wilburpan

Overall, they liked the Texas style better. The kids liked the NC ribs better, mainly because I think there was too much black pepper in the rub for them.

I also have been poring through Aaron Franklin’s book, and watching his videos online. They are all really outstanding. I very much like his approach to making rubs, to the point that I’m not sure if I’ll ever have to buy a commercial rub ever again. This may seem a bit of a weird comparison, but I think one reason his book really resonated with me is that his approach to food is a lot like a top-notch sushi chef’s: simple ingredients of the highest quality, and obsessive attention to detail and technique. In general, that’s the approach to food that I’ve always gravitated to. If nothing else, I followed his approach when making my very first brisket, and this is how it turned out: Of course, having a KK grill helped a lot, too. The only places where I deviated from Aaron Franklin’s approach was that I cooked this brisket at around 225ºF, going up to 250ºF at the end, and I didn’t bother with wrapping, since I felt that the interior of a KK grill would be more moist than an offset cooker.

Congratulations! You’re going to have a ton of fun using your new KK grill, but then again, you already know that.

We had some friends over this weekend for dinner, and they are real foodies. So we decided to do a side-by-side comparison of different types of rubs on some baby back ribs. The first rub was a Lexington, NC-style rub from a recipe I found online. It’s primarily paprika, brown sugar, salt, with some added pepper, cayenne, dry mustard, and granulated garlic. The second was a Texas-style rub that I got from Aaron Franklin’s video on making rubs. It’s two parts ground black pepper, 1 part salt, and a little granulated garlic, granulated onion, ancho chile, dry mustard, and paprika. (If you’re tired of me linking to that video, it’s only because the video is really really really good. ) I sprinkled a good amount of rub on the ribs, and set them up in Smaug. I cooked them at 225ºF for about 5 hours. I decided they were done when they passed the bend test. No wrapping, no spritzing. Why? Because we’re using kamados! No need for all that extra work! This is what they looked like at the end. And plated, with some corn and cornbread pudding. The Texas-style rub is in the middle, and the NC-style rub is on the right. The other chunk on the left is the piece from the end of the Texas-style rack of ribs. They were moist and juicy. The only thing I didn’t do which I wish I had was to let the racks rest for a little before serving them. But we were all hungry, and they smelled SO GOOD. Overall, I thought the Texas-style rub was the better of the two, although if you put some sauce on the NC-style ribs (which is what the recipe calls for), that made the comparison much more close in terms of which one was better. I also think that the next time I do this, I’m going to cut back on the pepper a bit, at the request of my 8-year old son. I think I’m partial to Texas-style barbecue because I lived in Dallas for three years, and loved going out for BBQ. On the other hand, my favorite type of BBQ is pulled pork and pork ribs, which is definitely not a Texas thing. Go figure.

Looks great! And my hat’s off to you for trying brisket for a first cook. It took me ten months before I was brave enough to give it a try.

Congratulations! Looking forward to hearing about the food you’ll be cooking on your grill.

Welcome! I’ll be looking forward to see your cooks on the 21â€!

I’m not a big fan of the idea of using a kamado as a heat source for wok cooking. You want a hot heat source that is concentrated at the lower part of the wok that you can turn up and down as needed. Getting enough heat is an important part of stir frying, but you also will want to be able to apply low heat to foods as well. (At least that’s how traditional Chinese cuisine works.) A kamado doesn’t really fulfill either criteria very well, unless you were to use a large wok on a mini-sized kamado, and you were willing to control the heat by lifting the wok off the grill when needed. From that point, a turkey fryer would be much better.

I didn’t foil this butt. For that matter, I don't foil anything that other folks might wrap when doing a low and slow cook: brisket, ribs, pork butt. I’ve made all of these, all without foiling. My best guess is that the bark didn’t turn black because I maintained a low temperature. Here’s a photo of some ribs that I made recently, and there was sugar in the rub for this one: I’ve previously made a pork butt with a rub that contained sugar, and the bark wound up being very dark, but not black, and it wasn’t burned either. On that cook I remember that the temp got up to over 300ºF without me knowing about it. As far as the red goes, that may just be the paprika. In the video that I based this rub on, Aaron Franklin mentions that he adds paprika mainly for color, not for flavor.

