Leaderboard

Ha! We use our drug dealer scale all the time. I'm told it's essential for formulating cola extracts. I use it to weigh yeast and salt for bread, or saffron for tagines. I loved my trip to Morocco. I was cheated exactly once, in the most surprising setting: Hamid Fondouk li Houdi http://www.jaztravelweb.com/MOROCCO/Perfumery_%26_Herbalist.html He was one of the most sophisticated gentlemen to take us into a shop. (After asking for the best spice shop, we were lead there by an official guide recommended by our hotel, but they probably had no idea what was about to transpire, and I am not going to tell them.) Along with other spices, my friend and I each purchased 5 grams of his highest quality saffron. He measured without hesitation by sight, with the authority one would expect from decades of practice. My friend then objected that this looked like less that five grams, so he moved over to an ancient balance scale probably not used since the Indiana Jones movies were filmed, and used an unmarked weight to demonstrate perfect balance. Like I said, decades of practice. I got home, pulled out my drug dealer scale, and sure enough, measured 1.06 grams (not 5.00). Huh. I can easily afford the loss, and what little I have is great saffron. This was just deeply amusing. One doesn’t expect this from someone who proudly displays his picture taken with Bill Clinton. Or perhaps I am also naive about politics? I fantasize about bringing a hidden camera, and getting him to cheat me again. He was too practiced for this to be a one-off. But one can actually be arrested for bringing such a scale into Morocco. They take the "drug dealer scale" bit seriously. What I should do instead is bring one and five gram weights, ready to use with his scale. He'll know at this point I'm a repeat customer.

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!

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).

Hitting the best part of summer - local corn and homegrown tomatoes.

Lucky you, local corn on the cob.

Made a follow up video describing what you’re talking about here, it is an evolution.

Yes. On one hand, people overthink the angle thing, what matters is how often we sharpen, not how perfectly we sharpened last year. I go entirely by feel. It's very easy to feel when one has slipped back to the point where the edge isn't making proper contact, or when one has slipped forward to the point where digging into the stone is an immediate risk. The sweet spot is somewhere right in the middle between these extremes. I work in a quiet room (other than the dribble of the faucet). I use an Atoma diamond stone to smooth the surface of my Shapton Glass stones frequently, often between knives. Perhaps I secretly want to actually wear out a water stone in this lifetime. More likely, when the stone is very smooth it gives very good tactile feedback as to how the knife is riding. A just-polished stone is like waterskiing a glassy Adirondack lake at dawn. There is the potential for a feedback loop, here, taking my knives off course: The feel each time I sharpen has everything to do with how I sharpened last time. My chef's knives may have drifted, while for some reason my cleaver sharpening is spot-on. Further evidence for this theory is that I'd already noticed I can get the 8" Fujitake chef's knife sharper than the 10" Fujitake chef's knife. In both kitchens. I'd always assumed it was something different about the knives, but this could be a reproducible experiment coming down to how I hold each knife as I sharpen. A variant on your theory: While the VG 10 core is the same, the cladding varies on the different knives, and how straight each edge is. Both of these would affect the feel while sharpening. I go for "what feels best" while sharpening (an apprentice Japanese woodworker asks how to cook the rice for rice glue? So it tastes good), but this may serve me better on some knives that others. There have been many reasons I've craved a good microscope. This would be one. A really sharp knife is actually more serrated than a dull knife. Whatever we imagine, we're all really just using bread knives.

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!"

Well, dammit. Now pebble people can start saying that their grills cook as well as tiled grills!! Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk