The smell of a camp fire, the taste of a hardwood cooked meal, the joy of splitting dry firewood and building a fire outdoors – that is what this project is about.
Skewers slowly cooked over hardwood embers
Developed during the campaign! The new pizza oven attachment shown as functional prototype.
The Fourneau Fire Pit Grill supports a variety of fire cooking techniques while also providing a fire-building structure to make starting a cooking fire easy. Use it in the fire pit, or take it out and bring it to the beach or the campsite.
The Fourneau Fire Pit Grill:
Designed to support the firewood as you build your fire
Multiple cooking heights
Portable for cooking at home, the camp site, and the beach
Made in the USA
Heavy gauge steel construction
30" Fourneau Fire Pit, Fourneau Fire Pit Grill, and Paella Pan coming together
The outer frame of the grill contains the fire and provides support for a variety of grilling styles. It supports a grilling grate at two heights for direct, indirect, flame and ember cooking.
Tomatillo salsa verde on the way...
Heating tortillas over hardwood embers for a camp site taco feast
Skewered fish arrayed around the Fire Pit Grill resting on the inner core and outer frame
The Fire Pit Grill can be used with the Fourneau 30" Steel Fire Pit or in your existing fire pit. Place it in a fire ring or use it directly on the ground for beach cookouts or at campsites.
Roasting corn over hardwood while enjoying the magic hour sun at the beach
Spatchcocked chicken roasting over mature embers with indirect fire finishing the job
Fourneau Fire Pit Grill inside of the Fourneau 30" Fire Pit ... smokey roasted eggplant on the way!
Unlock a huge array of grilling techniques!
Traditional grilling
Searing
Barbecuing
Indirect cooking
Kabobs & skewers
Griddle & plancha
Smoking
Barbecued drumsticks with indirect heat from a fire built around the Fire Pit Grill
The Fire Pit Grill provides structure as you build your fire, making it easy to ignite kindling and grow the fire with split hardwood.
The ring at the core of the Fire Pit Grill contains your fire-starter and supports kindling. The ring also acts as a stand around which split wood is leaned. The result is a hot, healthy cooking fire that is easy to light and that builds quickly.
The central ring of the Fire Pit Grill supports kindling and firewood to build fast, hot fires
Kindling and firewood prepared for building a fire in the Fourneau Fire Pit Grill
Adding kindling to the core ring of the Fire Pit Grill
Freshly split oak resting against the core ring, ignited by the kindling burning within
Hardwood fire imparts delicious flavors to food that are hard to achieve in any other way. Cooking over hardwood at home, allows you to channel the fun and relaxation of a camping trip without going anywhere!
Fire starters, split kindling, and split oak firewood
When built with care, a hardwood fire provides versatile and responsive cooking performance. You can cook slowly over mellow embers or sear over colossally hot flames.
Scallops, salmon, and asparagus on skewers over hot embers
Super-hot direct flames in combination with cast iron makes for a perfect searing station (optional cast iron Fourneau Paella Pan)
Building a cooking fire is fast and easy when you stick to a few key principles:
Start with a fire starter to ignite your kindling
Build a small fire with kindling and add your firewood to that
Split your firewood into small staves that will also burn quickly
Only use well seasoned – well dried – firewood
Cook with wood from deciduous trees (hardwood), not conifers and not old building materials
While it is designed specifically for hardwood live fire cooking, it works just as well with charcoal.
A charcoal chimney sitting atop the Fire Pit Grill core cylinder, lit with a batch of kindling and a fire starter
The core cylinder of our grill works to start coals as well as it does with hardwood. Load the cylinder with a starter and light it. Add kindling and place your coal-laden charcoal chimney on top. The fire starter will burn for several minutes igniting the kindling, providing ample flame to start the coals. The coals are dumped around the core cylinder when entirely ignited.
You can get the Fire Pit Grill with whatever combination of components or accessories you choose. Follow these steps to calculate your custom pledge:
Decide which components and accessories you want
Jot down the $$ amount for everything that you want
Add them up and the sum is the amount that you pledge - your custom pledge
Select the Custom Reward in the Pledge Levels area of the campaign
Type in your custom pledge and send us your list in a message in the Community area of the campaign
The Fourneau Fire Pit Grill complete kit - $890
The 30" Fire Pit, the Fire Pit Grill, the cast iron Paella Pan
The complete kit includes the Fourneau Fire Pit Grill, the 30" Fire Pit, and the Fourneau Cast Iron Paella Pan. The Fire Pit Grill comes with an oil-seasoned cooking grate. This kit is all you need to turn your yard into a hardwood cooking headquarters. The 30” Fire Pit comes with a cover for protection from the elements, as well as a drain hole.