I think Robert’s comment about width is key. We have a family of four, and we have a KK 23â€. Although doing a relatively small cook on our KK grill may seem silly at times (tonight I’m grilling four hot dogs), I’ve never thought that the grill was too big. And there have been times where I cooked ribs when I was happy to have every inch of the space in the KK 23†because the rib slab was so long. One other think to keep in mind with the size is that if you are cooking indirect, your actual cooking area is going to be about an inch less on all sides, because the deflector plate doesn’t stretch all the way from edge to edge. I learned that lesson when I was cooking wings, and covered the entire grate. The wings on the outside definitely cooked faster by a significant amount than the ones in the middle. It’s true that the hi cap design on the 21†gives you more cooking capacity, but I think that only helps with low and slow cooks. If you need to cook a lot of burgers at once, that upper rack won’t be of much help because it’s so far away from the fire.

I did a pork butt cook over the weekend. I started with a rub that was mainly black pepper and salt, with a little bit of paprika, onion powder, garlic powder, ancho chile powder, and dry mustard. I pulled this idea from this video by Aaron Franklin. The thing that makes this rub a bit different from typical pork butt rubs is that it has no sugar, and relatively little paprika. Here’s the pork butt before the rub. And after. Into Smaug, who had settled in at 240ºF. This was early Saturday morning. My last pork butt cooked in about 10 hours, so I thought this would be ready for dinner. As you’ll see, that didn’t exactly happen the way I had planned. The finished product, after a little more than 12 hours of cooking. It was really good. We had friends over, and more than a few of them mentioned how it didn’t need any BBQ sauce. Here are a couple of things that I learned about this cook. First, I really understand the concept of probe tenderness now. The cook was taking longer than I had expected, and even though I had set a target IT of 200ºF, I stopped the cook at 192ºF. Our friends were waiting to eat, and with anticipated rest time, we were over 1-1/2 hours past when I wanted to serve the pork. But I felt good about stopping the cook at that point because the pork really was probe tender. No matter where I stuck the thermometer, it went through like a hot knife through butter. The second thing I noticed was that over the last hour of cooking, the temp started to creep up from 240ºF to 280ºF. I didn’t really mind, since I wanted the cook to go faster anyway, and thought that this was Smaug looking out for me. When I took the pork out, I took the deflector off to add some more charcoal to grill some shrimp skewers over direct heat, and saw that the charcoal had burned in such a way that the center of the charcoal pile had a hole clear down to the bottom of the charcoal basket. My theory is that when that part of the bottom layer of charcoal burned through, airflow through the grill increased even without touching the vents, since there now was a clear path through the charcoal when there wasn’t one at the beginning of the cook. This led to the increase in temperature that I saw. Anyway, it was great. My friends ate so much of it that we only had one meal’s worth of leftover pulled pork for Sunday. I can’t wait to make my next pulled pork. Only next time, I’m starting it overnight.

No, this cook was done with just Royal Oak charcoal. I’m not sure how much flavor could be added with smoking wood, as it was only 6 minutes of cooking altogether.

Our Sunday dinner cook was pretty straight forward. Take 2 lbs of salmon fillet, slice into individual pieces, pat dry, and sprinkle with a liberal amount of Old Bay. Cook over high heat skin side up to start. Flip after three minutes, and cook for another three minutes. Here’s what it looked like coming off of Smaug. Plated. The skin side came out nice and crispy. Even my kids ate the skin, and they’ve been squeamish about fish skin before this. The inside was perfect. I’ve often said that having a kamado grill is like having a charcoal grill that’s as efficient as a gas grill. I timed how long it took Smaug to come up to temperature. I started with a full basket of charcoal, lit it over a fairly wide area, and had the lid open with the bottom vents fully open, with the grate off. After five minutes, I stirred the top layer of the charcoal a bit to spread out the lit coals, put the grate in, closed the lid and opened the top vent as high as it would go. I hit 600ºF after a total time of 12 minutes. My old gas grill would have to heat for about 12 minutes or so before the grates were hot enough to cook salmon like this, and it never got this hot. I’ve often read that people using kamado grills of various sorts have a problem getting the temperature high enough in a reasonable amount of time. As much as I would love to say that the solution is to get a KK grill , I think that my approach to starting a hot fire would work for anyone. I think that the stirring 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.

Here’s a post I wrote when I got and uncrated my KK 23â€. Hopefully this will give you an idea of what to expect. http://komodokamadoforum.com/topic/5007-my-ordering-and-unpacking-experience-with-a-kk-23â€-ultimate/

I used Royal Oak, straight up, no other smoking woods.

