Syzygies

Exactly. I've fed 60 to 100 people various times from my KK23; pork shoulder goes furthest but brisket goes a long ways. One can fit many ribs. When we want to grill for 80 we rent. While I can appreciate the thrill Dennis took in designing larger sizes, and the thrill others take in buying them (I've seen a few in person), I've never felt any desire for a bigger KK myself (or a bigger car; again when I need one I rent). I'm sure the smaller models are also useful, but again I can't imagine it (or driving a Fiat). Promoting all sizes makes sense preaching to the choir. With a new opportunity like this, I'd put the KK23 front and center, and promote its capacity for anything but grilling. Anyone in this market already has experience grilling, and equipment they can turn to: A kettle, or (!?) a rectangular gas grill.

Olivewood End Grain Carving Board (Arte Legno, Italy) I do love a good end grain cutting board. Shown is my favorite; I used a UK source. The end grain testimonials here happened to coincide with my pulling out this board to bone some chicken thighs that I had cooked sous vide in a Chettinad pepper masala, best chicken curry of my life. My smaller "utility" Hasegawa board is shown for comparison. For any detailed knife work such as mincing, I always reach for one of my Hasegawa boards. I have a great capacity for creative delusion, balanced by high entropy, so I find what I do after I stop thinking to be informative. On the other hand, food is part romance. For anyone who hasn't admired the attentive composure of Japanese chefs working in front of you on a Hasegawa class board, the end grain wood is more romantic. And it rarely makes sense to have one type of tool, though my cast iron, carbon steel, enameled cast iron, and various clay pots are all talking behind my back as I go all in on Hestan NanoBond pans for utility use. Many reviews haven't made the effort to learn best use of this molecular titanium surface, yielding a metal pan that thinks it's ceramic nonstick. If with careful technique I can glide a fried egg across its surface like an air hockey table, and I don't want teflon nonstick pans for health reasons, then any other pan becomes a speciality player. I've had other kinds of laminated boards chip on me; my knives are sharper than they imagined. I don't see a health hazard with my Hasegawa boards. And I bought their sanding block, tried it once, and haven't thought about it since. I will simply buy these boards again when the time comes; they are that important to me.

The Hasegawa and Asahi cutting boards will have cutting surfaces superior to any other I have used. Both for protecting the knives and actually cutting food more effectively. Bamboo is hard on cutting edges; it's penalty work for my woodworking neighbor. Various synthetic boards chip on me; they aren't expecting my sharp knives. And a company that flogs pure titanium pans on Facebook also sells titanium cutting boards, which tipped me off that they have no idea what they're doing. Sure, titanium is softer than steel, but that's far from the whole picture. I'm loving my Hestan Titanium Chef's Pan which is actually a molecular titanium surface deposited on steel that is 4x stronger than steel, and slick, leaning in the "ceramic nonstick" direction but more durable. But pure titanium is a terrible idea for a pan. Luckily, my knowledge of cutting boards saved me from a mistake. The Japanese, of course, are expecting sharp knives. I have long had a raw butcher block work surface in each kitchen, with an overhang to mount tools. I wash the surface by scraping with a bench knife into an (empty) steam table insert that also collects compost as I work. Since getting Japanese cutting boards, I only use the bare wood some of the time, like for prepping winter squash. I am delinquent in bleaching my Japanese boards again, which does work. I lay down paper towels on the board surface in a utility sink, pour over a bleach mixture just strong enough to turn the paper towels back to pulp. But I'm not expecting Michelin inspectors any time soon (their loss!) and the stains don't bother me. Still, black? Clever. 600cm, wow. Cutting the Hasagawa boards (which you don't plan to do) would expose the wood core. Artists know this one: Cut both ends, make it look deliberate. 😀

HASEGAWA PRO-SOFT RUBBER WOOD CORE CUTTING BOARD FSR 19.7" X 13.8" X 0.8" HT Traveling solo in Japan, I'd often sit at bars where I could watch chefs work. I learn, and I have always taught my math students to learn, by absorbing the mindsets of others I admire. Cooking isn't following lists of ingredients. This is the class of board I always saw at the stations that relied on knife technique. I now have several sizes, duplicated when I had two kitchens. I consider these the canonical answer to your question, with the same certainty as "the JVR Vac-100 is far and away the best entry level chamber vacuum machine" (again I bought one for each kitchen, in each case replacing a far clunkier VacMaster). They do stain. One can ignore this, or soak with a mixture of bleach and water. My "Made in Japan" hall of fame also includes items one would expect to buy from China: the best cleaver and best wok I've ever owned, again duplicated while I had two kitchens. We saw the New York wok last night in constant use yesterday at California friends' Thanksgiving, for various veggie sides. They ship worldwide: Tojiro DP 3-Layer Chinese Cleaver 225mm (thin blade) Yamada Hammered Iron Round Bottom Wok (1.6mm Thickness) Yamada Hammered Iron Flat Bottom Wok (1.6mm Thickness)

Wow, I love your design. I'm very happy with my pragmatic design, using metal grids. And I usually cringe at the loss of bottle density in most "artistic" designs. Yours is great looking, celebrates wood, and doesn't give up bottle density. With the right jig and a great router table (I have Jessem's best table) can one knock out your vertical elements? I'd cut V's so the boards mated with the eighth turn bigger sticks. Or do I have this wrong?

No, I just make an appropriate fire, no splitter. I do own two charcoal baskets, which facilitates saving extruded coconut fuel in place, swapping in other charcoal for e.g. a pizza or bread cook. I store the other basket on a "box store" terra cotta plant saucer.

I'm episodic in my pasta. For a while I was only making Sicilian busiate by hand, or rolled pasta with my Marcato Otello (a definite upgrade on their Atlas, several of which I've broken over the years. Laurie and I are just back from a food tour of Sicily with Rosetta Costantino, author of My Calabria. She and her husband were debating importing a powered pasta maker, and PastaBiz is having their annual die sale. So I returned yet again to see what I could figure out, making a Bigolaro easier to use. When I worked (math professor), one administrative skill I demonstrated was looking at a list of requirements that couldn't possibly all be satisfied at once, and killing off a requirement. The puzzle with a hand pasta extruder is this: They don't generate as much pressure as a powered machine. The Model B torchio that various of us own also accepts dies meant for the Lillo powered machine, but these Lillo dies allow less "flow" than the dies designed for a hand extruder. So one wants a dough wet enough to extrude by hand, but dry enough to not stick together and make a mess. This window is small, perhaps negative width. Meanwhile, people love how extruded pasta dough is just flour and water. Um, there's our candidate requirement for deletion. The obvious conclusion is that one needs to reformulate pasta dough to pass through a hand Bigolaro and Lillo dies. It's better to knead dough, but then it's too stiff? Um, add water. It's better to rest dough in the fridge for hours or overnight, but then cold dough is too stiff? Um, add water. If one is at all worried about "A1C" numbers for pre-diabetes, adding sourdough starter and resting dough overnight changes its carb profile for the better. You will worry about A1C if you live long enough, if something else doesn't kill you first, so it would be kind of stupid not to consider this. But you're off the hook! Just as sourdough bread dough that ages in the fridge for day(s) tastes spectacular, so does pasta dough handled this way. So extend your life and your quality of life by being a hedonist! I'm doubling pressure using a custom handle, and I'm adding a small amount of psyllium hush to my dough, which stabilizes water that would otherwise make the dough sticky. I'm adding sourdough starter, and resting the dough overnight, good for both health and flavor. And I've never experienced such an easy time using a Bigolaro. I stare at the shapes I can now perfectly produce, "I did that?"

