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Isolation Pork Belly Bao bun cook last night. I always enjoy these so much, both the making of and the eating of. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Dennis you need to remarket these rib holders as a banana smores holders. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Baby Backs

Breakfast, poached egg on toasted homemade whole wheat bread with cream cheese and steamed spinach. In the pouch with the egg is black pepper, Urfa chili, red pepper slices and some chives. Served with winter green and a slice of bacon. Poached and plated. Sprinkle on the cheese.

Thx. Brisket always comes out very good and always tastes better in sone sort of a taco form. Or just naked with nothing on it. Thx Pequod. I understand the idea of the two zone the trouble I have had with the splitter on the 21" is that I end up with a fairly small grill size when the 21" is split in two. Maybe next time I smoke a roast or NY strip I will try to use the split basket rather than smoke it and than crank up the heat to sear (which is what I am doing now). Will report back once I get a chance to try. The quarantine is proving to be extremely detrimental to keeping the calorie intake to a reasonable level 😣

Grill arrived Wednesday and I’ve used it everyday so far. Here are a couple cooks that I was pleased with. Burgers

Two 40' Containers of Charcoal Scheduled!!! I have a container of CocoChar loaded last week, had to send it from a different port in Java to get around the freight issues but it looks like it worked.. A 40' container of Coffee Lump will load on the 7th.. 20' of 22 lb boxes and 20' of 44 lb polypropylene bags..

Six feet and NO closer: Alright...I’ll let you a tad closer as long as you don’t drool and wash your freakin’ hands! Sourdough with DOP San Marzano tomatoes and mozzarella di bufala. Mangia!

WELL, you're off to a great start. Not being shy at all tackling brisket right out of the shoot. Can see that this is not your first rodeo! One piece of advice, no need for that bowl of water in a KK. Meat stays very moist without having to have a pan of water like with other styles of grills. It's because the KK is so efficient once heat soaked, that it doesn't take much combustion air to maintain temperatures. Less air in means less moisture out.

Ok. So decided to truly give a try to the splitter today with 3 NY strips. Usually I sear at high heat on the lower grate, take the steaks out, put the upper grate in and drop the temp a bit before putting the steaks back. Today I got the grill up to 475 with the splitter. Seared 3 NY strips on the hot side and then moved them indirect until cooked. Same great taste but easier to deal with than what I was doing previously. Only negative is space with the 21" would allow for only one more steak. A few pictures below.

Some fantastic meals and cooks lighting up the screen here, I couldn't pick a winner. The only conclusion I could come to was, "Y'all got way too much time on your hands." You could be raking leaves...........better yet, you could be raking my leaves.

Filet

Brisket

What a great idea those ribs look delicious and I’m sure your neighbors are a happy group of people. If I did that in my neighborhood I’d have to grill mostly vegetables most of my neighbors are vegetarians lol

I agree with you on the calorie count glx. I also think we are going to have a whole new generation of babies born because of this stay at home order. Lol and a heck of a lot of people with clean hands. Uh oh I better go wash my hands it’s been over ten minutes since last time. everybody stay safe and keep all those wonderfully yummy and delicious food pictures coming I think I have gained 5 lbs. just from looking at all this delicious food.

Love that Fri. night dinner, Tony. It is the perfect time to get cooking, you're not going anywhere so no rush.

Thank you to all for your replies! The bolts on the upper and lower parts of the latch on my 23 do not have room to make adjustments. I tried tapping with wood, per Dennis, and that did the trick. Eric

Punch bowl! Not sure I’d be drinking it. The steel is about a 1/4 inch thick and I’d say it would hold around 30 gal. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I feel like I'm hijacking this thread because still not sure what can I do with my basket splitter on the 21" KK, but below some pics of the bark and the final product.

