wilburpan

That’s a PBS thing. They don’t allow identifying brands on equipment used during the show. You can sponsor the show and get mentioned during the beginning and ending credits, like Komodo Kamado does, but you can’t have the equipment be labeled. All the grills are set up this way, with the label either obscured, covered, or removed. All PBS shows are like this. If you watch This Old House, and pay close attention, you’ll see that there’s electrical tape over the brand names of the drills and other tools they use. It’s not too hard to guess which drill they are using, since Dewalt is yellow, Milwaukee is red, Makita is blue, and so on, but they obscure the labels anyway.

Oh, I agree — I’m sure it’s handy. But I think it’s also far away from “must have” territory. Put it this way: in terms of accessories, I would much rather have a baking stone, a rotisserie set up, or the KK basket splitter before getting a Divide and Conquer system.

To be honest, I’ve never had a situation where a split setup would seem to be that much better than reconfiguring the grill while doing a reverse sear. Here’s my take. When doing a reverse sear, I typically have the dome thermometer in the 200-225ºF range, the deflector plate in, and the meat on the main grill. After the steak hits the IT I want, I’ll put the steak on a plate temporarily, put some gloves on, take the main grate out, and then take the deflector plate out. This would be difficult if the grill was at steak searing temperatures. But at 200-225ºF, it’s not a problem at all. Then I put the searing grate in, open the vents all the way, and wait for Smaug to heat up to steak searing temps. This takes a few minutes, but it’s much faster than you may think. I remember once talking about the KJ Divide and Conquer system as solving a problem that didn’t really exist. To be fair, I’ve never used the D&C system, but then again, I can’t see doing the first part of a reverse sear with a full on fire so that I could go straight from the first step to the second step of the cook without reconfiguring anything. If I’m going to start a reverse sear with a full on fire, I’ll just cook the steak directly, since I can get results like this without the reverse sear.

I don’t think there’s a health issue. The only problem I can see is if you’re grilling something with a tendency to stick, like fish, you might want to clean the black stuff off the grates. If you’re not having a problem with sticking, however, don’t mess with success.

Sorry! I guess there is one advantage to jumping in the deep end when buying a grill. There are other LOTR dragons: Glaring, Ancalagon the Black (probably not the best for your grill), Scatha, and the Beast of Gondolin. Hope that helps. And congratulations on your new KK grill! You’re going to love using it.

Congratulations! I’m going to be really interested in how your catering venture goes.

Welcome to the KK community, Aussie Ora! I think you’re going to be more than pleasantly surprised with how your new KK grill performs compared to a ceramic kamado. And earth tone pebble tiles are the best. Even in the rain.

Add me to the list of people saying that you should hold off on the temperature controller for now. All I can say is that prior to getting my KK grill, I had ZERO experience with low and slow BBQ cooking, and I was able to dial in Smaug to a temperature of 200-225ºF without much problem. That’s how easy a KK grill is to control. My KK grill is a 23”, and I have to remove the right side table when using the rotisserie motor. It just pops off, and mounting the motor is not too much of a problem. I have more issues with snaking an extension cord out to the grill due to the locations of electrical outlets in my house.

That is hilarious.

To get to the first unread post, there’s a little circle or star in front of the post title (circled in green in the screenshot below). Click on the circle or star, and it should take you to the first unread post. (If it’s a star, then it’s a post you’ve started or replied to. Otherwise, it’s a circle.)

生日快樂！

In older versions of this forum, when starting a new thread, I would often used the “Preview” option before submitting the post. I don’t see that option in the current version of the forum. Can this feature be reinstated?

For those of you who want to try squid (and if you like calamari, I suggest that you do), there is a difference between fresh and frozen whole squid. Both of them can be cooked well, but the fresh squid has less issues with becoming tough while cooking. As far as tenderness goes, I wouldn’t change a thing about this cook. The way this cook came out, I don’t anticipate that I’ll need to do the milk soaking or cross hatching methods in the future if I’m using fresh squid. I have seen both of these techniques used for frozen squid.

Congratulations!

