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i almost always want wings and pizza and beef ribs!

Great setting to cook amongst the flowers BOC. We r moving out of home for 3 months while the next renovations get underway so old habits have been a bit disrupted. I did however manage to sneak in a cheeky beef rib slow cooked over 7 hours. I rigged up the Smartfire for a 120c (250f) cook and then took the boys to play rugby. Returned 2 hours later and the temp was rock solid at 120. I threw a few frozen snags in for the last 2 hours and they turned out delish. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Hurray! The local corn is finally coming in! The best part of summer has begun! Now if only more of my tomatoes would ripen! Tossed on the grill with some chicken thighs, spuds in the foil pouch, and some shishito peppers off my plant. Topped off with a side salad and crusty bread - winner, winner, chicken & corn dinner!

Now I want wings and pizza and beef ribs !!!!!!

Now for the postmortem. The brisket was a big hit. My best ever, according to my wife (yes, I know she’s a little biased). The photos don’t really do it justice. The flat was juicy and the point was absolutely melt in your mouth. The rub was sea salt, pepper, and some cayenne. We started inside with apps - smoked salmon on mustard butter toasts and shrimp. Then outside for dinner, tablescape curtesy of my wife. Started with an intermezzo - lemon sorbetto in Prosecco and grappa. Sides were a hash brown potato casserole (no photo) and a Malaysian fruit and vegetable slaw.

With the fresh halibut we got yesterday I made a Peruvian ceviche (which I’ve shared the recipe on other threads before) but decided to pair it today with a Pisco Sour 3 parts Pisco 1 part lime juice 1 part simple syrup Egg white topped with a dash of bitters also got this recipe from the Hotel in Agia Calientes (base of Machu Pichu), kept this piece of paper now for 8 years Side note we made this with “Kusi” Pisco which is my wife’s name. Kusi mean happiness in Quechua and whenever her relatives come visit from Peru they always bring us a bottle

The meat went into the KK at about 7:30AM, 275°F dome temp. At about 6 hours the bark looked good; the brisket was reading 170°. I wrapped it in butcher paper. It reached 203° maybe four hours after that. It had a nice jiggle. I let it rest, wrapped in a towel, in a cooler until we were ready to eat around 8PM.

How about all of the above.

Very nice looking drink @Troble I can just taste it. Shame it is too early in the day to do anything about that urge!

Easy Popcorn Shrimp | Recipe | Almazan Kitchen Now that's a knife. My cleaver hasn't left my hand, despite owning many knives. "Unlike many of you" ?? I resemble that remark!

Yummy looking food, one and all! Trouble is, I am now totally indecisive about what to have for dinner - wings, pizza, fish, chicken, steak...?

Pizza and wings kind of Saturday. Wings- sprayed with duck fat, seasoned and left overnight. Then smoked with hickory chunks in the smoker pot at ~225F for 95 min. Dial up heat to 350-400F for 30-40 min more. sauce them as you like with hot, honey bbq, garlic park, and Asian zing options. Pictures were an after thought but I got one early in the grill and one late before the last of them. Pizzas - 4, 14-16in. Pies. heat soak KK to 500-525 with baking stone in. Hand toss. Olive oil on parchment paper. Straight on the stone. Remove the paper after 2-3 min and rotate pie. Rotate pie once more 2-3 min later. Done in about 9 min (Pics front to back): - pepperoni, sausage and green olive - honey sriracha chicken with jalapeño. Highly recommend you google this recipe, follow the principle and make your own rendition. - sausage and pepperoni - margarita with pickled onions and reduced balsamic drizzle Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