Go on hunch? Go on lunch? Anything like this is the "art of seeing". You're gauging his ability to observe and react. General intelligence can lead to both great BBQ and excellent plumbing.

I too have seen the "too long" effect but less the "too short" effect. I like would expect to guide experiments. Perhaps my favorite BBQ book is Legends of Texas Barbecue by Robb Walsh, although I follow none of its recipes. The stories bring home the attitude and diversity of technique, discovered experimentally, of various cooks. No one to watch the fire while you sleep? Let it die, in a brick-lined wood oven that holds heat well, and build it again in the morning. The meat that comes out is famous. Aaron Franklin of Franklin Barbecue in Austin, Texas generally cooks everything at 275 F. Why? He builds these cookers from 1,000 gallon recycled propane tanks, and he has a restaurant to run. As it happens, I've found 275 F to be a far better universal choice than the 225 F I first learned, though one can learn to work with either. This discussion reminds me most of Neopolitan Pizza discussions. I know an Italian cook who has traveled Italy with an infrared shooter thermometer, and the exalted temperatures people claim to use are relative to where one takes the reading. It's a temptation to latch on to a mythical high temperature as the "proof" one is a great pizza cook, rather than learning what reading works best with one's dough, technique, and cooker. I love that Chris Young's Combustion Engine is a simple dial. I don't expect consistency in someone else's shower, and I expect the numbers I'll use are again just readings, relative to this specific feedback loop. I don't fear that the probe will be "too short" as long as its tip reaches dome air. I do fear that this discussion will spook Chris Young into making us a probe that's "too long", though as you imply the workaround is to be careful how one uses the upper grill. In any case I do intend to take one for the team and buy this setup, after they answer my email.

My routine setup for using pit probes through the Tel-Tru dome hole is to set a "stop" on the probe using an alligator clip. (I now use those things hippies used to use to smoke joints, to smoke meats.) This has the advantage of never exposing the probe cable to high temperatures, easing stabilizing the KK for making bread. I'm familiar with the standard advice that a pit probe should be near the meat, but that advice is cooker-agnostic. In my experience there can be a large discrepancy at first between dome temp and grill temp, but they converge as the KK stabilizes because the KK is so well insulated. Limiting the dome temp is a better way to keep the fire from overshooting; in a way the dome temp is the actual temperature, and asking the KK to maintain a flat pit temp near the grill is asking the fire to supply an initial surge so the dome temp can swing high. Of course there's an overshoot risk. Controlling the dome temp is simply a different flight path for getting to your destination, and one I'm happy with. For low & slow barbecue, the meat stays colder longer, absorbing more of the clean smoke from my "smoke pot" (my other hippy to meat transition) before we reach cruising altitude. Dave's not here! (I think he's in back, at the cooker.) So I'd be very happy with a dome controller; that's what I already do. And I'm rather unhappy with my newest controller from that legacy company, so I'm ready to move on. Based on that experience, my biggest concern is how well the MeatNet™ Cloud works. My $30 Leviton Smart Switch in the garage updates its app instantly when I use the physical switch, so we know IT competence isn't a "class" thing. My legacy controller (cloud or bluetooth) will blithely lie that 20 minute old data is current, with no visual indication that my phone is failing to update. I so wish there were hardware episodes of Squid Game for AI to watch. I'd be happy to be the human on the ground, filming a YouTube video where sledge hammer meets product. Anyhow, I've seen little difference between having the tip of the probe barely protrude and having it dangle well inside. One gets predictable cooks either way. Numbers are arbitrary (and this is coming from a mathematician).