Actually, this was a Third of July cook, since I had the day off. Take equal parts salt and black pepper. Mix it up well. It’s going to go on this. The rub is on. I used about 3/4 of the 1/2 cup salt/pepper mix that I made. I got Smaug fired up. He settled in at 220ºF, and I wound up putting the brisket on at about midnight. Then I went to sleep. When I woke up, I was greeted by this. Good boy, Smaug! Here’s the brisket as it looked at that point, about 7 hours into the cook. My thermometer says the IT is 160ºF. After about 13 hours total, I hit a final temp of 200ºF. Here’s the final product. Sliced. The smoke ring isn’t too bad. Plated. In case you all want to know the technical details, the thermometer was a solid 220ºF for the majority of the cook. When the outside temperature started to rise this morning, I could see the grill thermometer start to creep up a bit, and it finished at 250ºF. Total time of cooking was 13 hours, and the final IT was 200ºF. I was hoping to hit the magical IT of 203ºF, but we had guests to feed. Rest time was about 30 minutes, less than what I would have liked. Overall, it was not a bad cook for my first try at a brisket. The bark was excellent. The meat could have been more moist (although it wasn’t dry), which was either a factor of the meat not resting for as long as I would like, or because this was a choice brisket from our grocery store. I think that if I had a prime brisket, it would have turned out moister. Also, I think that the way this brisket was trimmed left it with a thinner than normal fat cap. I did start slicing from the flat end, but this brisket seems to have a thinner than normal fat cap layer. I think that if the fat cap layer was thicker, the brisket might have been more moist. I’ll be on the look out for this the next time I try a brisket.

Glad I could help! I’m so happy that you got your grill back.

Congratulations! You’re going to love cooking on the Tank. So will your wife.

Welcome, and congrats on scoring your KK! Used ones seem to be like hen’s teeth. Looking forward to pics of your cooks.

Great job on that batch of wings! They look delicious.

Those wings look great! Nice job. And I agree, more wings with less cholesterol and calories is always a good thing. Not to mention not having to deal with used frying oil.

I used Smaug a lot this weekend, but had many mishaps along the way. First was some ribeye steaks for dinner on Saturday. I’ve cooked steak a lot over my life, but on that day the fatal flaw in my plan was that I didn’t anticipate moderately heavy rain hitting our area right at the time that I would be grilling. And I had already seasoned the steak earlier in the day, so I felt that I was committed at that point. Here are the steaks. And here’s what I had to deal with, weather-wise. Luckily, Smaug seemed to have no issues with the rain. Even though I don’t usually do a reverse sear for steaks, I decided to do that for this cook, since it would be less time actually sitting by the grill. (I usually go for direct cooking over very high heat for steaks, and flipping fairly often until they are done.) I did the indirect part at 250º, until the steaks hit 115º internal. Then I moved the steaks off, took out the grate and the heat deflector, put the grate back on, and started searing the steaks. Here they are, at the searing part. In my rush to get things arranged because of the rain, I forgot to drop in the searing grate instead of the main grate, and did the searing on the main grate instead, further away from the fire. Because of that, the sear developed more slowly than it would have, and so the steaks seared longer than I would have liked. Losing track of the time also didn’t help me at all. Final result: They came out more medium than medium rare. Still, they were really juicy. Next mishap was cooking a rotisserie chicken for dinner on Sunday. I basically followed the exact method I used in this cook, down to the chicken coming with head and feet attached, except that in the rub I used a higher ratio of poultry seasoning and black pepper to the salt/baking powder mix that I have taken to using on chicken to make the skin super crispy. I also only used 1/4 tsp salt and 1/4 tsp baking powder, to see how low I could go on that component of the rub. Here’s the final product. The chicken looks pretty good, but what you can’t see is that I lost track of time for this cook as well, and the chicken hit an internal temperature of 170ºF, higher than recommended. Still, it was still juicy, even the breast meat. Not as juicy as it could have been, but it wasn’t dry, either. The skin turned out great. Last cook was some sausage that I got from the same butcher that I go to for steaks. It’s called Provolone sausage, and (you guessed it) has little bits of Provolone mixed in with the meat. It came in one long coil. I twisted it off to make links before cooking it. I did this at 225ºF, indirect. After about an hour, with me turning it about halfway through, it looked like this. Served on a bun. What was the problem with this cook? Nothing, really, except that the sausages were so skinny I could fit two of them on a single hot dog bun. The lesson I learned this weekend: even a less than perfect cook is better than not cooking at all.

Welcome! You’re going to be really happy with the KK 23â€.

Hope it works out! If so, I’m just glad to help.

I sent him a PM through this forum last night. Hopefully that triggers an email to him.