Lighting a Chimney and Knowing When Coals Are Ready
Get one thing straight: you're not lighting charcoal, you're lighting newspaper, and the charcoal is just standing there benefiting from it.
Chimney starter, crumpled newspaper in the bottom, briquettes on top. Light the paper through the holes at the bottom, set the whole thing on something that can't burn (bare dirt, gravel, a fire ring, not your neighbor's picnic table), and walk away for a while. That's really the whole method.
How many coals, and why we're not eyeballing it
We count because charcoal briquettes are boringly consistent, and boring is what you want while you're learning. A full chimney is usually somewhere around 20-25 briquettes depending on the size of your chimney, and most 12-inch Dutch oven recipes want a version of "8 coals under, 16 or so on top" as a starting point. Exact numbers for specific recipes come later. Today's just about getting the coals to the right stage, however many you need.
Light the chimney 20 to 25 minutes before you actually want to start cooking. Not five minutes. Not "oh it's fine, I'll just start moving them now." Twenty-five minutes, real ones, standing there or doing something else nearby.
What "ready" actually looks like
You're watching for the coals to go from black to gray ash on the outside, with an orange glow you can see down in the gaps when you look close. Not flames. If you've still got flame licking up out of the top of the chimney, it's not ready, that's just the briquettes still burning off their coating.
Give the chimney a little shake or a tap partway through. If the coals sound like they're settling and starting to look pale gray, you're close. When most of them are ashed over gray, you're there. A few darker ones mixed in is fine, they'll catch up once they're spread out on the coals already going.
This part isn't hard once you've seen it a couple times. The hard part is trusting yourself not to rush it.
Dumping and spacing them
Dump the chimney out where you want your bottom coals, using gloves, not oven mitts, because oven mitts are for ovens with doors and this chimney handle gets legitimately hot. Then move your top coals into place on the lid.
My son figured this part out before I did, which still bugs me a little. I'd read in three different scout manuals that lid coals should go in a ring, evenly spaced, not clumped in the middle. Read it, filed it away, kept clumping them anyway out of habit. Owen was maybe twelve, looked at my lid, and said "shouldn't those be spread out more, so it heats even?" like it was obvious. It was obvious. I'd just never actually looked at what I was doing while I did it.
Ring around the edge, not a pile in the middle. Bottom coals same idea, spaced out under the pot, not bunched under one spot.
Wind is the variable I still can't fully call
Straight talk: Utah County wind will mess with your coal count and I still can't perfectly eyeball how much to compensate. A breeze pulls heat sideways off your coals faster than you'd think, especially up a canyon where it funnels. What I do is add a couple extra coals if it's windy and check the food a little earlier than usual, rather than trying to guess the exact adjustment ahead of time. Guessing wrong is normal. You just check and correct.
An opinion, while we're here
Don't preheat everything to death. I see people get nervous and pile on way more coals than a recipe needs, thinking more heat means more safety margin. Mostly it just means a scorched bottom and a raw middle, which was my very first cobbler, and I'm not doing that story again today, you've heard it. Most family recipes want steady moderate heat held for a while, not a blast at the start.
When it actually clicks
There's a specific good feeling when you've got the coal count right and the food's just quietly doing its thing and you don't have to hover. I made a batch of Dutch oven rolls for a family thing a while back, nothing fancy, and pulled the lid and they were golden all the way around, every single one, like a picture in a cookbook. I took an actual photo of a pan of rolls and didn't tell anyone why I was so pleased with myself. That's the whole payoff of learning to count coals properly. Not drama, just things coming out right because you did the boring part correctly.
Before next time
Practice lighting a full chimney at home in your driveway or backyard, on gravel or dirt, just to watch the color change without any food pressure attached. Time it, and see if your own 20-minute guess matches what you actually see in the chimney.