Staying away from crowds, so took an early pass to get home and cook a feed up for the two chippies building the ODK.... well, there was all this clean, scrap timber around for smoking So I put a coffee, spice rub on some pork. And roasted it, direct And indirect as soon as the dripping blew extra smoke out of the KK- about 90 minutes into the cook. Turned out delish. That’s with my new love for vinegar and honey based sauces. BTW ssgt that slow cook Butt looks sensational. Well done. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Today I chose to toss a few drumsticks on and practice with the settings and I did pretty good with getting my temp to settle in the saweeeet spot. You talk about moist. Makes you appreciate cooking to internal temperature some kind of bad. I now know how owners feel and what they mean when they say the food of a KK is awesome.

Well, between retirement and corona lockdown, yeah, I got a lot of time on my hands now! Having to get creative on projects around the house to stay busy. Weather still hasn't turned yet here to be doing much yardwork. And, when it comes to "raking" leaves, that's what leaf blowers are for! Not a good day for it today though, seriously windy!

Big Dizzy Dust fan here. I generally smear ribs with CYM and hit it pretty good with Dizzy Dust (or others). Don't think that's your issue. I like a combo of hickory and a fruit wood for pork - usually apple, cherry or peach. Usually 2 parts fruit wood to 1 part hickory in the cast iron smoker pot. Your spritzing technique in on point, just be careful to not overdo it and wash off that lovely bark that we all work so hard to develop. Don't know if you're a fan of Meathead over at Amazing Ribs. Here's his thoughts on smoke ring development. https://amazingribs.com/more-technique-and-science/more-cooking-science/mythbusting-smoke-ring-no-smoke-necessary

The learning curve seems especially quick with this one, yes? Seriously, very nice brisket!

Seems as if you could have slid some half-size boxes underneath the pallets and gotten a few more in. 😉

Looks like bugs. What are u going to do with them?

Ticket2ride, everything you have cooked on that gorgeous KK is looking lovely.

I've had a turmeric plant growing in my living room window for more than a year now. It has started to look like it is succumbing to the virus so I harvested the entire crop. Cleanup.

Yum! It's all eye candy to me.

Tony that plated shot is making my mouth water! Yum yum yum

You know the "starter" has become one of the family when you make a quick dash to the supermarket to get starter feed. I thought how I could have forgotten my no.1 pet.

Basher, that spinning pork roast looks deeelicious.

Aw, c'mon give him just slice.

That is great news, Eric. Dennis to the rescue again.

Harder to get than TP! Let the hoarding begin! LOL!!

We tap the bottom of the top swinging latch with a block of wood with a little weight.. just a little smack tweaks it back into alignment. Start gently and then tap harder until you get the results you want..

No. He isn’t missing any meals. He is looking pretty good eating his own food.

Putting smiles on faces and food in bellies! Good job!!

Friday night is usually steak night here. The rain held off, so here we go! T-bone and bacon-wrapped asparagus on the lower grate, direct, basket splitter, with coffee and mesquite chunks. Plated with a twice-baked spud and sautéed mushrooms. Nice red wine to go with it. Just because you're in lockdown, doesn't mean that you can't eat & drink well! Stay safe out there!

They do look good bigshep. I get the feeling you can improve on them. I found myself short of the coals to when I wanted to sear. Looking back at that now, I didn’t have a full basket and was too conservative with my air flow. I’ve learnt a little more patience now and let the fire really take hold before searing. Keep the photos and stories coming. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Guess you had your MOJO workin for ya on that cook.

Thank you, Bruce. I must say I did enjoy that breafast.[emoji9]

Dennis you are sounding like Henry Winkler in Happy Days. [emoji41] This worked every time. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

