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When I was first researching the KK I stumbled across this video and I remember it being a defining moment in my decision to purchase a KK or not. I distinctly remember telling myself “I want to cook global cuisine....I think I should get the KK” after I watched this video fast forward 18 months, I’ve never attempted this recipe but @Syzygiesrecentky posted it and it spurred my memory bank so I present boneless leg of lamb Tandoor style on the rotisserie served with Indian basmati rice

I was working on my taxes this morning, and it looks like I'm getting about a $250 refund from the state. First thing that went through my head was "ooh, I could get the cold smoker attachment with that!". Am I going to start looking at the costs of things I need and/or want, then automatically convert that into what accessories I could get for the KK?

I set up to use the rotisserie today. I wanted to use the double drip pan to avoid flare ups but found that it would not fit underneath the cradle rotisserie - handle clash. I swapped for the rod rotisserie but was worried because the last time I used it, it managed to "unwind" the adjustable point on the left hand side and got jammed in the KK because it was too long to get out. On that occasion I cut the chicken off the rod and unscrewed the end of the rod when everything cooled down. Today I made sure the nut was tight and then I watched when it started to rotate. Sometimes the current sends the rod rotating in a clockwise direction and sometimes in an anti clockwise direction. I tried a couple of times until the rod was rotating in the clockwise direction so that it would not be able to unwind the end nut. Perfect. No problems at all getting the rod out this time. Three chooks. One for us, one for the in-laws and one for friends. The double drip pan did an awesome job of allowing me to baste with oil and fat without flare ups. I noticed the difference, with almost instant flare ups, when I took the pan out to get some fire browning at the end. Very tasty and a great trial as I am planning to cook a suckling pig at the end of the week. We once ate the tastiest potatoes ever at a market in France. They were basted by a wall of rotisserie chicken, multi meats and sausages. Not quite the same today but tasty nonetheless.

The good news for me is that I am The wife and so didn't have to seek a wife's permission in order to get a dry ager. I did have to give up a standing freezer to make room for the dry ager but that was The Husband's only condition of purchase. Maybe you guys will need to figure out something you can "give up" in exchange for getting an ager. I tell you, it is worth it! Now that the long aging piece of beef is out of the ager I might change the temp and humidity to cure some salamis for a few weeks. @S and @M - glad to count you as members of the hacksaw club. Absolutely essential for meat butchery and it is all about preserving your quality knives. Arrive at a bit of bone? Swap out for a saw so as not to damage your knife. Others will catch up to this eventually. 🤪

There’s been a steady influx of pizza pictures lately, so I debated not posting. But Saturday pizza party with the nieces and nephews was a huge success. Still haven’t made my own crust yet...the pizzeria down the street sells a 14 in ball of fresh dough for $2 so it will take some motivation for me to put the effort in. Pizza sauce = stewed tomatoes, roasted garlic, basil and Parmesan in a blender. Whole milk mozzarella. A must in my opinion. Garbage/supreme picture posted. This was a 14 in dough ball but I usually stretch it for a slightly thinner crust. Basically covers 85% of the big bad stone. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

My first bone-in dry age is a short loin that's in the SteakAger now; the meat market where I got it will slice it for free when it's ready. Some folks on the SteakAger FaceBook page are using a Sawz-all with a stainless steel blade - I bought a Dewalt with a battery operated drill and their version of a Sawz-all a while back so I may try this since my back issues may it painful and numbing to do much hack saw work.

Would need to let’s you talk to my wife! Unfortunately, I used a lot or my bartering points lately. Will need to wait a bit Envoyé de mon iPad en utilisant Tapatalk

Haven’t been able to convince my wife yet to get a meat ager or Macgiver version of it. So all I do is aging in Umai dry bag. Just started a full loin of boneless sirloin. Will try to wait 60 to 90 days. Second attempt. First one was good. Envoyé de mon iPad en utilisant Tapatalk

I'd like to join this group, seems they like to saw up body parts.

Ha! I'd like to think tekobo and I are kindred spirits, though my conversation with Laurie about getting my own dry ager didn't go so well. But I do have a food hacksaw!

There's a great SF Bay Area butcher (Golden Gate Meat Company) that will dry age for us on request. I've tried dry aging brisket before traditional low & slow. Too far and one can eat the brisket with a spoon, but a few days is wonderful. What I'd use a dry ager for would be sausage. I have perhaps the largest Kaffir lime tree of any of Kasma Loha-unchit's students, and periodically I share leaves and limes. Perhaps the best sausage I've ever tasted was a Thai-inflected sausage offered me in gratitude by one of her students. I can't buy sausage like that.

