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Smoked whole chicken on the meat hanger is a GOOD thing. About 2.5 hours at 250F/120C in the end. Start drooling now...

My wife’s overseas this week, so to make the last few days a bit easier meals wise I thought I should bbq on the weekend. The kids requested pulled pork… done.

@remi looks really tasty. my wife's gone on business for 2 weeks. i've been basically eating chops of different animals every other night. this is not allowed when she is home..

made another pizza today with some nice cornicione action. spicy salciccia is so much better than pepperoni..

ohhh, you got the kk accessory. i thought you got one of these..,

My husband was just saying how nice sourdough crumpets must be when you came up with this @Pequod. Please fail. I don't want the man thinking you are perfect and I am not.

Today is the day. I have had this meat hanger for at least six months and am finally going to use it. There used to be a great South African butcher in Leeds Market. He "retired" but was forced to continue making and selling sausages and smoked chickens from his home because his customers demanded it. I no longer work in Leeds and so I wrote to him to ask him if I was on the right track with my plans to brine and then smoke some whole chickens. This is five years after he was meant to have retired (he is now 74) and he was up bright and early this morning to continue our email conversation. It seems like I am on the right track. I aged the chickens in the dry ager for a week to build flavour. Then I wet brined them for 18 hours. One of them in a lemony coriander and fennel brine and the other in a beery, hot sauce brine. They have just gone into the heat soaked KK at about 140C. Smoking over a mix of apple and a little pecan. Photos to follow....

I'd eat that, regardless of the bread!

yeah tastes great as a reuben, wrong type of bread but i'm not complaining..

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.

Don’t know if I’d say there’s an advantage to it vs. what you suggest, but making a separate levain from my starter is usually what I do. My starter is 100% hydration and fed a mix of 70/30 white/whole rye, and the levain branches from that to whatever the formula calls for. Maybe a *slight* advantage to this is that the levain timing is very predictable. For example, a 1:2:2 levain at 78 degrees will be ready in about 5 hours.

@Syzygies

if you go to thailand, or if you have a thai grocery near you, they have really good curries in paste form.

I use the premade Japanese curry cubes. Even the "spicy" ones aren't very spicy, at least to me anyway. I typically don't make "gloppy" curry with them; I treat it just like my usual curry powders. Fun to explore though!

Sourdough Crumpets @tekobo: https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/sourdough-crumpets-recipe Going to give these a go.

pastrami came out good. tallow injected, but i felt like most of it leaked out before it could do any good..

I'm hoping to rotisserie roast a whole hog for a family gathering this summer, but since I'd never done one I decided to do a practice pig. I ordered a 70 to 80 lb one from a local meat shop last week with the plan to pick it up Wednesday afternoon, dry brine it overnight, and have it roasting by 10 am yesterday (Thursday). My brother and I went to pick it up and things went a bit awry: not only was the pig 93 lbs - it was also frozen solid. Evidently, the supplier didn't have any pigs ready to slaughter in the sight range I'd requested, so they sent the closest thing they had. The front legs were frozen straight out by the head and the hind legs were straight out from the back of the pig so it didn't fit in any of the coolers we had available so we loaded it in the back of my pickup truck and carried it home. It was wrapped up tight in plastic; when we got it home, we suck it in a couple of industrial garbage bags (one over the front end and the other over the back end tapped the open ends of the bags together with duct tape, and lugged it upstairs and dumped it in the bathtub on top of a tarp, then filled the tub with cold water. My brother got to my house before 8 am Thursday morning and the pig was thawed so we lugged it back downstairs and opened up the plastic to discover that the pig has been butterflied - very good if you're wanting to smoke it in a smoker or open pit, but not for spit roasting. The spine had even been split open on the inside so it would lay nice and flat. We cleaned it up and washed it, then seasoned the inside and got it on the spit the best we could, tying it on with heavy twine. Neither of us is good with knots so we tied a lot. Got the motor mounted on the spit and the spit on the tripods. It was very damp here so I started two chimneys of lump charcoal to establish a good bed of coals while my brother applied soy sauce to the pig's skin. When the charcoal was burning good, I dumped it in the fire pit, added hickory, and we started up the rotisserie at around 9:15 am (about the same time a couple of cousins showed up to help). Most of the pig was done by 4:45 pm or so, so we stopped the rotisserie and focused on getting heat on the areas that weren't quite to temperature. We took it away from the fire about 5:15 pm and let the pig rest while I hunted for a 10 mm wrench to remove the spine clamp; the wrench had evidently wandered off on is own adventure after I'd used it that morning. Due to the pig being butterflied, it flopped around a lot and because of that and shrinkage, we had to stop and add additional twine to secure the pig to the spit. Also, with the legs tied up stretched out in front and behind the pig, the pig was wider than the firepit so the legs didn't cook very well. We also burned a few patches of skin. I had invited friends and family to come by and get pork to go; the general consensus was that it was very tasty except for the burnt patches of skin and the undercooked legs. I fire up the big grill to finish up the legs after most everyone has left. So, the verdict: I think things went pretty well considering it was my first attempt; I certainly learned a lot. A lot of the issues we encountered were due to the pig being frozen and butterflied; I have some ideas for handling those issues if they reoccur. I think we can handle the undercooked legs by bringing the hind legs up under the pig to shorten up the total length instead of leaving them stretched out behind. Oh - we also had a major grease fire when the oil in the propane deep fryer my brother was using to fry french fries at lunch caught fire, but that's another story. We also had a few rain events and some pretty strong wind gusts, plus a tornado warning after the cook was done. PXL_20240411_150948483.TS.mp4 PXL_20240411_172236138.TS.mp4 PXL_20240411_183900220.TS.mp4

Ha. All our prejudices are wonderfully illustrated by this thread. The young “grasshopper” brings us a story we oldies would never have found ourselves, we hate it because it brings our precious club into contact with the world of the nouveau riche, we hope that it turns out that the Man owns the tool and rail at the fact that a woman might afford to get someone else to do her barbecuing for her. I love it. Long live our weirdly wired human brains.