jdbower

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

Re: While posting this morning I realized I was late for wor I love it! They look great!

I was hoping you'd say something like that You wouldn't happen to have a source for that, would you? 1400 degree protection would come in handy for a lot of things.

The 1 hour was from memory (a few days after the fact) I took a look at the timestamps of some pictures and it looks like it was 42 minutes from the time I put the steak on the grill to the time it came off, that includes the time it would have taken for the grill to get back up to temp once I closed the lid. Temp going on was slightly above fridge temps, maybe 40-45F or so. I'll try a non-marinaded version next time and I may try slicing it before cooking. Good idea about some size indication on the cut, I'll have to add that next time. For the picture details here's what I did. First set up a tripod or another fixed support, you'll want two or more pictures with exactly the same framing. Take one picture exposing for the flames, most cameras will do this automatically if you disable the flash. Then take one exposing for the meat, again the easiest way may be just to enable the flash. For those of you with cameras that support it you can also look into something called "spot metering" - I may explore that option the next time around but I was getting hungry. You can also just adjust the exposure or use something called "bracketing" which will take a sequence of shots from underexposed through overexposed. I used Photoshop CS3 Extended but I'm sure many other (cheaper!) programs that support layers have similar functions. Load the shot exposed for the flames into the program. Then load the shot exposed for the meat. Use the Lasso tool on the meat shot to select just the meat, get close to the edges of the meat but it's not critical to be 100% exact. Copy the meat and paste it into the shot exposed for the flames. This should appear as another layer and it will have a weird look to it as it'll be a sharp cutoff between the two images. Adjust the layer's opacity until you get the look you want, this will allow the edges to blur together and help the layers to blend properly. In this image I used about 67% opacity.

Meat: Chicken Brine: ~18 hours in Kosher salt Fuel: Cowboy Smoke: None Method: Indirect, Main Grill, Roadside baste Rotisserie: No Pit Temp: 350 Pull Temp: 160 Time: About 3 hours Draft Control: Stoker + StokerLog I was too lazy to change out the charcoal, but 350 could go either way when it comes to lump vs. extruded. No smoke this time, but my wife is addicted to this roadside baste. This time I tried red wine vinegar, but the verdict was that, while delicious, she prefers the apple cider I used on a turkey breast. Maybe one of these days I'll actually try the white vinegar that the recipe recommends Needless to say it was delicious and experimenting with vinegars just means I need to make it over and over and over again!

And I was thinking he had issues in the past with too many BUIs - BBQing Under the Influence.

The marinade may have played a factor. I tend to like my steaks buttery-smooth (fillet mignon, prime rib) or firm and seasoned like a sirloin with a nice rub. The tri-tip was kind of a combination of the two, not quite tender and not quite firm. Rather than being "steaky" with a more uniform consistency it was more clear I was eating a muscle - if that makes any sense. I think it would have been a bit better had I let it cook a little longer and gotten it more on the medium side of medium rare. I'm certainly open to trying another one as a change of pace and next time maybe I'll try to find one that hasn't been marinaded to compare.

Looks like they'll be tasty! Out of curiosity, what do you use that rubber tubing out of your Polder port for?

Meat: Morton's of Omaha Tri-Tip from Costco Brine: Pre-marinaded with papaya enzymes among other things Fuel: Cowboy Smoke: None Method: Direct, Lower Grill Rotisserie: No Pit Temp: 450-550 Pull Temp: 135 Time: About 40 minutes Draft Control: Manual I found a pre-marinaded Tri-Tip at Costco so I figured I'd give it a shot. Building a high temp fire at night really shows an impressive glow from underneath the KK: I also experimented with some HDR photography. I used my tripod (a nice Gitzo CF model with a Markins M20 head) and took one picture exposing for the flames which left the meat very dark, then I took another and popped the flash which muted the inferno in the KK but showed the meat nicely. Then I combined them in post: The results were tender and juicy with a strong beefy flavor to it, but next time around I may add a rub to the meat. I ended up measuring the temps at the thin end of the cut which made the part we ate fresh from the grill a perfect temperature but left the rest of the meat slightly underdone so it should be perfect when reheated. All-in-all it's not my favorite cut of meat from a texture standpoint but it was still very good. I also need to bring in my tripod for the finished shots, there's not much in focus handheld at F1.4

For those interested the Stoker bulkhead adapter outside diameter measures 1.25" however there is a retaining clip that extends to 1.4". This clip can compress significantly and can easily be removed if needed. I'm hoping that the inside diameter of the Guru inducer tube measures between 1.3" and 1.4" so it can be a universal solution, otherwise I'm sure Rock can easily find a slightly smaller bulkhead adapter. Since it would make it easy for Guru users to upgrade ( ) to a Stoker without investing in a new blower mounting scheme I'm sure Rock would see a business case.

Think the smaller Guru port will still accept the bulkhead adapter from the Stoker? My guess is yes, but if you like I can take some measurements for you.