I have disappeared down a dry aging hole and I am loving it. I managed to get a good deal on a dry ager that i had been drooling over for years and would highly recommend it if you like aged meat. Here is where I have been over the last few months. First use was to cure sausages after my marathon sausage fest. Temperature and humidity set at 15C and 70% respectively. A much safer environment than the area I used to use outdoors, under the eaves. Then we met up with @Braai-Q and his wife in London and alarmed the waitress in the restaurant as we swapped meat between our cool bags under the table. This huge chicken is one of the presents that he gave us. The Husband wasn't pleased with my decision to age the chook for a week before we ate it. Thought I was risking a perfectly good chicken and quoted the old adage that everything looks like a nail to someone with a hammer. Well, this time it worked. A friend declared it the best chicken he had ever eaten. Temp down to 2C and humidity up to 80% for aging meat. I wanted to do a comparison with brill. The one on the left got eaten fresh. The one on the right ended up in the bin. A week's aging was too much in this case. I have since aged red mullet and hake for a few days each and both were very good. Flesh firms up and skin is nice and crisp when fried. This is today's adventure. The very kind folk at a restaurant that we went to showed us their cold room and described some of their techniques, one of which was coating meat in fat and aging it for months. Here are two Dexter cote de boeuf at the start of the job this morning. They use liquid nitrogen at the restaurant. I just painted the fat on every ten minutes or so and put the chops in the ager in between times. Fully coated. Not to be opened before 1 April 2020. Sitting in the dry ager. Hanging on the top right is a strip loin that has been in for two weeks. I cut a bit off and wipe off the mould when we want a piece. It has aged beautifully and is so much more fun and tasty than defrosting a steak from the freezer. The pichanha below has dried out quite quickly and will be difficult to cut and grill Brazilian style. No worries, will grill it flat and eat it up, very soon.

Hello everybody. I’m doing things a little backwards. Instead of registering here first, asking some questions, and then buying a KK, I pulled the trigger yesterday on a 32. We started lusting after the KK a few weeks ago after seeing that behemoth at the Malibu vacation home the Kardashians were renting (I know, please don’t judge). I thought a 23 would work, but my wife convinced me to go for a 32. I contacted Dennis yesterday with a few questions about future availability, just before starting to celebrate my birthday. Long story short, he told me about a cancelled order for a 32 in terra blue on the ship. It wasn’t our first color choice, but after reading what others have written here we said let’s do it. A bird in hand . . . . Happy birthday to me. Now for a question. I’ve been using a large BGE for 12-13 years. I’ve also had a Fire Magic Diamond Echelon 790 for about 6 years. I cook with the BGE more than the gas grill. I think the KK could and should replace both. The KK will live under a large grill cover where the Fire Magic is sitting now. Selling a used BGE is not unusual. However, to my surprise after a couple of hours on the internet I could not find a single used Fire Magic grill for sale - eBay, Craigslist, Facebook marketplace, some BBQ forums. I suppose I can simply put it on asking for my dream price and see what happens. Does anybody have an idea about what I should ask for this? Thanks.

Hello All, I just wanted to follow up on my 1st run at Nixtamalization.....making masa and tortillas. My Masa starter kit from Masienda arrived about 10 days ago and my Premier wet grinder arrived earlier this week. All and all I would say it was a success...did the nixtamalization process last night and started out just making 1 lb of heirloom corn and taking notes. The grinding process went pretty good...did it in two batches and ended up adding about 1.25 cups of water. I believed the end consistency coming out to the machine was good (not too much moisture) so initially I did not add any dry masa back into the mixture. When I started using the tortilla press I was not able to handle the tortilla without it breaking up on me. Based on this I decided to add dry masa (from Masienda) back into the masa mixture. I ended up adding 6 TBS and after that the tortillas held together...but they were still pretty fragile. I was able to get some "puff" but not as good as I hoped! Maybe more dry masa next time??? I also learned to not press to hard on the Masienda tortilla press as they would get too thin. For dinner I made two fresh salsa's using a Mocajete, guacamole and some Mexican street style corn. Earlier this week I smoked up a 6lb rack of beef plate ribs. I decided to warm up these leftovers via sous vide to about 100F and was able to cut up the meat and cut off some of the fat which I rendered down and then pan fried the cut up rib meat until it was crispy! All and all it turned out very good! The Cerveza in the pic is a homebrew Hazy IPA. I look forward to my continuing education in the art of Nixtamalization! Thanks @syzygies !!! Paul

Oooh. I think I would be interested in your classmate’s Thai sausage. I have some kaffir lime leaves too although my plant has never produced fruit and is less than 4’ tall. Here our favourite sausages are very simple. Pork and sage wins hands down for fresh sausage and I like to make a semi cured sausage that is half way between fresh sausage and fully cured salami. Will hunt out the recipe. We tasted it once in a bar in italy and could not find it to buy. That’s the sort of thing that is worth making, in my opinion.

Nope, just normal UK size chickens in my 32. No 42, or goat, here yet.

Congratulations on the pickup and welcome! I'm coming from a BGE too.. can't wait to get my KK!

I bought the 21” Komodo in black with every accessory and lots of fuel and love it. It is big enough for a packer brisket, ribs and whatever we cook. Been too cold in Idaho to use it, but spring is here and we are getting psyched! Buy one the size you need, but buy one!! Dan

braindoc, I see you have a pretty smart wife, suggesting the 32 was an awesome idea. Wait until you cook on the KK, the food is going to go to the next level too.

