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A statement from one of the the Thailand Boys trapped in the cave. "Pipat Pho, 15 (nickname: Nick) - wrote in his letter he wanted his parents to take him for barbecued food once rescued" I'm a certified cave diver that has had a few scarey dives. This rescue will be the scariest adventure of their lives. I wish them the best. Pipat Pho (Nick), come to Reef's Bistro. You can have all the barbecued food you care to eat.

My Substitution Breakfast - pizza crust for toast, tomato sauce for cherry jam, fresh mozzarella for egg, and a side of toppings.

Got some nice shorties and double rubbed them ..on they go over Pecan..looking good another hour to go..I put some butter on some corn and a sweet rub tony b sent me...on they go with the ribs..Dee was going to hard boil some eggs for the salad I thought I would throw them on as well good move cooked great ..ready to go...and sliced..and plated used some of ckreefs peach balsamic liquid gold on the sale yum.

Tonight’s dinner was Berkshire pork belly with home made bao buns and a hoisin based bbq sauce, these are quickly becoming a favourite!

Summarizing: Cooking is all about heat transfer. The temperature of the cooking medium is a rough guide to that, but not the entire story. Heat flux is also proportional to thermal conductivity of the interface between the thing imparting energy and the food absorbing it. For example, a baking steel has much higher conductivity than a baking stone, so at the same temp the steel will transfer more energy to your dough than a stone in the same amount of time, while the top is being cooked at the same rate with both. Place your hand in boiling water and you're immediately burned. Place your hand in a 212F oven and you're fine. Keep your hand in that oven long enough and you'll be burned. When baking pizza on a steel I generally dial the temp down 50-100 degrees from baking on the KK baking stone. Similarly, the "right temp" for your WFO depends on the thermal conductivity of the floor tiles and the type of dough you're baking.

True, but we have access to authentic Neapolitan dough recipes, and many of us have worked out our dough recipes from scratch. I sometimes bake pizza at 600 F, when I'm confident that the stone itself isn't much hotter, and I still watch very carefully. Whatever the recipe, it gets much harder to bake successfully above that temperature. One can mitigate the "fire from below" issues, but not completely. My neighbor has four different rigs, counting his wood-fired pizza oven. The Komodo Kamado is a Swiss Army knife. It does a great job with pizza but it is definitely not specialized to the task.

Kai Yang Chicken with Tamarind Dipping Sauce. This is a Milk Street recipe. There’s lemongrass in there, so I know it’s authentic. Making the sauce. Starts with sautéing some lemongrass, a chili, and shallot. Then magic happened! (I.e., I forgot to take any other pics of the sauce making process). The chook brined in a soy sauce, fish sauce, cilantro, lemongrass, etc. mixture for two hours. Then I spun it with a pineapple. The pineapple is sporting Dizzy Pig Pineapple Head, which I’m told is all the rage in Thailand. Ready to serve. Have done this one before. It’s becoming a favorite way to do a chook.

Today I used my NY style Serious Eats pizza dough to make a naked pizza. Heated the KK and stone to 530F. Used an IR thermometer to check. Dough is just out of fridge, started it last evening. Made 2 dough balls. Pizza one with fresh mozzarella. Baking on KK. Done and ready for basil from the garden. Basil from the garden. Crumb view. Pizza 2 added more sauce and cheese this time. Pizza 2 on KK. Second pizza baked. This was a fun cook, but I miss my loaded pizza.

...and to build flavour into your dough. I, for one, appreciate the proper use of “all y’all”.

@Shuley‘s recent cook reminded me that this has been on my to do list for far too long. In keeping with my current theme of cooks inspired by foreign cultures, tonight I finally got around to Detroit! Yes, it’s in the USA, but Detroit deserves special recognition and qualifies as foreign...to me, at least. Biggest city ever to declare bankruptcy, population 1/3 of what it was in 1950, and one of the highest murder rates in the country. And yet with all of that going for it, they also figured out their very own variant of deep dish pizza. Being a Chicago Deep Dish aficionado, I had to cook this for comparison and to see what all the fuss was all about. I’m using Kenji’s recipe from Serious Eats to the letter. The right pan, brick cheese, and the thick sliced pepperoni he calls for. One of the big differences from Chicago Deep Dish is the use of a cooked sauce with multiple ingredients: The dough for this pizza is very high Hydration, has no oil, and is kneaded a long time. Chicago Dish Dish crust is a biscuit. This will be bread. Assembly: Got the 23 heat soaked at exactly the right temp. Pizza goes on. Admiring my 23 and noting the need to clean the cap whilst I wait. Done! Beautiful! Nailed the blackened edge! This is an excellent pizza that deserves a spot in the rotation. Very different from Chicago style, but that’s not a bad thing. Hats off to Detroit!

What did you think of the rib racks sauce I sent you .it's locally made here and I told the bloke I sent a bottle to a pit master in the states. And would get feed back tell the truth lol Outback kamado Bar and Grill

Oh I haven’t forgotten...just haven’t broken the good news on the Konro to the wife yet!