The Fourneau Fire Pit Grill - $290
The Fire Pit Grill and grill grate being used to support the Fourneau Paella Pan
Made in the USA from heavy gauge steel and finished with a heat resistant coating, the grill features all welded construction. The grate is made from steel and is seasoned with oil. The Fire Pit Grill can be used on the ground, in your existing fire pit, or in the 30" Fourneau Fire Pit. It will even fit inside of a 22" Weber Grill!
The Fourneau 30" Fire Pit - $560
The extremely heavy gauge 30" Fire Pit. We expect to be dead before one of these rusts through.
Made in the USA from 3/16" thick steel and finished with a heat resistant coating, this fire pit is nothing like the steel fire pits you find at big box stores. These are literally built like tanks. The legs and handles are welded on and the fire dish sports a center hole for drainage. Comes with a sewn cover for protection from the elements.
The Fourneau Cast Iron Paella Pan - $95
From Paella, to searing, to roasting, to barbecuing the Fourneau Paella Pan is an indispensable piece of cast iron cookery
Our cast iron paella pan is sized to fit the Fire Pit Grill and works as a plancha, a comal, a griddle, a roaster, and a serving dish. It features a smooth-machined cooking surface and pre-seasoning for minimal sticking and easy cleaning.
The Fourneau Cast Iron Skillet - $75
Fourneau 10" Cast Iron Skillet ready to fry on the Fire Pit Grill
The cast iron skillet sits directly on the core ring of the Fire Pit Grill or on the grill grate. It is perfect for searing over direct flames or for shallow frying over embers. It features a smooth-machined cooking surface and pre-seasoning for minimal sticking and easy cleaning.
Fourneau Leather Grill Gloves - $60
Fourneau Leather Grill Gloves, Made in the USA
Made in the USA from premium leather and lined with a layer of insulation these gloves will shield your hands as you cook over the fire. They are perfect for handling firewood and protecting from quick brushes with hot items. However, handling extremely hot items requires the use of additional handling protection.
The ring grill grate - $100 per 1/3 section
The ring grill is a slow cooker's dream. To use it you need both the Fire Pit Grill and the 30" Fire Pit. It can be used as one single section (1/3" of the ring space) or use 2 or 3 sections. The Fire Pit Grill grate fits into the middle zone for searing. Seasoned carbon steel, 1/4" diameter wire.
The rotisserie attachment - $150
The rotisserie attachment screws onto the Fourneau Fire Pit Grill and uses a 120v plug in motor to drive the rotisserie skewer. You'll get two skewer forks to hold larger roasts in place. Nothing tastes like a slow-cooked meal prepared over fire.
The vertical kabobs and holder - $50
This is a set of 4, 24" heavy steel kabob blades for vertical grilling. These tuck into the central ring of the Fire Pit Grill for support and let you roast vertically. It is wonderful technique if you want to cook a variety of skewered foods all at once. For foods that will stick to the grill grate and aren't quite right for the rotisserie, this is the way.
The pizza oven attachment - $250
This pizza oven attachment was developed during the campaign and we're so happy with the way it works. The stone spins on a central pivot point making it easy to get an even bake on each pizza. The stone slides in and out of the baking chamber, making it easy to regulate the heat of the baking deck and also easy to load and unload your pies. Because the sides of the Fire Pit Grill, upon which the pizza oven sits, are open, feeding and managing your fire with wood and coals is easier than ever. The prototype shown here is carbon steel but the final design will be made from heavy gauge stainless steel and cordierite.
A few more notes on making a custom pledge:
You can EDIT YOUR EXISTING ORDER and over-pledge by an amount of $ equal to the add-ons you want.
After the campaign ends, you will get a survey to finalize and customize your order one last time.
You can either change your pledge level upwards OR add-on additional rewards to your order via survey.
Your input is shaping the design of the Fourneau Fire Pit Grill!
We're developing the Fire Pit Grill as the campaign is live. Using the rolled steel Fire Pit Grill as a platform we've created numerous working prototypes to expand the cooking capabilities of our live-fire cooker. Tell us what you like, what we should make into a reward level, and which other features you want to see! Add one of the new accessories to your pledge!
Our campaign goal is based on production minimums – to produce our products we need to order a minimum quantity of each from our manufacturing partners. When we exceed our manufacturing minimum order quantities (MOQ) our manufacturers often provide price reductions as we reach higher order quantity tiers. We want to share the volume savings with you as the campaign grows!
While there is no mechanism for us to reduce the pledge amount for rewards as the campaign grows, we can translate the savings into free stuff –perks – that we add to your pledge rewards! Here are some of the perks we'd like to release if the campaign grows beyond our initial goal:
The Fire Pit Grill is manufactured in the USA. We want your Fire Pit Grill to last so we're using heavy gauge steel that is capable of standing up the rigors of live fire. You'll notice the difference between these components and big box fire pits – we're building these to last, not to optimize shipping weight.