A few months ago I finally bought a ThermoWorks Signals / Billows setup. Needing to clear the freezer of a 19 pound package of pork butt (which was taking up a lot of space) and having house guests to help eat it, I decided to try an overnight cook using the controller / fan to check it out. After three days of thawing, I separated and trimmed the two bone-in butts. I marinaded one overnight with Wicker's Marinade, then rubbed with Wicker's dry rub. The other I rubbed with a 50-50 mix of KC Butt Spice and Bad Byron's Butt Rub, using duck fat as a binder. Butt Number Two (number one was very similar in size and fat content): KC Butt Spice/Bad Byron's Butt Rub over duck fat binder: Both were refrigerated until placed into the KK23, set at 225° and heat soaked for 1.5 hours. The double drip pan was used and smoke wood was a mix of cherry and apple wood chunks. The meat (33.5°F) was added to the KK at 8:00 pm (which was under a tarp as we were expected to have 2 - 4 inches of rain over to coming 24 hours). Adding 19 lbs of cold pork to pulled the smoker temperature down to about 140° and it took about 1.5 hours to get back to 225° with the Billows fan (I had choked it down for the KK using the accessory damper since the Billows cfm is ridiculously high for a KK). Billows fit into the KK Guru port using the Billows accessory snout: Billows damper setting I used to tame the cfm (via inspection mirror), which turned out about right: Since dinner was not to be until 23 hours later, I decided to not wrap the butts at the stall, but to instead see how the KK/Signals/Billows setup worked for a long cook (without any intervention on my part). Plus, I didn't want to get up at 0' Dark Thirty to wrap them. Butts at 45 minutes in: Left (green probe) is Wicker's Marinade; Right (yellow probe + toothpick) is KC/BB dry rub The Billows overshot the 225° setting in the initial push to return the KK to temperature by only 10°, then was within 5° of the set 225° temperature throughout the 19.5 hours of the cook. I was very impressed with the consistency. Here is the graph at 9:00 am, 13 hours into the cook (the slight dip in pit temp at 6:00 am was to check the results after the overnight smoke): Temperature readings at 13 hours: The butts continued to leisurely accrue internal temperature throughout the day, reaching high 190°s by around 2:00 pm, at which time I bumped the set temp up to 250° to get a bit more temperature differential to push the butts to 203°, which was to be my pull target. The Wicker's butt reached 204° at 3:10 pm (19 hours in the smoker) while the KC/BB butt reached 203° at 3:30 pm (19.5 hours). They were wrapped in foil and a towel, then placed in a cooler for a three hour rest until dinner. I didn't get any photos of the finished butts in the KK as it was pouring rain then and the activity was a bit frantic. Here are the results. Left is KC/Bad Byron Rub; Right is Wicker's Marinade & Rub: Partially chunked up / pre-pulled. Notice the internal color difference between the dry rub (left) and marinade (right - more intense and deeper into the meat) versions. Bark was about the same on both. These are not the entire butts; just the amount for dinner (19 lbs of pork butt is A LOT of pork butt...). Plated at 7:00 pm, 23 hours after the meat was placed into the KK: In summary, I found the KK/Signals/Billows combination to be very satisfactory. It was my first use of a controller & fan combination and while I probably won't use it often, I will likely use it for future brisket and pork butt overnight cooks. I will probably do the normal butcher paper wrap to cut down the time in the future as well (I typically do so but wanted to experiment with the new gear). There was no lack of moisture in the pork without the butcher paper crutch. I was impressed with the low temperature variation of the Signals / Billows combination after the system stabilized. With the large cfm of the Billows, I was concerned it might repeatedly overshoot the set temperature but this was not the case. Other than the first return to temperature after the cold meat was added to the KK, the temperature variation was 5° or less. I set the Billows diffuser to almost closed, and fortunately it seemed to be about right. The KK was miserly with the use of its charcoal (FOGO Super Premium - large chunks). I started with a full basket and 1.5 hour heat soak, then a 19.5 hour cook at 225°, followed by a run up to 350° for 2.5 hours waiting to grill the corn and mushroom. At the end, I still have over one-half basket of charcoal left. As I have mentioned before, I am not a huge fan of pulled pork but this certainly was a moist and tasty result. Between the marinade and dry rub versions, I preferred the marinade version. As for the guests, the preference was evenly split between the two butts among the carnivores (the vegetarian had no opinion about the pork, but pronounced the EVO/Balsamic grilled portobello to be superior).