This is why I haven't pulled the trigger yet on a WFO. I can cook everything *I like* the most with my KK, with a preference toward Chicago thin and deep dish styles. A WFO would help me with Neapolitan...but do I *need* to perfect Neapolitan pizza? Jury is still out. Wife would say no...

Syzygies "We use a substantial proportion of home-ground whole wheat flour in our dough, and we're simply making food we want to eat, not reproducing an authentic standard. " I am going back to my old favourite, the NY style from Serious Eats, now that I had a little side adventure. Then again I might do another side adventure, the Detroit Pizza.

I needed flavour flavour for dinner, Peposo, should do it. Add some just picked spinach from the garden, add some rice and we have lift off.:)

Rosetta Costantino meant get a home oven as hot as it goes (without hacking the self-cleaning mode to get the door to open!). That's below reputed Neapolitan temperatures. She's an engineer by training, with a successful Silicon Valley career that gave her the chance to retire young. So I believe her when she told us she brought an infrared temperature shooter around Italy, and never saw temperatures as high as claimed, where the pizza actually landed in the ovens. Huh. At the same time, The Neapolitan Pizza book is clear that the oven floor must be brought to 380 C - 465 C (715 F - 870 F). What follows are heat transfer equations. Huh. I'm reminded of firing cones, for pottery kilns. While one can describe what happens in a kiln by final temperature, a "cone" is a canary in the mineshaft to witness and integrate the entire progress of the cook. We talk about temperatures as a result of modern-day indoctrination, as if the model replaces reality. Mathematicians are the worst offenders; their tendency to substitute idealized models for reality turns what should be fairly smart people into blithering idiots. (I try to avoid discussing politics with mathematicians; the world doesn't always work the way they think it does.) So 550 F is just a guideline; there are many ways to come up with this reading. The Tel-Tru thermometer reading the air temperature just inside that dome hole is simply there as a chance to say "oops, that fire got away". Infrared readings of the stone and the inside dome are more relevant. As others say, an older fire that burned too hot but is now calming down is easier to work with (like so many of us). We use a substantial proportion of home-ground whole wheat flour in our dough, and we're simply making food we want to eat, not reproducing an authentic standard. What I know is that when our KK gets too hot, the crust burns before the dough or toppings bake as we'd like. Perhaps the best description of a pizza, besides thickness and topping weight, would be cooking time. One can guess oven conditions from cooking time. A Neapolitan pizza bakes 60 to 90 seconds, according to the standards reported in The Neapolitan Pizza book. Our pizza bakes 6 to 7 minutes.

I've seen it used to purify water by immersion, but not as a means to extinguish it. Saw a "special" ceramic pot for putting it out - $39 and it was small (less than 7" dia and 5" tall). If I choose to try re-using it, I'll just put the whole grill inside the KK and button it up. Especially if I splurge on the white binchotan charcoal!

I'll give my thoughts on the questions as I have numbered them above. 1) Generally yes. Most pizza recipes are formulated for an oven and most ovens can get to 500* tops. You could push that to 550* in a kamado. You will have optimum results cooking at whatever the recommended temperature is. A lot of people new to pizza making on a grill just ignore the recipe and cook at too high a temperature. They think it is going to work better. This not only effects browning but also how the dough rises. 2) a pizza stone (or anything else you put in the kamado) will only get as high as the grill temp. Unless (and this is a big one), unless it is trapping heat below it. In this case the stone could potentially get much hotter than the dome thermometer. 3) I use the baking stone on my upper rack with no bottom deflector. Using my method it is a real easy way to tell when both the stone and the dome are heat soaked and equal in temp. A stone can easily get to temperature before the dome is heat soaked if the stone is put on at the same time. There is more than one way to skin this cat and that's just my way.

@tony b, I've been meaning to comment on your use of the yakitori grill for suya. Great idea. The KK does the job well with the lower grate in but, when you have a lot of skewers to serve and distance between the KK and the eating location, you can end up with cold meat very quickly. That is where the cut and wrap in newspaper method from back home would come in handy! Looking forward to receiving my konro grill eventually. Getting the meat from grill to mouth should be much quicker. To your other point about putting out your Japanese charcoal: I thought I read somewhere that you can quench binchotan in cold water and re-use it. That is one of the factors that convinced me to add a bag of binchotan to my konro order.

Nice looking pizzas @MacKenzie. You didn't have to be purist about it. We sneaked a bit of lardo onto our seventh pizza once we were satisfied we had assessed all three doughs fairly.

I am glad that you have extended this conversation. I had some "stupid" questions saved up that I now feel able to ask, using your various points as triggers: Given a KK can go up to 700F I wasn't sure why everyone recommended cooking pizza at around the 550F mark when real pizza ovens are run at higher temperatures. Is it because we are using recipes adapted for the "home" oven? What temperature and dough combination do you use for the Neopolitan pizza @Syzygies? Does "hottest oven one can arrange"=highest temperature or best heat saturation? What do you use as a heat deflector and do you do this because the temperature of the pizza stone continues to rise uncontrollably without one? Why do you stabilise the KK temp before putting the pizza stone in @ckreef? Wouldn't it work to have the stone and the KK come up to temperature over the same period? Or might the stone, for some reason, get too hot if left to heat up for the same length of time as the KK? All out of questions, stupid or otherwise. Happy to be directed to other posts if all of this has already been explained elsewhere.