Fire Pit Grill shown with the included grill grate and optional accessories
The Fourneau Fire Pit Grill is made from heavy gauge steel and all welded construction to stand up to direct fire.
The grill grate is made from welded 1/4" steel rod.
The 30" Fire Pit is 3/16" thick steel with all welded construction.
When we cook we tinker. This project started when Ted hacked a smoking basket to make a skewer support for the backyard fire pit. The wire hardware-store-purchased basket did the trick and revealed something fun – the elevated rack of the basket helped to hold kindling in place and provided room for a fire starter. Ted started using the rack as a structure to help with building cooking fires. It wasn't long before the first crudely welded wire prototypes for the Fourneau Fire Pit Grill were in use.
Early wire prototype developing scale and exploring material and construction
The prototypes were designed to provide multiple levels of cooking support and were sized to fit the Fourneau cast iron paella pan – which in this application is used as everything from a griddle to a serving platter. Transitioning from a hacked prototype, to purpose built prototype, to manufacturable design, we explored numerous materials, processes and orientations for the form of the Fire Pit Grill. The core cylinder feature of this design came about while exploring round forms vs square forms and it turned into one of our favorite features of the grill – ideal for supporting kindling and split firewood as well as supporting skewers.
Hand bent prototype of the present design ... not quite round but it works!
Through discussions with manufacturers and through the exercise of pricing out various iterations, we landed on rolled sheet steel as the final material. It produced a product with the right blend of performance, weight, and value that we were looking for. The prototype shown in many of the images in this campaign is a hand-bent, sloppily welded mockup made in Ted's garage studio. We've cooked over it dozens upon dozens of times – and if this prototype can take the abuse you can be sure the factory-made grills are going to be solid.
We're a small family-run company based around Lake Michigan with an aim of making unique, master-grade tools for the adventure of cooking.
Ted and Sharon Burdett founded Fourneau in 2015 with the introduction of the Fourneau Bread Oven on Kickstarter. Since then, we've introduced multiple other projects through crowdfunding and through our site, www.fourneauoven.com.
2019, Fourneau Grande and Levée – 503 backers pledged $94,511
Ted, a professor of Industrial Design and Entrepreneurship at the University of Illinois at Chicago, designs Fourneau's products taking inspiration from cooking and tinkering with cooking processes. The team – Katie Burdett, Nick Martin, Bo Moody, and Rachel Buzenius – works to create inspiring content, achieve quality in manufacturing, and fulfill products to our beloved customers!
We're excited to work with BackerKit – as they introduce their new crowdfunding platform – to bring you this new campaign.
We’re confident about how well our Fire Pit Grill works, in fact we can’t get enough of cooking with it. But when it comes to which accessories to offer and what kind of finish to apply to the product, we want input from you! Crowdfunding provides creators like us with the opportunity to dialogue about what we’ve developed while asking for your ideas about how to make it better.
BackerKit has integrated a cool new survey tool into this platform that will allow you to share your input. Here are some of the community input events we're organizing throughout the campaign:
Fire Pit Legs – which style and construction?
Fire Pit Finish – paint, seasoning, raw?
Accessories – what do you need most?
Recipes and recipes categories – what do you want to cook?
Your support enables us to invest in production!
Developing products and gearing up for production is expensive! The financial dimension of crowdfunding is still very important – it’s been nothing less than transformative for small businesses like ours and for independent creators around the world. Your backing provides our business with a funding alternative to big bank loans or equity-reducing investment deals. For lifestyle companies – those driven more by passion than by profit – that alternative is HUGE!
This project is the result of a longstanding (and ongoing) love for building fires and cooking with fire. We hope you will connect with us through this campaign so that we can make this product the best it can be, while we all have fun building fires and nourishing our friends with delicious food.
We're still living through a Pandemic so shipping delays, manufacturing interruptions, and slowdowns due to an imbalance in supply and demand are not unlikely risks. We will do everything that we can to avoid such problems. When we cannot avoid them, we will make every effort to keep you informed of what is going on.
The price of steel in the US has doubled over the past year. The price of stainless steel has tripled in the same period of time. Manufacturing in the US is multiple times more costly than manufacturing in China but it allows us to work more closely with our partners to ensure quality outcomes and the fastest possible delivery.
While we can't avoid working with steel for this project, we believe we can get around many of the current global logistics hurdles by manufacturing most of the Fourneau Fire Pit Grill in the USA. Doing this will allow us to produce and deliver rewards to our community as quickly as possible.
Our cast iron Paella Pan and Skillet are produced in China. The production of the paella pan is already underway. The skillets are already manufactured and are in our warehouse.