For our first wedding anniversary, my wife and I took a trip to Italy. It was the first time for both of us. One of the meals we had was in Murano, which is well know for its glassmaking tradition. But what I remember most from that part of our trip was eating a plate of grilled squid. It was very simple: squid, cleaned, grilled, and seasoned with salt, pepper, and some lemon. So simple, yet so delicious. It’s a meal that I still remember even though it was more than 15 years ago. We were at the Korean grocery store picking up food to do Korean BBQ. At this grocery store, I always stroll through the seafood section even if I’m not intending to get any seafood. I noticed that they had fresh squid for sale. I picked up three of them, to see what I could do with them. Here’s the squid. As it turns out, cleaning and prepping squid is pretty simple. The first order of business is to cut the tentacle end from the body. I made a cut between the eye and the tentacles. Once I did this, the guts came out easily. Then I rinsed the squid under running water, to rinse away the ink and any slime from the inside of the body. The bodies have a long thin bone in them. It looks clear, almost like plastic. You can just grab it and pull it out. The bodies are also covered with a thin skin. It’s easy to peel the skin off. Once the skin is off, the fins can be peeled off the main part of the body. Some people say that removing the skin and the fins isn’t necessary. I took the skin off all the squid bodies, but I left the fins on two of them. For the tentacles, there’s a sharp beak in the center. This just pops out. After I was done disassembling the squid, I patted them with a paper towel to make them as dry as I could. Then I sprinkled some olive oil on them. Cook the parts on the grill at high heat. I once posted a picture of Smaug cooking just four hotdogs. Cooking just three squid is equally ridiculous. Sprinkle some salt and pepper on them, and add a drizzle of lime juice (we were out of lemons), and you’re done. These squid were really good. The one thing I didn’t anticipate was the development of a slimy juice inside the bodies of some of the squid as it cooked. The juice that developed had an interesting taste to it. If you like the green stuff inside a lobster, or uni (sea urchin sushi), this stuff tasted like that. I think it was a result of me not rinsing out the squid enough. The fins were indeed edible, but not as nice as the body. It was a little tougher. I’ll definitely be doing this again, although next time I’ll be sure to rinse the squid more carefully.

So I’ve been digging into this a bit. There are some interesting characteristics of collagen that I’ve found diving through the biomedical literature. First of all, collagen is not a pure chemical compound, like water or carbon dioxide. There are many different collagens that vary from species to species and even between parts of the body in the same animal. Second, it appears that collagen denatures in the 105-115ºF range. This is under laboratory conditions, which may not be completely apply in a piece of meat. But given that the IT that we tend to shoot for with low and slow cooks (195-205ºF) is clearly higher than that range, there’s probably more to the denaturation of collagen to gelatin in a piece of meat than just hitting a given internal temperature.

If I wanted to put that much work into smoking a pork butt, I’d be cooking on a Weber grill instead. ***ducks***

Wait — I thought I was a BBQ genius, because everyone kept telling me that even though I was getting excellent results from my low and slow cooks without having had any low and slow BBQ experience, the grill had nothing to do with it. Now I am sad. (Not really!)

Congratulations on the new grill! You’re going to love it. Since you’ve used gas grills, having a KK is going to be a revelation. I’ve often said that using a KK grill is like having a charcoal grill that’s nearly as convenient as a gas grill. I’ve had that burn-through thing happen, where the fire seems to leave a part of the charcoal basket alone, but that rarely happens. I haven’t identified any specific factor, but having chunks of lump that are too big seems to contribute to this. For building a low and slow fire, I try to distribute the bigger chunks across the basket, instead of having them all in one area.

Terrific job! That’s a great way to break in your KK grill. It only gets better from here.