Pictures! Super tasty looking shorties! How was the Lane's on the corn?

I took this advice and got up and move from comfy chair in my ODK and lit my pizza cook fire. Now I can go back to where I was for a couple of hours. [emoji4][emoji41][emoji7]

You hit that one out of the park. Great entry.

https://natashaskitchen.com/cucumber-tomato-avocado-salad/

Nice discussion and post.

@Tony, what an awesome dinner, perfect. What a great way to have this fabulous dinner, outside on a summer's evening. "First, ckreef gets a shout out for his tip on getting this Japanese charcoal to stay lit on the yakitori grill. " I missed his tip would you mind directing me to it, please and thank you.

@tony b that looks really good! If it's earthier flavours you are after, one of the things missing in the Milk St recipe is either (a) a sufficient amount of black pepper or (b) try some grains of paradise, long pepper, or other varieties. There are all sorts of spices used in W Africa that are not typical to the Euro/American experience - Calabash nutmeg, for example, is a nightmare to find here. Ditto Uda seeds and Alligator Pepper - both of which are used for the pepper soup spice mix, but almost impossible to find in the UK. In fact, the spice element of pepper soup has a lot in common with suya spice, absent the ground nuts and ginger elements. So I can see why the milk st recipe has a 'lighter' taste than the authentic Nigerian version - just a question of availability. To be quite honest, I have often replicated the lack of depth of the suggested substitutions with ground black cardamom (NOT green), which does help ground it a little bit.

Been trying to catch up reading through this thread, you guys are having way too much fun

That looks great @tony b. I would love to try your rub recipe when you have finished refining it.

Tonight's dinner was a double experiment - a second try at the Japanese charcoal on the yakitori grill and another side-by-side of my recipe and tekobo's on some suya skewers, with some ponzu shrimp thrown in for a palate cleanser! First, ckreef gets a shout out for his tip on getting this Japanese charcoal to stay lit on the yakitori grill. Pictures? Of course there's pictures! Skewers prep'ed and ready to go - my suya recipe is on the left, tekobo's on the right. On the yakitori grill. Had to stagger the cooks to fit. Tekobo's suya on the left, shrimp on the right. Each side had a different charcoal. Both worked very well and produced a nice steady heat. They are still going a couple of hours later. This stuff compares favorably to Dennis' cocochar - albeit a bit more pricey! Plated, with a nice side salad, crisp rose wine and some Caribbean yellow rice (done in the donabe). It was such a nice day, that I had to eat outside on the deck. Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up! My rub on the left and tekobo's on the right, with extra sprinkles after cooking. By the end of the meal, I was hitting that rose hard! Thankfully there was a salad at the end. But, I do have to say that my recipe had a tad more heat than tekobo's. Gonna have to work on it a bit more. I like the peanut in mine, but the earthy flavors in tekobo's are nice.

Wanted to update this older thread. 2 years into the goldfish pond. It has 1 male, 1 female and 1 juvie. (that's the way goldfish work). Anyway the pond and fish have been growing and kicking it. We now have 2 baby goldfish in the pond (3/4"). I'm sure way more hatched but looks like 2 survived. This is way kewl. As soon as they get bigger I'll try and get a picture.

The dog is great. He is back to normal.

I have been looking jealously at your posts about La Chamba cookware for some time. Postage to the UK looked prohibitive until I got into a conversation with Charles at My Toque. Their postage charge looked the most reasonable and he gave me a discount for buying a few pieces. The pieces, finally, arrived today. Well, they didn't so much as arrive as get rescued from the local Parcel Force depot when I got fed up waiting for the paperwork to get sorted! Box full of polar bear poo, as The Husband calls it. Beautiful artisanal ceramics. Looking to use the pots to cook up dishes in real time and also in the residual heat when I have finished my main cook. The lids don't all fit tightly but well enough for my purposes. Here is the large roasting pan (Their model no SPX) in the 23". I ordered two of these. One broke in transit. It was the only breakage and I am in touch with them about insurance. And the 5.5qt RS6 oval roaster fits just fine in the 21" The 10qt RS15 didn't fit in either KK but, happily, does fit in my indoor oven. Here is Serena, looking grumpy about being asked to give you an idea of the scale of this enormous pot. She looks small but actually weighs 6kg. I am convinced she swallowed something heavy somewhere along the way. And yes, the sun does shine in the UK. Sometimes.

Nice potatoes. Our potatoe plants were duds. Then again I have a black thumb so by me just looking at them probably did them in LOL.

After another heavy killer frost last night my potato plant was done for so i dug underneath and came up with these treasures. I have already taken 6 potatoes out earlier and the in total there were 41 potatoes. Thanks to SK because she inspired me to plant the potatoes slips in the first place. I will clean the soil off later but right now I don't want to damage the this skin on the potatoes.