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Today was rib cook day. I cooked 6 racks of baby backs and 1 rack of St. Louis cut side ribs. I rubbed the ribs in Eat Barbeque sweet rub and heat soaked the KK at 225f for two hours. I used peach and sugar maple for smoke. I was expecting the ribs to take five hours but Wilburpan's friend Murphy stopped by and delayed everything. The baby backs were thicker then normal and needed an hour more. The KK loaded up And thats it no more pictures. The hour delay messed everything up no cooked shots.

Like you Wilbur, et al, when cooking for a party and trying to time the finish and exit of a chunk of meat...its nearly always late getting past the stall and to the cutting station on time. To piggyback on CC's post: An insulated cooler is your best friend when low and slow cooked blocks of meat decide to surprise you by getting to temp early. The meat, if properly packed in the cooler, will hold hot and juicy for hours and hours. Wrap the roast in your preferred method, foil typically; I then use plenty of clean old bath towels on the bottom of the insulated cooler then the wrapped roast atop; then loosely pack towels all around the roast to completely use up the free air space. Close the lid and DO NOT OPEN IT UNTIL you want to remove the roast for carving. I've had them stay piping hot for up to 6-hours! The great buffer!

I named my bronzes Fat Man, and Little Boy. The fact that I have two, I wanted names that went together. You may have to cook a few times before the right names strike you, so, no hurry! Robert

No problems here. I just light up a small amount (3in) of lump in middle of the Komodo Kamado with my long handle Weed Eater and Ralph is off and running for 14 plus hours. Set it and forget it. I do insure that there is no ash in the basket. Other than that I just dump new lump on top of the unburned lump. (to top of the handles)

Poochie - I hit Beauty! &TheBeast with the auto detailing product after every cook. That keeps everything looking like the day my KKs arrived . My Father taught me a long, long time ago that if you take care of your tools, your tools take care of you! And he's absolutely right. For maintaining my grates, I can't imagine anything taking the place of my Grill Floss. After every cook, especially the low-n-slow types, I do a high temp burn that keeps the inside of my KKs as clean as possible. Then when things have cooled down, I take my Grill Floss to my grates. I don't think that the Magic Eraser is stout enough to clean grates. I think you'll find that there are as many way to detail your KK as there are KKers.

Ok, so it's decided, the 23 it is. Called Dennis and as all of you know everything is smooth. Thanks again to all. When I receive it I'll take some pictures and post them.

I only know bad jokes. Some are worse than others, but they're all really bad.

OK, so I did it! Despite trials and tribulations*, I did the Aaron Franklin brisket (sort of). Like he says, it's all about the meat. Since I was not cooking for the masses, I picked up a beautiful 100% grass fed brisket. My above post was a case of bad memory - it's only 1.5 lbs. The setup - Sucklebusters SPG, with extra S&P (fresh cracked, of course), and the pink butcher paper. All seasoned up and ready to go. Onto the KK, indirect, 250F w/Guru. Smoker pot with red oak and peach (see Trials & Tribulations below). A little after 8am this morning. After the stall (~172F internal, about 11:30 am) and ready to be wrapped. The stall was really short, only about 30 minutes (best guess). Back onto the KK. Finished @ 205F internal, about 3:30pm, look at the grease stain on the paper! Total time on the KK = ~ 7 1/2 hours. Wrapped in a towel and put into the cooler until suppertime @ 6pm. The grand reveal - ta, da!! Naked, no pink robe! Sliced open. Nice smoke ring. Great bark. Ate the end piece as the Cook's Choice. Crazy good pepper flavors. See where Aaron is going with this! Plated, with fresh, local sweet corn (seriously sweet!), house made fries (double fried, of course), salad with homegrown tomato (doesn't hold a candle to MacKenzie's garden produce!), sourdough rolls, and a nice Rose wine. Call it din-din! Money shot! How was it? AMAZING! The flavor and bark were killer. While not dry, I wouldn't have call it moist or juicy (until I hit a piece with some fat left - OMG!), but that was to be expected with such a small piece of meat. Will definitely only be doing brisket in the future in pink butcher paper and will likely wrap my chuck roasts, too!! I wonder how ribs would do in it?? * OK, for the Trials & Tribulations - First, despite getting up at the crack of dawn (6am) to get the KK up and going, it took 3 attempts to get the grill lit and running (Ken, starting to have serious doubts about this FOGO charcoal! This isn't the first time I've had it go out on me after seriously hitting it with the torch!) After losing an hour fighting the charcoal, I finally got the meat on a little after 8 am. My original target was 7am. Was a bit worried about getting it done by suppertime. Thought seriously about breaking out the Bourbon at this point! As it turns out, it finished a bit earlier than I planned. Wrapped in a towel and into the cooler until suppertime. Second T&T - because of the issues getting the charcoal lit and going, the smoker pot never got lit during the brisket cook. When I ramped up the KK to 350F to cook the corn after the brisket came off, the smoker pot kicked in like a Banshee and smoked the hell out of the corn! Seriously pissed for the second time today! Didn't seem to miss the extra smoke on the brisket and the corn was cooked in the shucks, so it didn't affect it either. But, I was not a happy camper, nonetheless! And yes, I started drinking at this point!!! All in all, not one of the worst cooks that I've suffered through, but not one of the easiest, either. But, in the end, all that matters is the results - which were F-ing Fantastic! So, I guess all the headaches were worth it!

I would have to go with the 23". It's capable of more than you describe, and more, yet is easy enough to handle for small cooks. The 32", would seem to be almost overkill for the average person, but those that have them, love them. The 21" has the hi cap design, which allows for filling the lid with pork butts and the like, but you give up width on the main grate, which would be an issue for me, as I like to cook briskets, and ribs, which need the width. I have a 19" also, and if you told me it was the only grill I could have, I'd be ok with that. After having both though, given a choice, definitely the 23". Robert

Last time I did pulled pork and had friends over, the pork wound up taking longer than I expected, which was a great example of the first principle of timing a cook for a party: cooks take longer when you have guests waiting. Today, we’re having people over, and I decided to make a brisket. I started the cook last night in anticipation of finishing around lunch time. The cook itself was straightforward. The rub was a 50/50 mix of black pepper and kosher salt, I put the brisket in Smaug, who decided to settle in at 225ºF, and let it run overnight. My plan was an IT of 203ºF, because 5698k said so. Here are some pics. The strip on the side was a piece that I trimmed, put some rub on, and cooked as an experiment. Ultimately, it cooked way too long, and was dry as well cooked bacon. I tossed that part. So I woke up this morning, expecting that I would have been most of the way through the cook, and went to check the brisket to see whether I should bump the temperature up or not. This is what I was greeted with. It certainly looked done. It was probe tender all over, and the IT was 204ºF. Perfect, right? Except that our friends won’t be here until lunchtime, a good 5-6 hours from when I took the brisket off the grill. So this is the second principle of timing a cook for a party: cooks go way shorter when you plan ahead. I put the brisket on a platter, wrapped it in foil, and stuck it in the oven. I’ll see whether I need to reheat it when your friends get here. It sure smells good, though. The brisket was 12.5 lbs. I guessed it was going to take 15 hours or so to cook, especially since I started at 225ºF. This morning, the thermometer was reading 300ºF. After I got the brisket out and checked the basket, enough of the charcoal had burned so that the airflow through the basket would have had less resistance than the full basket I started with. In other words, as the charcoal burned away, the airflow through the grill increased even without touching the vents. This is the same phenomenon I saw with my last pulled pork cook.