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I promise you really, really need smell-o-vision for this one. I ordered 10kg of cubed goat meat and cooked a Nigerian stew on the stove and these two, low and slow, on my 23 and 32 respectively. The first is a Guyanese goat curry from Madhur Jaffrey's Ultimate Curry Bible that I have made many times before and the second is a new to me curry goat by Andi Oliver whose family come from Antigua. It is from her Pepperpot Diaries book and contains lots of whole spices and some dark chocolate. I look forward to trying the latter for dinner today. And yes, that large pot is difficult to carry when it is fully loaded and hot!

i had to wait for my mason jar sealer to finish this so here we go…popped the hard tallow out of the metal bowl. scrapped off any brown bits and moisture. melt over a bain marie and transfer to jars. waiting for the tallow to cool before i vac seal them. im hoping i get 1 year in the cupboard. but i probably will consume it before that…

Cheers tekobo I have been in hiatus for a while .just kicking back from the online world doing my own thing . Sent from my SM-T835 using Tapatalk

i was minding my own business and watching weight lifting videos on youtube (yes, thats what some guys do in their spare time) and noticed that the current record holder +109kg class Lasha Talakhadze can lift a 23" KK in the clean and jerk and a 22" TT in the snatch.

Yo @Aussie Ora great to hear from you and to see that you are still cooking up a storm. Don't be a stranger, we are missing your weird and wonderful sauce and rub combinations!

Hi @David Chang, the two goat curries taste very different. The first one is a bit more like an Indian curry, with a predominant flavour of coriander and cumin. It is well reduced and so can be eaten easily with a flat bread. The second one, with all the whole spices, was a bit more of a challenge. It has a deep rich flavour but your tastebuds end up dominated by the whole cloves, bits of star anise or cardamom that you end up chewing on. The jury is out on this one and I am thinking of dropping Andi a note on instagram to find out if that was really her intent. That curry contains dark chocolate and molasses but it doesn't taste sweet, just rich. I have recently experimented with Japanese katsu curry and made the Japanese curry roux from scratch. I really like it. Not sweet and not strongly flavoured. A bit like an old fashioned Vesta curry that has been toned down for Western tastes. Sometimes it is nice not to be challenged and we enjoyed pouring the gloopy sauce over the crisp fried chicken katsu and plain boiled rice. What other types of Japanese curry are there?

@tekobo i'm curious to know what this tastes like. i'd imagine it to be a very spicy taste explosion. i'm so used to asian style curries (like the japanese ones), which is almost always too sweet and sometimes almost tasteless..

That's an interesting idea with the Airscape container. I'd thought of doing something similar for pizza dough, which would benefit from long, slow ferments at above-fridge temperatures. I've also considered something like this with a bit more capacity: Amazon.com: Cooluli 20 Liter Mini Fridge with Temperature Control - Black: Home & Kitchen I don't know anything about that particular model, but it's an example of a portable, adjustable fridge. @tekobo - see what I did there? I saw @Syzygies container and raised him a fridge!

I've made countless experiments over the years, including attempts to adopt ideas that have worked for others. I keep coming back to cast iron. One can find arbitrarily small cast iron pots with effort. The most common mode of failure I've experienced is a breach, where either the lid displaces or a space opens between the lid and pot. Now convection burns the wood in the way we're trying to avoid. Thin steel deforms easily. An unsecured cast iron lid usually stays on, but smoke pots can tip as the fire shifts. I don't care how small the chances are here, I would find it unacceptable to lose a cook, particularly if it's for an event where others are depending on my BBQ. The flour paste seal for a cast iron lid is easy once one establishes a routine, and reminds me of the romance of using questionable pots in Moroccan cooking. I've never actually seen my three 1/8" holes clog, even though my wood could be in contact with the holes. A single hole would probably work, but one never wants to build a bomb, and three holes is not a liability. Do the holes need to face down? This was based on watching how one makes charcoal, where the exhaust becomes a self-sustaining flame at temperatures well above low & slow. Dunno how important "down" is, but down is better than up, and I have to point the holes some way. (I came up with the smoke pot idea after some ill-advised experiments at making charcoal...) If I had investors for a state-of-the-art BBQ restaurant in Manhattan, I'd design a method of heating wood in external chambers, and feeding the gas produced to a modified standard gas oven. I'm surprised that no one has tried this. Usually when people are unhappy with smoke pots, they're having trouble getting them going. I like starting my fires with a weed burner propane torch. For low & slow one wants a fire in one spot, so the fire doesn't run away. If one lights that spot under a smoke pot, one can arrange to get the smoke pot going too. This is fire tending, not fundamentally different from any other form of fire tending. One learns with practice. I don't give up. Alternatives? A mandatory PSA is required here, not all metals belong in a smoker. Galvanized metals in particular off-gas toxins one doesn't want near food. Never break with tradition without understanding what one is doing. Long ago, others followed my smoke pot experiments by building "pipe bombs", stainless steel threaded pipes with caps, with multiple holes along the bottom edge. These were expensive, but avoided the flour paste lid sealing ritual. For a bento box one would want a smaller pipe, bringing down the expense. Could one use other metals? See above. Texas oil rigger BBQ recycled job-site drums. I'd just go with stainless steel, to be sure. With several holes and ordinary wood as filler, I can't imagine sufficient pressure building to create a bomb. On the other hand, in math we observe that lack of imagination isn't a proof of anything. A reasonable design principle is that you can never design something not to break, but you can and should design how it breaks. Would pipe caps really need to screw on, or could one rig something that slid together, perhaps with enough overlap that there was no need for flour paste? Try multiple ideas, with care!

Had some family over for dinner tonight. Cranked out a Bistecca Fiorentina for the adults (each steak around 900gram)… sausages and burgers for the kids. Made some home made chips, salad, some no-knead bread… amazing. Everyone happy.