Like many of you, i have a bit of a knife fetish that I'm trying to keep under control. Unlike many of you, I'm doing a pretty good job of keeping it under control, but I've been sorely tempted by the Almazan Kitchen Serbian chefs knife. If you're not familiar with these, wander over to YouTube and do a search for Almazan Kitchen; you'll find numerous videos of a guy in Serbia cooking out in the woods or in a rustic kitchen and using a wooden-handled knife that resembles a rustic cleaver with a rounded blade. The videos show them using the knife for everything from chopping wood to flipping and serving food to slicing and chopping ingredients. They sell these knives on their website; i don't know if this is a traditional knife in that region, but there are a lot of different manufacturers offering similarly styled knives now. Since i have two full sets of kitchen knives (a Wustof trident set I've had for close to 30 years and a newer set of Shun stainless steel), I've been resisting these Serbian knifes, but my sister recently gave me one as a late retirement gift (I retired last year but she has been in some financial difficulties and recently got some relief). They offer both stainless and carbon steel versions; mine is the carbon steel. The on-line reviews often say the knives are extremely sharp right out of the box; mine was not - at least not in comparison with my Shuns. I put a quick edge on it using a diamond stone but didn't spend a lot of time on it; that helped some but it still wasn't as sharp as shown in the videos. i took a bit more time this afternoon and dug out my Edge Pro sharpening system to bring it up to snuff. I'm happy to report that the results are impressive; i quickly brought it up to a very usable degree of sharpness that rivals the out-of-box sharpness of my Shuns - and it was much easier to get there than it is to sharpen the extremely hard stainless steel of the Shuns. I don't expect the edge to last as long on the carbon steel knife but i don't yet have a feel for it. i don't see this as being a big deal unless it dulls very quickly since it's so easy to bring back an edge. The knife handle is attractive and fairly comfortable. The blade thickness is somewhere between the widths of my Shun and Wustof chefs knives and doesn't flex. There's a slightly wider section on the spine near the handle that allows you to use your thumb or index finger to apply more pressure when needed; this feels a little odd when i use my normal knife grip and pinch the blade but it's not uncomfortable. The blade shape takes some getting used to. As mentioned earlier, the shape is similar to a traditional cleaver except the blade is rounded; i haven't used a nakiri but i think the Serbian knife probably feels like a thicker version of one except for double bevel on the Serbian knife. I have a heavy Wustof cleaver i use for chopping meat and bone but the Wustof is substantially thicker and heavier and not suitable for slicing or general kitchen use like the new knife is. While substantially lighter than the Wustof cleaver, it's noticeably heavier than my Shun and Wustof chefs knives. It feels well balanced. After sharpening, i sliced up some very ripe peaches. The knife seemed to slice through the peel and flesh of the peaches without me applying any noticeable pressure; i assume the weight of the blade applied sufficient pressure. If you've cut very ripe peaches before, you know that it's easy to mush up the flesh while cutting through the peel if the knife isn't very sharp or if you don't use enough slicing motion for the amount of applied pressure; i tried several slicing motions and didn't experience any of this mushing. While the Alzaman Kitchen videos show the knife bring used to peel fruit and veggies, i found the width of the blade uncomfortable for peeling the peach slices so i grabbed my Shun paring knife. I think I'll get more comfortable using the knife for this finer work as i get used to the width of the blade. My conclusion: While i don't think this will replace the Shuns as my kitchen workhorse knives, i think i will use it extensively for some jobs and i will make it my primary knife to take outside for use at the KK and other grills instead of my Wustofs . Since i have the optional sheath, I'll have less concern with lugging and potentially dropping other knives or having an exposed knife lying on a table or shelf outdoors. it performs well enough to replace several knives while cooking and serving outside. It's definately a nice addition to my knife arsenal and it's rustic appearance and different design will certainly be a conversation starter.

Are you free hand sharpening? If so, it could be nothing more than the way you happen to hold the cleaver compared to others. I don’t believe it’s the stones necessarily, I use shapton glass on all my Japanese knives with excellent results. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

Well done !!!!!! The good kind of well done not the bad kind lol

@tekobo - as the saying goes, "You can't drink all day, unless you start first thing in the morning!"

The Musui Kamado (Laurie calls it the "indoor K") is perfect for making ghee. Throw in the butter, set on extra low, leave unattended half an hour or more. The new jar is Marcus Samuelsson's Ethiopian spiced butter, a version made by his wife Maya’s tribe, the Gurage. Ghee with aliums and spices. Incredible aroma. I'm reminded of a fish cookbook from decades ago (I've been unable to identify since) where a Portuguese chef is baffled he has to instruct his staff to put the paprika in fat not water, the best parts of spices are fat soluble. Tonight's recipe also calls for a bit of Madras curry powder. We don't buy curry powder, like Indians we make a custom blend per recipe. I'm looking up what this is. Samuelsson's single best recipe could be his Berbere Spice Blend featured for example in his Black-Eyed Peas with Coconut Milk and Berbere; it's better than bought berbere from upscale sources. So of course we want to make Madras curry powder from scratch. It calls for curry leaves I happen to have just bought... Huh. Curry leaves have an amazing flavor, usually unlocked by tempering in oil, somewhat lost if dried for a spice blend. Huh. The Marcus ghee comes back to me. I should make a Madras curry powder ghee, with generous curry leaves. Huh. I should make a custom ghee for rogan josh, and use sous vide to cook a lamb shank confit. I identify with Samuelsson's trajectory and existential culinary questions. I've been listening to his Yes, Chef: A Memoir that he narrates. I love international food from everywhere, but French technique reaches greater heights than just checking off spice boxes. And whatever I do, my Indian tastes muddy, but my best French gets boring. Samuelsson left his Swedish restaurant to open Red Rooster Harlem, where he applies all of his classic training to world and soul food. I'm reminded of Alex Stupak's Tacos: Recipes and Provocations: A Cookbook where he applies his classic training to tacos.

A friends garden is producing veggies now so decided to chop up a few different varieties of squash, potato and bell pepper. I let the chicken spin for awhile naked then put the drip pan and veggies under. Made for a real tasty dinner

Looks good @C6Bill I keep getting the weekly email from the family run fishing boat that they are bringing back CA King Salmon. 4th week in a row. $19/lb delivered to my front door. Boat comes in Friday morning and it’s in my fridge by noon Friday. Can’t beat that. Also picked up 1lb of fresh halibut I’ll make Peruvian Ceviche with & 1lb of bluefin tuna that I’ll do sashimi with. standard salmon cook indirect with mesquite wood. Kids get salt, garlic powder & oregano. Wife & I use this house blend mesquite rub. Served with tri color quinoa sweet onions, celery & carrots with Oyster Bay Sauvignon Blanc. Tasty lunch

Decided to try a smoke pot and the pork lard and butcher paper method for ribs the other day. Everyone loved the lighter milder smoke taste and the moisture in the ribs was nice too. I'm sure i will try that method again someday. But the smoke pot is here to stay, i have it in again today with a chicken spinning

Close your eyes if you like a fine blade. A mate gave me his favourite knife and asked if it could be fixed. This was after 5 minutes with the work sharp belt sharpener. If another 10 minutes was spent on this, I’m sure the blade could be ground to be more even, however, this will do given the previous state it was in. He can bring it back in a year after he hacks it up again. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Grabbed a 3lb cowboy prime from Costco (first time) last night. cooked at 300 dome temp for about 1 he 10 until it hit 118, pulled and cranked to 500-550. It only took a few minutes to get the fire roaring, then seared on lower grate over fire 1.5 min each side. Pulled and center was 135 on dot basically! No other wood, just used coffeechar.