jdbower

All this pizza talk is getting me hungry, that looks great!

Poor man's prime rib Meat: ~3lb round roast Brine: None Rub: Balsamic and Olive Oil and with Dizzy's Cow Lick Fuel: KKEC Smoke: None Method: Indirect, Main Grill Rotisserie: No Pit Temp: 250 Pull Temp: 130 Time: About 2 hours Draft Control: Stoker I almost forgot to show off about a round roast I picked up and ate a few weeks ago. Rubbed in olive oil and balsamic with Dizzy's Cow Lick before I tossed it on the grill. Despite continually putting the meat on too soon (should have dropped the temp to 225 to be more on time, methinks) the results were great, it was more like a prime rib than a round roast. Rather than letting it dwell like I did for my earlier prime rib I pulled the roast and wrapped it in foil for half an hour before the wife came home and I sliced it. Tasted great with a little horseradish sauce on the side but the Cow Lick was a bit superfluous in my opinion, next time I'll do without.

FYI, what may be the final release of StokerLog R5.0 was announced here. You can click here to download the image file directly.

Good for you! I'm sure you'll be happy with your new toy. Another great way to pass the time is to research your wife's plants to see which ones can be used as smoke wood.

Something I haven't quite been able to figure out about the CyberQ is what type of USB support it will have. A lot of people (myself included) have assumed it will be like a newer version of the Stoker and act like a small embedded computer with a robust set of drivers and an IP stack - effectively acting like a USB master device. This would probably mean that it should have a "Type A" USB connector on it and a special USB A-A crossover connector of sorts to talk to a laptop: If it has the Type B connector it's more likely that a lot of USB dreams will be squashed and all it can do is create something like a virtual serial port on a laptop. This would make it more of a dumb slave device and mean that you'd need an attached computer to do a lot of the interesting stuff but with new laptops available for a few hundred dollars that can have a recipe program and all sorts of other features this isn't necessarily a show-stopper. Of course, a connector is just a hardware design choice and it's possible to have either type of implementation with either connector type. Either way I'm curious to see what the specs are one it's released.

I think the biggest con is being subjected to pictures of some of our members... The only reason a thread or section like that doesn't exist is because it hasn't come up before, pictures including actual people are a bit few and far between on this forum but I've always hated getting my picture taken so I'm fine with it Feel free to post some pictures of yourself with your cooker (as long as there's a KK in it it'll fit right in under Komodo Photos) and if there's enough interest we can pull them out into a dedicated section.

Re: Answers

I'd like to point out that in the first two shots there was a little kid and a chunk of meat about the same size as the little kid. Once the meat was cooked there was no more little kid. Are you sure you didn't get confused when you were putting things on the grill?

The big question is do they match in size and color? Welcome to the club!

Don't you hate it when you have to settle for something like that? I didn't realize it was a Primo underneath. It may be interesting if you have an all-stainless motif going on, but I do like the form and function (and comparative pricing!) of the KK a bit better I'm moving this to the Ceramic World forum where there's a lot of other competitive information.

Uh oh, I think Sanny's having flashback flashbacks! Deja vu all over again...

Here's the link to that particular article in the Hitchhiker's Guide to Ceramic Cookery: http://www.nakedwhiz.com/flash.htm

Re: Reszearch questions Some of these will need to wait for Dennis, but I'll see what I can answer. I would imagine it depends on what you replace it with. If you swap it out for a reasonable burner that you can use as a primary heat source I doubt there will be an issue, but if you swap it for one that offers 2 million BTUs of raw pork-to-charcoal-in-6.3-seconds power I'd say you may have an issue. KK is friendly enough that they've tended to offer warranty repairs for a lot of stuff as long as gross negligence isn't involved. The thermometer goes up to 750F, anything in that range should be OK and possibly higher. How high did you want to go? A lot I don't have exact numbers but if they don't appear shortly I can try to measure. The grills aren't a regular shape so calculations aren't as trivial as they are for a round grill. There are also multiple levels, you could have three levels going in the 23" grill (main grill, upper grill and lower grill or main, lower, sear) or two in the 19" (main and upper or main and sear). The measurement is roughly the diameter of the main grill so we're talking about around 415 square inches for the 23" main and nearly 300 for the 19.5" before you take into account the accessory grills. I'll let people with more experience with other brands chime in but I'd say the same or better is a safe bet. It's a very well-sealed unit so I doubt it'll be worse and the walls are very thick to trap heat - less charcoal used to maintain temperature means less airflow which means more moisture. They vary widely based on location and over time. In Boston I needed to have a second shipper deliver from a NY terminal to the New England area. I'd ask Dennis for a shipping quote to your city/state to get a more precise answer. You may want to check any particular competitions you're interested in but I doubt it. You'll see a lot of BGEs for two reasons. One is they're very popular and very well marketed, high sales volume = more visibility which leads to an even higher sales volume. The second is that they're much lighter than a KK is which makes them more portable. They're also pretty much assembly line products which means you don't cry as much when one breaks - you just replace it. Not great answers to most of your questions but hopefully it helps a bit.