While home in California for the year on academic sabbatical (I'm a math prof), I was hoping to take a weeklong bread intensive at the San Francisco Baking Institute. Actually, it's their second week that interests me (Artisan II: Baking Sourdough, Levain, and Wild Yeast) though I'm not sure about the time commitment. These classes may still happen, though everything is on hold because of the virus. It was through the book by Michel Suas, associated with SFBI, that I first understood "green" (not-aged freshly ground) flour, and the ascorbic acid fix: Mix ascorbic acid 1:20 with white flour, very thoroughly. Then mix that 1:20 with white flour for a 1:440 blend. One can measure this in grams to add, say, 40 parts per million ascorbic acid to one's dough. This is easy after the initial investment in finding and mixing ascorbic acid, and it did solve this problem for me. I've instead started to work through this book: Advanced Bread & Pastry by Michel Suas It was a Google Books excerpt that alerted me to "green" flour. I since bought the book from Amazon UK. It was incompetently packed, being heavy, and arrived very damaged. Return shipping was prohibitive, so they let me keep the copy (it's now in New York) and sent another. Equally stupidly packed, but survived somewhat better. Not the copy you'd choose from the stack in a brick and mortar store, but usable. I'd trust SFBI to do a better job of shipping, as it's their book. We're going through a time with a pretty odd relationship to science and expertise. Global warming or pandemic, it may be our downfall. Bread is a relatively light topic, but the mere existence of this book illustrates a vast chasm between what a French-trained professional with decades of experience understands about bread, and what "blind leading the blind" lay writers for amateur home bakers understand. I felt that I was making progress when I gave up Peter Reinhart for Lent. I nevertheless found reading Chad Robertson's Tartine Bread a breakthrough experience (even though we can actually go buy Tartine bread, and we find it unnecessarily scorched in its signature style). But these guys are all guessing, even as they're learning fast by talking to others. There's a tremendous amount that one can learn from attentive experiment, it's not a surprise that the most strikingly original bakers of our day are self-taught. But then one wants to solve a problem, like the problem of "green" flour. As a research mathematician, this is a quandary that I recognize. Work alone, be strikingly original, but give up on thousands of years of supporting insights and intellectual infrastructure. Work too hard to instead master this history of ideas, get sucked into conventional thinking and sacrifice all originality. Each researcher's identity ties to how they resolve striking this balance. Oddly, I could not learn how to pick a lock in my twenties, but I sailed through an evening lock picking workshop recently. One's mind slows down as one ages, but just as Tai chi can teach one to better understand one's body, there are net benefits to better understanding one's mind. When I teach others how to become researchers, this is what I teach. In lock picking in particular, one is trying many possibilities in rapid succession. In problem solving too, there can be critical phases where one needs to be able to rotate through hundreds of possibilities in rapid succession. The researcher who has spent decades studying other peoples' work can generate these hundreds of possibilities in their head, from experience. The lone original wolf, no matter how brilliant, doesn't stand a chance at keeping up. Sometimes they'll instead try one thing that is so out of the norm that experienced researchers would have never considered it, and be lucky, but generally being a lone wolf puts one at a disadvantage. When I want a lazy way to expose myself to hundreds of possibilities for how my bread might improve, I flip through the Suas book. At farmers markets I've met my share of bread bakers who freshly grind but don't understand "green" flour. The key for a professional operation is reproducibility. They're making the same breads day after day. Once they've found protocols that work, they're good. I keep trying new procedures and recipes, so I'm relying on ascorbic acid to get that variable out of my way. I really don't know what you might have discovered, but it makes sense. The balance of acids varies with the stiffness of the levain, affecting the chemistry of gluten formation. Tonight's sourdough rye put me way outside my comfort zone, because the levain protocol was so different. When I flip again through Suas, I haven't even tried most of his ideas that could be relevant to making a rye sourdough come out. I'll play with them one or two at a time, so I have some hope of relating these ideas to experience. So, hopefully you'll be able to replicate this success without ascorbic acid. If not, ascorbic acid is actually quite easy.

