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Made some chicken with our version of the Bama white sauce. So good! Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Since I officially placed my order for a 32" Cobolt Blue KK, I figured I should introduce myself. Canadian living in Delaware, backyard hack who enjoys cooking, cars, and golf. Started with a Brinkmann electric drum style smoker that I used for 10 years (had 2 over that time). Graduated to a Weber Smoky Mountain, and a Weber Summit gas grill for 4 years. Then replaced Smoky Mountain with a Kamado Joe Big Joe for 2.5 years Now replaced Summit with a Lynx 54" Pro grill on NG Just (today) sold KJ and bought a Traeger Ironwood, so I have something to at least smoke on with while I wait for the 32" KK. Had a Traeger 7 years ago (for 3 weeks) but only had a small deck and wife said we didn't have room for 2 bbqs so it had to go. Great for a few things but terrible for sear and hi temp cooking. End result will be a 32"KK, my Lynx, Traeger, and adding a Lynx 30" griddle. Yes most will say, I may not use anything but my KK after I have one, but the Traeger makes some amazing chicken that I dont have to babysit, and the 1000F sear burner on the Lynx is nice to have when doing a reverse sear on another unit. There are only 2 of us but I do enjoy mixing different processes and eating a fine steak or smoked food. Looking forward to experimenting with the KK (yes I bought 15 cases of cocochar at the same time).

So good! Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Great cooks, everyone!! I had out of town guests for the weekend, so I had to welcome them properly on Friday with a nice cowboy ribeye steak cook. On the KK with the local corn. Sorry no plated shots of the full meal (steaks, corn, mushroom pasta, Greek Salad), but a nice close up of the ribeyes after the sear.

I was rehearsing lighting the KK as I sat on the train home on Friday night. Home safely and one hour or so later...heaven.

After 3 hours of braising. Shredded and ready for a nice crusty bun.

I've done something similar in the past but this time I decided to make a pancake and waffle syrup/topping. Simple ingredients including some pure Canadian mapple syrup sent to me by a friend from Canada. (Thank You @MacKenzie) I started by grilling some peaches in two batches. When they come off the grill put them in a bowl and cover with cellophane. Letting them steam and cool down in a covered bowl makes it easier to peel off the skin. Peel then chop the peaches. About to make 5 cups of peach puree. Add the peach puree, mapple syrup, sugar, lemon juice and a little water. Bring to a rolling boil then simmer for 5 minutes. Water bath can for 20 minutes. Let cool over night. Sunday morning breakfast.

Had a Konro night last night. Nothing too fancy but definitely tasty. Tsukune Yuzu Ponzu chicken Orange Honey Shrimp Grilled carrots Served with Jasmin rice and a honey Ginseng green tea.

That pic is just crazy....man the surface area. I can't wrap my head around how many butts you could do on main and upper grills with this thing. Beautiful beast there. And even more KK grills in Ga....awesome.

Ground some Durum wheat berries to make flour for today's spaghetti. Made a batch of meatballs, fortunately the sauce was made a few days ago.:)

We like to skin, salt, partially dry, and freeze our garden tomatoes. We haven't opened a can in well over a decade. Living in the "California" region of Italy, we're not hidebound by tradition. In Sicily and the south of Italy they make a very concentrated tomato paste from the best tomatoes they can grow. It's nothing like commercial paste in cans. As winemakers migrate to new climates, they adapt, recognizing which grape varieties grow best in their new digs. Similarly, the most remarkable tomatoes in California are dry-farmed Early Girls from Santa Cruz, and they make a spectacular estrattu tomato paste. Making this paste on fruit roll trays lining our 24 American Harvester dehydrator trays was quite the nuisance, so for a few years I've been meaning to make a dehydrator optimized for drying tomatoes and tomato paste. Each full sheet pan holds well over a gallon of liquid. The frame of this dehydrator is a 10 shelf sheet pan rack, that accepts full sheet pans with Silpat liners. The heat source is a Com-Pak wall heater suspended in a box, controlled by a Johnson A421 Digital Temperature Controller. The exit fans are an AirTitan T8-N crawl space fan array, with a control panel that looks much more at home in this application. The airflow is blocked on alternate sides of each sheet pan, directing the air to pass over each pan. In initial testing, tomato slices dry much more uniformly than in any commercial dryer I've used.