Apollo 12 needed to land within walking distance of the Surveyor 3 robotic probe. The moon's lumpy gravity proved a challenge for Apollo 11's landing, so NASA introduced a feedback loop, and nearly landed on top of the Surveyor. The poster child for this cooking debate would be salt. Many people are fiercely proud of portioning salt by eye. Cooking is part theatre, and making a show of pinching salt as a restaurant chef would do is good theatre. We can taste the difference for each 0.1% step of salt by meat or fish weight, and we've never met anyone who can eye salt to this accuracy, so we measure. We like to land within walking distance. A KK with no controller is astonishingly stable, but needs periodic adjustments. Fixed settings determine the geometry of the airflow, and oxygen determines heat production, but this isn't what an engineer calls a stable equilibrium. Open the lid to tend to the meat, and with greater airflow the fire gets hotter. Hotter air generates a greater pressure differential through the fixed geometry of the airflow, which increases the airflow, which sustains a hotter fire. Even if one never opens the lid, nighttime changes in outdoor temperature, and variations in the evolution of the fire, can similarly change the airflow for a fixed opening geometry. This is a mild effect, but every 15 degrees affects the cook. One either embraces these variations as the romance of barbecue, or periodically steers.

I'm almost there, but I like to sleep through overnight cooks. One can nail 225 F manually "most of the time" and sleep through the night, but "most of the time" doesn't cut it when 50 people are depending on the result, or the brisket cost $120. I like to measure my pit temp by sticking my probe through the TelTru dome thermometer hole. This is contrary to most advice, but it doesn't matter as long as one is consistent and understands one's cooks. The dome runs hotter till the KK stabilizes, so this yields a more gentle approach to cruising altitude. And I can set 450 F for bread without heat damage to the probe wire. So yes, my lesson has been to not overreach, just use a feedback loop without embarrassment to set my pit temp.

I really wish I'd never bought my UltraQ. I've been a BBQ Guru fan since they were the best option, which was apparently long ago. That mechanical dial thingy, then two DigiQs, and now (for some reason, the DigiQs both work) the UltraQ. I love how I can mount the UltraQ on my garage wall, and see the pit temp from far away. One would think I bought the UltraQ so my phone would tell me the pit temp from far away? Even after deleting ShareMyCook and standing right next to the UtraQ, the phone will show stale data while lying about the update time. This is inexcusably stupid. It's not rocket science to handle messages so that one never falsely depends on stale data. I want a warning if my actual data is more than a minute old, not a lie. I should only see that warning when I'm out of bluetooth range. For those of us good at programming computers, it comes as a surprise how well or badly such apps work. My ceiling fan app is unpredictable, from an upscale company. I always thought of Leviton as generic box store stuff, but their smart switches are bomb-proof. One can stand in the garage and manually flip a switch while my wife watches the Leviton phone app in the house, and the new state shows instantly. From this perspective, whomever BBQ Guru hired are the dumb kids in the class. My various AI consoles tell me people think more highly of FireBoard products. The kicker for me was intermittent connectivity for my meat probe, in any UltraQ meat port. AI tells me this could be the probe (out of warranty) or the UltraQ (still under warranty). I just don't have time for this, I'd rather pay top dollar for something that just works. Wireless probes? Huh. For now, given that I'm this close to offering my UltraQ here for $25, I decided that for $25 I'd buy it as a pit temp monitor and fan controller with a nice display. So I'm keeping it, but one further failure and I trash it, move on.

Long time 23" Ultimate owner. I've experimented with many approaches to "radiant heat". I wouldn't double the basket splitter. I'm a big fan of the 23" ULTIMATE DOUBLE BOTTOM DRIP PAN. It makes a great heat deflector, and an easy to clean drip pan when lined with foil. (Some people use the drippings for gravy, where the double bottom helps prevent scorching.) I use it as a heat deflector for pizza. Using any ceramic cooker as a pizza oven, one needs to confront the "heat from the bottom" effect. Wood-fired dome pizza ovens don't work this way. The best deflector helps here. Long ago, I'd get several years at a time out of a giant unglazed plant saucer (no lead risk) lined with foil. Again, leave several inches around the outside. The real art to radiant heat is to time the fire's arc. Cook on the return from "low earth orbit" when the fire is waning but the dome remembers.