My wife is amused. Just about every time I cook for her the drip pan comes out all crusty and burned but I dutifully scrub it clean until it shines again before I repeat the process for the next cook. Besides a routine scraping as needed she doesn't seem to see why I go through the effort or making it sparkle. My thoughts are that if I wasn't using a baste that caramelizes on the bottom of the pan (thanks LarryR, but now I'm stuck cooking poultry!) the drippings may be useful as gravy or sauce and if I keep the pan clean on a regular basis this is much more feasible. So what's your drip pan look like?

Boiling should kill off the worst of the dangerous stuff. I would also consider some sort of a physical filter, a couple of layers of cheesecloth or a paper filter of some sort. Nothing worse than sand in your cook, and it may get out some of the foam. If you boil it all the way down you've got your own source for sea salt

Would those pets happen to be white meat or red?

Dennis couldn't even find tiles that are all the same size? If you're doing low and slows you may be able to source a low temperature thermometer locally as a stop-gap until your replacement arrives. Of course if you have a Guru/Stoker you may not even need that. Glad the rubber ducky made it there finally, now you can experiment with all that local smoke wood and tell us how it goes!

Another option is to get things nice and smokey - a cold night is good for this since there tends to be a lot of steam as well as smoke. When my Stoker's 10CFM fan powers on it forces smoke out everyplace it can, if you can coax the Guru fan on you may be able to find the leak by watching for where the smoke exits. Using some wadded up foil can close off the temperature probe port or other open spots. If nothing else seems to be leaking the only other source of airflow is through the fan assembly itself, you can check to make sure the flap falls back into place when it's done blowing. Of course if it never happens again it may have just been a weird atmospheric fluke or a little too much testing of the cooking sherry

Jeez FM, you've had a busy weekend! I imagined a chicken cook yesterday but today's been miserable and rainy and a tad more chilly than it is by you. Looks delicious and I'll have to track down a good pit beef place next time I head down to Linthicum.

Out of curiosity, did you make the dough or was it store-bought? Up here a "calzone" is apparently the same as a "hot pocket" (I bought an "Italian Calzone" locally and it was a bad Italian sub in a calzone wrapping - not even any cheese!). If the one decent pizza place I've found doesn't sell them I may be forced to make my own

A spike is normal, as the cooker heat soaks the same O2 levels will allow for a hotter fire. The Guru should compensate for this over time, sounds like yours did not this time around. A few things to check: 1. Leaks. If the ash door was cracked open accidentally or the rear gas door this could have caused issues. Also if the lid wasn't latched fully or if there wasn't anything in the probe port. A last thing would be the fan assembly. Stoker fans have a flap that seals the opening when the fan's not running but if you install the fan upside down it's always open. Not sure if the Guru fans are the same. 2. Wind. In high winds I've found it's hard to keep low temperatures without sealing things up almost completely. Even just cracking the top damper can cause issues (stupid Bernoulli and his partial pressures ruining it for all of us!). 3. Temperature. Electronics don't like it when the temperatures are too low. Some Stoker users put their control unit into a plastic container (sometimes with a heating pad) when the temps drop too low. 20F is the magic number when issues start happening for the Stoker, but I've been good for a few cooks at lower temps (but I also don't do extra long, super low cooks). Does the Guru have the ability to export a log file of sorts? One nice thing about the Stoker is StokerLog, it shows a graph of pit and food temperatures but, more importantly, the fan state. I'd be interested to know if the fan was on during the cook (indicating that the Guru may have been having issues due to temperature) or if it was off the entire time (indicating that maybe the Guru wasn't the primary source of oxygen and we need to plug some leaks).

Salvaging or Sacrilege? I found the ends of the cut much better than the more rare center of the cut - I would say erring on the side of medium would be a big benefit. I have to confess, my wife wanted chili and the leftover tri-tip was diced, lightly pan fried with garlic and ground beef, and dumped into the chili pot with the rest of the ingredients. It adds a very nice flavor to the chili and being more well done (as well as diced) takes care of my texture issues. So is this an acceptable use for the cut or a sin tantamount to ketchup on a fillet mignon?

That's actually quite the interesting question. I'm sure there are regional differences, but there may also be differences depending on what part of speech "BBQ" is. For me (growing up in NJ with parents from PA farmland and the greater Cleveland area): "A BBQ" was any family get together that happens outdoors. I think it's assumed that something will also be cooked outdoors but I think a few exceptions were made. "BBQ" the food group was seldom used but often relegated to the pulled meat variety with sauce. At a BBQ, ironically, BBQ was rarely served at my house. "BBQ" as a verb wasn't used much either. One grilled. And it's what I still call grilling, high temperature cooking over a flame. I suppose the open pit cooking of chicken including a BBQ sauce baste that we did on the farm could have been called BBQing. Now I consider BBQing to be cooking anything from about 250-350F over charcoal (usually with smoke, but the sauce is definitely optional). Grilling is 400F and above and should be charcoal, but I'll allow gas in a pinch (350-400F is ambiguous and can go either way). Anything less than 250F or so is smoking. Not really hard and fast definitions, but they work for me

It's the root of all civilization, of course! An interesting article theorizes that it was the ability to cook food that was the driving distinguishing feature that allowed humans to become the dominant species. I guess that makes a KK the pinnacle of civilization, then