I have been struggling mightily with my bread making recently. I had got to a stage where most loaves came out well and then things started to go wrong about a month ago and I have been delivering variations on shrunken, flat loaves consistently. Aaaargh. There were so many variables that I struggled to fix the problem, no matter how many times I tried to test an individual stage or method. I even resorted to re-reading other's posts and noted that @Syzygies talked about his flat as a pancake period and how minute doses of ascorbic acid helped him out of it. I didn't want to add yet another variable so I persisted with one last experiment over the last two days. Here is my journey for those who are novices like me. First I mixed and scoop kneaded the dough, using Trevor J Wilson's method. Got that tip from one of @Pequod's posts. Actually, that wasn't the first thing I did. Begin at the beginning. This record is going to be important for when something goes wrong again. This experiment was to test whether my move from one method of making leaven to another was part of the problem. I had been using a stiff leaven, made with 1 part starter to 1 part water to 2 parts flour. My loaves over the last month used Chad Peterson's leaven recipe which is made up of 1 tablespoon of starter to 200g of flour and 200g of water. Weird juxtaposition of tablespoons with grams and much less starter relative to flour in Chad's method. I ended up being busy and left the leaven to rise for longer than my usual 6 hours. It was much closer to 15 hours by the time I got to mixing the leaven in to the dough. I milled the spelt and wheat grain and hydrolysed with 85% water for about two hours before adding the salt and leaven. Adding the leaven and salt later is another Trevor J Wilson recommendation. Works for me in that I can get the flour hydrolysing in parallel with waiting for the leaven to peak. It was 9pm by the time I had finished scoop kneading the dough so I was in no mood to stay up all night folding at half hourly intervals for four hours before shaping so I put the two, separate lots of dough with the Chad leaven on the left and the Bertinet stiff leaven on the right, in bowls in the cool cellar. Cool bulk fermentation like this is great for allowing you to bake sourdough when you are ready and rather than having to stick to strict timings. The dough looked good when I got to it in the morning. I then formed it into balls for the bench rest. I used damp hands to avoid adding too much flour . Here are the balls after the bench rest. Relaxed but the not too flat so I figured they were good to be shaped to go in the banettons. I have been having problems with sticky dough adhering to the banettons so I liberally floured the top of the dough balls and the banettons before laying the balls in the baskets. The good news is that the dough already felt less sticky than normal at this stage. I got the extra rack in the proofer to allow for proofing two loaves at once. Here they are, going in for four hours or so. And here they are looking wet but plump after proofing. I had a load of calls for work yesterday but had marked out my schedule to say when to put the oven on, when to put the dough in and when to get it out between calls. I dashed down to check on progress and this is what I found. It was a dance around the kitchen moment. The lower loaf was better risen than my more recent attempts but it was still flatter than the beautifully plump loaf on the top rack using the stiffer leaven. Letting the leaven go for longer may have helped both bakes but the stiffer dough was the clear winner for me. I wondered if the lesser amount of starter in the Chad leaven will have been expended sooner but, given all my previous attempts used his leaven after about six to ten hours I don't think that the timing is the main reason for the difference. Looking lovely during the agonising two hour wait for cooling. You can't have everything. Still some big holes in the crumb. Something to work on. In the meantime, The Husband delivered half of the plump loaf to my father-in-law as part of his lockdown care package. Father-in-law was very happy with progress and remarked on the softness and plumpness of the loaf. At last.

Yes, I mill the flour shortly before using it. At first the idea of milling was a bit daunting but it is now just part of the routine. Put machine on the kitchen counter, ask Alexa to divide the weight of flour required by the percentage extraction, weigh the grain, pour it in to the hopper to grind and choose the right grade of sieve to get the amount of flour I need. I use a mix of high extraction and whole grain flour in different combinations, depending on the loaf I am baking.

Is the plan to make flour from that? That would encompass a mill in there somewhere. Just curious.

My little bit of hoarding has been to replenish my stock of plain white flour a little earlier than normal I found out that my local health food store would order bigger bags of grain so I picked up this 5kg of spelt on Friday. And these beauties and more came from Austria the other day. So far the einkorn has been very tasty but I have not tried the kamut yet. I bought these "wheat seedlings" and "spelt seedlings" out of curiosity but have no idea what they are. I guessed they might be sprouted or malted grain but those words don't check out in any German translation that I can find. Does anybody have any idea?

Today's outing was to South San Francisco to stock up on grain for our mill. They seemed happy for the business, unconcerned that I could be hoarding. Not my first rodeo, we’ve gone through bags of red wheat berries before. Business is down. We’ll go through this. 50 lbs each of red wheat and rye berries, 25 lbs of soft wheat.