Bake vs Roast vs Braise: Moving Your Coals
Start here: the counting rule gets you a starting point, but bake, roast, and braise aren't the same heat, and you get there by moving coals off the bottom and onto the lid, or the other way around.
Same oven. Same total coal count, roughly. Different split.
Baking: heat from above
Bread, cobbler, rolls, cake, that kind of thing. You want gentle heat underneath so you don't scorch the bottom before the inside catches up, and most of your heat coming from the top, like a real oven.
Rule of thumb I use: take your total coal count and put about two-thirds on the lid, one-third underneath. So if the counting rule gave you 24 total for a 12-inch oven, that's roughly 16 on top, 8 on the bottom. Ring them, don't clump them, like we talked about last time.
This is the ratio that's supposed to protect you from a burnt bottom. It's also the ratio from my very first cobbler, which still had a scorched bottom rim, because I had it in wind and didn't compensate. The ratio's right. Wind doesn't care about the ratio. Check it.
Roasting: heat from both ends, evenly
Whole chicken, a roast, potatoes and carrots around a big cut of meat. Here you want even heat, top and bottom close to the same, because you're not worried about a delicate crust on top, you're worried about cooking something dense all the way through without drying out the outside.
Split it close to even, maybe a little more on the bottom than baking gets. Something like 12 and 12, or 10 bottom and 14 top if you want a little more browning on top toward the end.
Roasting is also the most forgiving of the three. It's a chicken. It wants time and steady heat, not precision. I'd rather someone under-coal a roast slightly and let it go an extra twenty minutes than crank the heat and end up with a dry outside and a pink middle.
Braising: heat from below, mostly
Stews, pot roast, anything with liquid you want to simmer low and slow for hours. This one flips the baking ratio. Most of your heat needs to come from underneath, keeping that liquid at a gentle simmer, not a boil. The lid coals here are mostly just holding warmth in the lid so it's not pulling heat back out of the pot. A handful will do it.
Something like 16 bottom, 8 top, and for a long braise I'll sometimes go even lower on top than that.
This is the one where people over-coal the most, because they see a liquid dish and think "boil," and boiling for four hours turns a chuck roast into shoe leather. You want the liquid barely moving. If it's boiling hard, you don't need more coals, you need to pull a few.
Moving them mid-cook
You don't have to pick one ratio and freeze it. If a bake is browning too fast on top, you can lift the lid with a lid lifter (gloved hands, always, that tool holds heat forever) and knock a couple coals off into a metal bucket. If a braise needs to cook down faster at the end, add a couple to the bottom.
This is where Jeremy and I still argue, a little. He tried to "help" once by dumping half a chimney straight onto the lid of something I already had going, no counting, just more is more. The ham underneath turned out fine because ham is forgiving like that. The green bean dish next to it did not survive contact with that much heat and came out somewhere in the neighborhood of charcoal. We still disagree on whose fault that was. I say his. He says the recipe was fragile. The recipe was not fragile, Jeremy.
The actual lesson in there: move coals in small numbers, on purpose, and check what happened before you add more. Not a whole chimney at once, ever, unless you're trying to ruin the green beans.
A few plain cautions
Coals you pull off stay dangerously hot for a long time, don't dump them in dry grass or leave them somewhere a kid or a dog is going to step. Use gloves, not oven mitts, an oven mitt is not built for direct coal contact and you will find that out the hard way once. And whatever bucket or tray you're knocking spent coals into, make sure it's metal and it's not sitting on something that'll melt or scorch.
Before next time
Pick one dish you actually want to make this month, one from each category if you're ambitious, and write down what split you used and what happened. That's the notebook habit that actually teaches you this stuff, not the formula by itself.