As we all know every species has it's own unique flavor profile, oak tastes much different than mesquite. I'm surprised nobody mentions these charcoals flavor. Is it strong like mesquite or light like apple? My problem here in Indonesia before I started making my own charcoal was not knowing what it was going to taste like because it was mixed or species unknown. Mystery charcoal makes it more difficult to get repeatable consistent results. If I was going to smoke a chicken with applewood, I would not want to use mesquite because you would never taste the apple. The reason I fell in love with the coffee char was because of how it tastes.. there are many much more dense woods here but I also personally refuse to cut trees to make charcoal. There are great mangrove charcoals but I feel you are either part of the problem or working on the solution. The coffee trees are cut every 15 years because their yields go down. The tamarind charcoal I buy is only trimmed branches, and of course, no trees are cut to make the coconut shell char. Just saying

Tee hee. I knew there was something I had forgotten. I have not sealed the lid on the smoke pot with paste for a long time. The lid is good and heavy and fits well so I rely on that for sealing. I have to admit that I have not checked for leakage once it has got going so I don't know if I am undermining the effectiveness of the smoke pot significantly by not adding the extra seal. I remember @Syzygies saying that he found applying the seal was good work for hands that might otherwise be idle. Decided my hands would be better occupied with a drink.

It takes about 2.5- 3 months for delivery to Australia. They come individually direct from Indonesia. I would assume it would be similar times. Maybe a few extra days at sea.

Love it!

LOL.....oh well. I'm happy just to be using charcoal again.

Leftovers today.

Fogo ships. That's how I get the Premiums like the Cuban/Argentina/Brazil ones. My local BBQ shop has started carrying their regular lump. Also look for Rockwood, if you can find it nearby. There's always Amazon. That's how I tried the Kamado Joe lump. Good stuff and well packaged for shipping. Dude, Royal Oak is soooo passé now! LOL

My first was in stock. Then when I was looking to add the 32 Dennis proactively sent me pics of grills that looked like a match. My 32 turned out to be at sea, in transit to the stateside warehouse. Just a short wait and it was on a truck to the east coast.

Having examined the smoker properly I now know that my proposal, as set out above, was flawed. The tube that fits into the KK means you cannot "slip the smoker off" without undoing the bolts (see picture below). I am now more relaxed about all of this. I load the smoker with just the amount of pellets that I think I need, they burn out and I leave the smoker to cool before unbolting from the KK.

Hi Paul. The Husband has returned from his foraging, sorry business, trip to NYC and he came back with these. Are they the right sort to be using for your tortilla recipe? I think they are, from your description.

Thanks it went on the water last Tuesday so hopefully within a month or so. Will be counting the days!

Hello All - I am looking forward to learning some of the tips and tricks of using a KK from this group. I have been cooking on a primo xl for the past 10 years, and after rebuilding the hinge (again) decided it was time to evaluate long term options. After research, debate and a couple of conversations with Dennis (thank you), we decided on the 42. It was delivered last week and we built the ramp to pull it up to the house, got it located, etc. Now working through burn in/venting and some of the basic short cooks to “get to know it”. Looking forward to trying the first long cook over the holiday weekend. Here are a few of the delivery/moving day/ first cook pictures: Cheers

Grilled peaches. These are part of a special cook. I'll post that in a couple of days once I get a proper money shot.

Last night some Mediterranean'ish Souflima. Today another loaf in my Challenger Bread Pan. This time with a bit of Einkorn in addition to my usual hard red wheat, spelt and rye blend. The souflima is pork tenderloin medallions marinated in olive oil, lemon juice, garlic, and Dizzy Pig Mediterranean'ish. Obviously served with fresh tzatziki and homemade pita's.

Tony you are killing me, dinner is awesome, local corn, nothing beats that in my mind. I, also enjoy meals of the deck and usually start with breakfast there.