I invented the smoke pot, and I've got all the parts on my yard table for converting my 2009 23" Ultimate to use the KK smoke generator and a BBQ Guru at the same time. All I need is to find the right directions. My wife and I have been together nearly twenty years, but she did worry about my tendency to keep changing my mind on the most sacred things. I'm like a pinball machine that keeps playing even though the kid walked away decades ago. This tendency is very useful in research mathematics, and needs to be managed in life.

KK or motorcycles seems normal to me.

Well done @Troble. I can feel an Indian summer getting ready to follow on from a hot Mexican spring.

That looks great@Troble Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Way to go, Troble.

Thanks everyone, right now I am reading and learning 😁

Nicely done Tekobo. You remain the only person I know with a hacksaw as part of their kitchen utensils. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I'm unlikely to experiment with the FinaMill, because I don't want to lock into someone else's system for storing spices. This is something I've thought long and hard about. My first recollection of school was teaching my classmates to play Simon Says backwards, and the student teacher leaving in tears. So I don't take direction well. Hario Ceramic Coffee Mill -"Skerton Pro"Hario Ceramic Coffee Mill -"Skerton Pro" Recently, our ancient, inexpensive "Pavoni" grinder started to fail. All it really needed was a good cleaning. This however prompted me to buy the new edition of the Hario Ceramic Coffee Mill. Various people had figured out you really want to run this with a cordless drill/driver, so the new design features a handle that slips onto a hexagon stem that's drill/driver ready. I was never before able to grind spices as finely as one can buy them pre-ground. Now, the spice I grind this way are so fine and fluffy that they're actually hard to pinch. They squirrel out of the way. Not sure how I feel about this. One could back off on the grind. Peppermate Traditional Pepper Mill For general use we have a number of colors of the Peppermate. It was billed to me as a "cook's" pepper mill: It doesn't make a waiter's impression like the ornamental pepper mills many people get as wedding gifts, but it can grind a teaspoon at a time like no one's business. I first saw these taking Italian cooking classes with Giuliano Bugiali in his New York apartment, long ago. (He has passed.) The one pepper that is a challenge to grind is Sichuan pepper. Two passes at different settings with the Hario does a wonderful job, I'll cache a few weeks worth at a time. Good Sichuan pepper can be hard to find. Back when the real thing was contraband in the US, I saw a worker at a Flushing, Queens Sichuan restaurant open a cabinet at the front of the store, housing a 50 lb bag. Their Sichuan pepper clearly rocked, as the meal was already reminding us. I approached the worker with an outstretched twenty dollar bill, only to have the woman manager tackle me. This was their livelihood at stake. So if I claim this is the best Sichuan pepper I have ever found, I hope my recommendation will be taken seriously: Sichuan Tribute Pepper (Mala Market) One can't go wrong with anything they sell. Their best Pixian chili bean paste, best soy sauce, and best vinegar are each transformative. I buy all of their chilis.

... and well aged!

The pleasure was all mine, Paul! It was great to meet you, too. Good stories, beers & pizza, too!

@tekoboi have purposefully resisted this thread until now because I did not want another rabbit hole of gadgets that I “had to have”. Finally read the entire thread. WOW! Thank you for all the info. I’ve never even ordered a dry aged steak before so I will likely pick one up at my butcher to taste the difference but once again you have taken things to the next level. Well done!

Needed lunch meat for work so pork loin it is. Nothing fancy...just S&P, garlic and thyme. On a side note...I had the pleasure of meeting Tony B. the other day. We had a couple beers together at Russian River Brewing in Santa Rosa CA. I can tell you Tony is as nice in person as on the forum. Good conversation along with good beer.

Cocochar is famous for it's lack of smoke flavor. One of the main reasons that many of us love to cook with it. Let's the true smoke flavor of your wood come through. Try using one of the smoking pot designs here on the Forum. The original cast iron dutch oven or the newer camping pot, which might work out better in the smaller KKs. Smoker pot from MSR stowaway pot - Relevant Product Reviews - Komodo Kamado (komodokamadoforum.com) One last piece of advice - ditch the heat shield and drip pan. Even Dennis recommends ditching the heat shield - just adds time to your heat up with no improvement in cooking. Use the drip pan only if you want to catch drippings. A simple sheet of AL foil on the lower grate works just as effectively as a heat shield and doesn't impact heat up time. Plus, it lets you keep the hinged part of the grate free if you want.

@tekoboi think you are right as I also picked up that Indian BBQ book, however I am gearing up to have my best buddies over on Cinco de Mayo for a vaccination party/taco extravaganza Note for future....when your 5 year old insists on helping you in the kitchen and you’re making “hellfire fury sauce” do not give in no matter what. She didn’t touch anything save for peeling my garlic, but somehow the habanero got in her eye and made the next hour of my life not so fun.....