket material away from the inside or outside of the grill.

It didn't take long for us to come up with an idea to solve this issue - a removable gasket. The problem is, we just didn't have time to pursue this idea until recently. Yes, this idea has been simmering in the back of our minds for over 10 years, but now we have materials that can make it a reality.

The gasket we developed is made of 100% Food Grade Silicone. It requires no adhesives. It requires minimal effort for installation. You can remove it any time you need to. It cleans up easily with a solution of mild dish soap and water. It is designed to provide years of performance with little to no degradation in sealing performance.

Common Questions 

Q. What is the point of Smokin' Seal™? 

A. The Smokin' Seal™ is designed for the outdoor chef who loves to explore the full capability of their Kamado-style cooker. For lower temperature cooks, the Smokin' Seal™ provides ideal sealing capabilities, reducing your fuel consumption, improving your temperature control, and ultimately resulting in better, more consistent cooking results. For very high temperature operations, the sealing performance of the gasket is far less important, as to achieve these high temperatures, your Kamado-style cooker will need much more air. With the Smokin' Seal™, you can just lift it off the base of the cooker and no longer worry about damaging your gasket's seal quality for when you want to cook at lower temps again.

Q. What is the maximum temperature I can cook with these gaskets?

A. To keep things simple, we recommend that for any extended cooks exceeding 450F, the Smokin' Seal should be removed from the grill. It literally takes 1 second to lift it off. It can actually survive small excursions above that temperature but keep in mind if there are any hot spots in the cooker causing a flow of very high temp air to be directed at a portion of the gasket for extended periods, it could lead to temporary or permanent deformation of the Smokin' Seal™ gasket. This risk is minimized if you keep your cooking temps at or below 450F.

Q. Can I install the Smokin' Seal™ over my existing felt gaskets?

A. The answer to this is "it depends". While it might work in some cases, odds are that the sealing performance will be improved if you remove the bottom gasket on the grill, and this is how we recommend that you use the Smokin' Seal™ gasket. As for the upper gasket, if it is in decent condition you may not need to remove it. On most of our early test grills, we actually left the upper gasket material installed, although for our main test unit we have no felt gasket materials installed at all. Note: If you watch the video above, you can see a bit of remaining felt material on the base of the cooker - this nominal amount of remnant material should not present a problem.