His work is amazing: Sam Maloof Woodworker I oscillate between obsessed with walnut and obsessed with cherry. This was opportunistic cherry, it will turn red with more sun. My next door neighbor is a master woodworker; he used to work at Berkeley Mills and now has his own shop other side of our fence. Steve Jobs lived in an empty mansion because nothing was good enough for him, until he bought Pixar and they walked him down the street to see Berkeley Mills. In any case, my neighbor has a serious problem with exotic scrap wood; we've sat around fires that included bits of mahogany and teak. We've bought various pieces from him (outdoor table that used to be theirs, solid cherry kitchen table, an exact reproduction/replacement for particle board box store bathroom vanity in solid cherry). Much of the storage in my garage is from his "customer changed their minds" cabinetry. This was an unneeded sheet of 7-ply (middle layer MDF) plywood with Cherry veneer, that he sold me. I loved the math involved in how he reworked my cut list, to get new edges on all sides with a minimum number of cuts. I love my $900 Kreg track saw table, but his table saw is in a different league. In any case, they're also flooded with tomatoes, and they'll be using this dryer too. In Sicily they spread paste on tables in the sun, over multiple days. I buy two 20 pound boxes of Santa Cruz dry farmed Early Girl tomatoes at a farmers market, for $100. Wash several times, core, quarter, add 35g salt per ten pounds gross (here, 140g salt) and simmer in a commercial stock pot. (My favorite is the VOLLRATH SAUCE POT, 22QT. PROFESSIONAL STAINLESS STEEL - 3905.) Pass through coarse then fine food mill screens. By my records this yields 20 quarts of sauce. Each full sheet pan lined with Silpat will hold six quarts liquid to the brim, with an absolutely level dehydrator (note the leveling feet on my base). Seven trays is 42 quarts, so 20 quarts is less than half full, a comfortable margin. One scrapes and combines down to fewer trays as the sauce thickens. One aims for a 4:1 or 5:1 reduction. This used to take on the order of 12 hours in a conventional dehydrator; we'll see with this new rig. Right now the heater is 1000 watts; I've ordered a 1500 watt replacement to be able to reach any temperature / fan setting combination that I want. My version of estrattu is less salty and less dried than the Sicilian original. Theirs did not require refrigeration; we fridge or freeze ours, leaving a concentrated but fresher flavor. This is a matter of taste. For cooking year round, we freeze packets of skinned (shown above after blanching 30 seconds), sliced, salted, partially dried garden heirloom tomatoes. I'll be laying them in these same Silpat-lined full sheet pans, oiled with olive oil. 22.75 square feet of surface area (7 full sheet pans lined with Silpat). That’s nominally a bit more than the 24 American Harvester dehydrator trays we used to use. However, one fills an 18" x 26" full sheet pan much more efficiently, and efficiency isn’t a liability because there’s 3” of headroom per tray, and stronger airflow. That takes on the order of ten hours, depending on temperature and airflow. Again, we'll see with the new rig. Tom Colicchio's "Think Like a Chef" had a strong influence on me when it came out, even though we don't follow the recipes. He had a version of fussy tomatoes in there: Following his lead, we used to roast tomatoes in a cazuela in our Kamado, pulling off the skins as they came loose. This is spectacular but doesn't really scale well. Later I spotted versions of precious tomatoes in books by some of my other zombie masters (such as Thomas Keller), and I reworked the approach to use a dehydrator as above, for handling our entire crop (200 pounds so far this year). It stuns me that something like this isn't for sale, e.g. at Eataly in NYC; if I had a restaurant, I'd be busy stocking tomatoes for the year, selling my overflow through Eataly. If I go to a $100 Italian restaurant, I more or less have to avoid tomato dishes. I have to ask first the provenance of the tomatoes, which makes me sound like a jerk if I don't nail the tone of the question right, but otherwise I can taste the canned tomato effect, which I don't like. We grind our own flour, which startles many people who grind their own coffee. They need a drug as inducement for obsessive behavior that comes naturally to me. Similarly, my peer group for this project would be my neighbors who make beer. (One neighbor is an owner of More Beer, where I bought the temperature controller.) Again, the alcohol is an inducement, but every beer maker becomes a DIY fanatic. The scale of my dryer project is nothing compared to some of the garage brewing rigs I've seen.

Love that and that walnut veneer on the plywood is beautiful. I grew up with a house full of 60's walnut Sam Maloof furniture. He was a close family friend and my inspiration to work in wood as a teenager.

@MacKenzie and @Tyrus are right. We did cut our rod and I am not totally sure that it shouldn't be a little longer but too late to change that. I recently asked Dennis for some extra rods because I have bought a new motor. Might try the grinding method this time around. This is not the right route to contact @DennisLinkletter, I know, but just in case he is reading this: it would be good to ship accessories like the rotisserrie and the smoker with a photo of the assembled product and/or the steps in between. They are awesome pieces of kit but I spent ages fearing and not using them until I finally got around to finding the relevant information on the forum. Much better to be able to get on and use them quickly out of the box using instructions from the maker.