Although there’s something to the idea of finding equivalents of temperature x time with varying conditions of temperature and time, there are going to be limitations to that. To take an extreme example, you could cook a moderately thick 1/4 burger in a KK grill at 200ºF for as long as it takes to cook it through. That’s not going to be equivalent to cooking the same burger for a short amount of time over a 700ºF fire, no matter what the time period is. Over the hot fire, the outside is going to be cooked to a greater degree than the interior. My feeling is that making those sorts of adjustments happen on the fly, and come with experience. If I want to cook my pork butt at 225ºF, and I see that Smaug settled in at 250ºF that day for whatever reason, I’ll know to check on it sooner than expected, while dialing down the vents a bit. This is one of the things that makes cooking different from baking. If I’m sautéing some garlic on my stove, I can use the same pan, the same amount of oil, and the same setting on my stove, and some days the garlic just cooks faster than I expect. I’ll adjust for that as it happens by pulling the pan off the flame and turning down the burner. Ed also alludes to one other key factor when he mentions the three identical pieces of meat. There aren’t three identical pieces of meat. The difference between one rack of ribs and the next, or one brisket and the next, probably overrides any consistency you’re looking for with time and temperature.

This may be a minority opinion, but if this is your first brisket, I’m going to suggest that you skip the smoking wood to start. Just make a 50/50 salt and pepper rub, and smoke away. Once you’re sure you have a good handle on brisket cooks, then start adding in smoking wood. The reason is that brisket seems to be one of the trickier cooks to do. If things don’t turn out the way that you want, you want to be able to identify what might have gone wrong. By not using a smoking wood this time, you take the choice of smoking wood out of the picture. If you’re worried that you won’t get that smokiness, unless you’re using Dennis’ coconut charcoal, whatever charcoal you’re using will add enough smoke flavor on its own.

One of the things I love about having a KK grill is that it’s like having a charcoal grill that’s as efficient as a gas grill. Here’s what I do to get a hot fire lit quickly in Smaug. 1. Workflow. This is by far the most important. For hot fast cooks, I’ll light my grill first, and then do food prep. However long it takes the fire to heat up, prepping the food will take more time. By the time food prep is done, Smaug will be at 500-600ºF, easy. 2. Full basket of charcoal, and skip the huge pieces. Heat is all about how much charcoal is burning at one time. Having a less than full basket of charcoal works against this, and having smaller pieces increases the surface area of charcoal that can be burning. Huge pieces of charcoal are great for low and slow cooks, but not so good for high heat cooks. 3. Vents. Bottom and top vents wide open. As far as the actual fire making process, here’s what I tend to do, if I’m doing nothing but lighting the grill. I start with a full basket of charcoal, lit it over a fairly wide area, close the lid with the top vent fully open, with the bottom vents fully open, with the grate off. After five minutes, I’ll open the lid, flip over the chunks in the top layer of the charcoal a bit in order to get the top surface to give off heat, put the grate in, and close the lid. I’ll hit 500-600ºF in 10-15 minutes consistently. I think that the moving the charcoal around after five minutes helps a lot, because it gets lit coals right at the top of the basket and distributes the fire more quickly than letting it burn on its own. (That’s also why I leave the grate off at first so I don’t have to maneuver a hot grate later to stir up the charcoal.) I’ve noticed in the past that if I’m going for a high temperature, and there’s large pieces of charcoal on the top that are burning only on the bottom side, the unlit portion of the charcoal is preventing heat from coming through. Flipping over those pieces did a lot to speed up the process. I’ve noticed that when my thermometer hits 500ºF, the top surface of the charcoal will mainly be on fire, but the larger chunks will have a dark spot in the middle that isn’t actually burning. Here’s a picture from the Serious Eats website that shows what I mean. This looks like a good charcoal fire, but it’s really not at full blast yet. You see those large pieces of charcoal in the middle that still look black? That’s charcoal that’s not burning. I think this acts as an insulator, blocking the fire underneath it, and preventing the temperature from rising higher. Turning those pieces over helps the temperature come up faster. But as I said above, I go through all this only if I don’t have anything else to do. What I do much more often these days is light the grill over a wide area, put the grates in, close the lid, and open the top and bottom vents all the way. Then I do food prep. By the time I’m done, Smaug is at steak-searing temperatures.

By the way, the moisture thing was the one of the first things I noticed about having a KK grill. I’ve seen demos of other ceramic grills, and never saw anything like that.

Congratulations on the engagement! Here’s to many happy years together.