wilburpan

After getting all the sides done, it was time for the final sear. Smaug was up to over 600ºF at this point. I seared each side as long as I dared to. Here’s the end result. I cut the strings and got the bones off. And quickly seared the inside face of the bones. Finally, the money shot. Even my wife was impressed. And plated, with the asparagus and my wife’s famous mashed potatoes. It was delicious. My wife said it was the best prime rib she had ever had, even though she likes her meat much more well done than this. If I was to make any changes, it might be to simplify the rub to just salt and pepper. The sear wound up burning the rosemary and thyme (although not in a bad way). It didn’t hurt the crust, it just didn’t seem to add much in the end. Or I might just leave it as is. By the way, I completely forgot about deglazing the roasting pan to make a sauce. Then again, we really didn’t need it.

In the meantime, I took out the heat deflector, and opened up the vents. When Smaug got to 500ºF+, we cooked up an appetizer and sides that our friends brought from the local Korean grocery store. Here’s some marinated pork belly in a spicy Korean marinade. They also brought two types of Korean peppers. The long ones are much spicier than the short ones. We prepped them with olive oil and salt. And then we cooked them on Smaug until the skins blistered. The smaller ones had a level of heat just about equal to deep fried jalapeños, and the long ones were much hotter. Interestingly, the long ones have less heat at the tip, and gain more heat as you work your way towards the stem. Here’s the asparagus that I had prepped earlier.

Here’s the high-tech monitoring system in action. Smaug is locked in at 200ºF, give or take. I’m really impressed with how quickly the temperature came back up after taking the top photo. I had the lid open long enough that when I closed the lid, the thermometer was at the outside temperature. Smug was back to 200ºF in less than 5 minutes. I’ve had this thermometer for over 15 years. It’s not a Thermoworks, but it’s great. Oh, wait. In the meantime, I’ve prepped some asparagus for grilling later. Olive oil, salt, and pepper. That’s it. Now we wait. When our friends got here, I showed them the prime rib roast inside Smaug. When I opened the lid, I was surprised to see how moist the air was that came out. It actually fogged up my glasses. I also noticed this. As far as I can tell, that’s condensation that has dripped down to the bottom of the inside and is leaking out from around the vent plate. I have to believe that the ability of Smaug to trap moisture like this during a low and slow cook is part of why I seem to be having so much success with my KK 23â€, despite my complete lack of low and slow cooking experience prior to Smaug landing at my house. Even though Smaug had no issues keeping the temperature at 200ºF, I wound up bumping the temperature up to 250ºF to speed things along to get the prime rib roast done at a reasonable time for dinner. Eventually, we hit an IT of 120ºF. We brought the prime rib roast inside. It was too dark to take pictures outside, so this is why it’s on my stove. We haven’t done the sear yet.

Because of my work schedule, and Christmas Eve/Day Mass activities, we didn’t do anything super special for Christmas dinner. But that’s okay, since this weekend we had planned to do something special for dinner Sunday night. Here’s the start. It’s four bones, and my butcher cut the bones off and tied them back on for me. I salted it, and let it sit in the fridge overnight. The next day, I fired up Smaug, and stabilized at 200ºF. I made a rub to go on the roast. Thyme, cayenne, rosemary, black pepper, and garlic. I added olive oil and some Worcestershire sauce, and mixed it up. Why no salt? I added the salt last night, and at this point, it’s worked its way into the meat, so I don’t think any more today is really needed. Here’s the roast all dressed up and ready to go. Next step in progress. I threw some celery, carrots, onion, and shallots in the roasting pan. We’ll see how successful I am with collecting pan drippings for a sauce.

Nice!

I’d avoid a handle-mounted light, mainly because if the lid is up, the light will be directly exposed to the heat from the grill, which can be problematic if you’re searing something. The fact that last night I found out the hard way how hot the handle can get when putting a sear on a prime rib roast with the lid up has nothing to do with this suggestion.

For me, I’m most often cooking for dinner, and at this time of year, it’s completely dark on my back patio when the food is ready. The good news is that we’ve passed the winter solstice, so the days will be getting longer, and at some point I’ll be able to take some money shots of food on the grill.

Same to you, Dennis, and everyone else!

Just so you all know, over on the Kamado Guru forum, CC sometimes makes the mistake of pointing out that KK grills are built to a higher standard than Akorns. At which point, many Akorn owners jump on him for suggesting such a thing. This has happened so often and so consistently that I thought CC would feel neglected if someone didn’t make a comment.

All I can say is that there’s a reason I said that on this forum, and not on another.

That’s a great holiday story. Thanks for sharing! Although I guess you’ll have to brace yourself for the flak you’re going to get because based on your photos, The Beast dropped a whopping 25ºF over 8-10 hours overnight. Clearly you could have done the same thing with an Akorn.

Ha! Just looked at the comic. Thanks!

Just out of curiosity, could you do most of the cook at 350ºF, and crank it up to 500ºF at the end? I think that would be easier than backing a KK grill down to 350ºF after getting it up to 500ºF.

Cooked a whole chicken on Smaug tonight. It turned out great, as you would expect food cooked on a Komodo Kamado would. I put together a rub with equal parts McCormick’s poultry seasoning (thyme, sage, marjoram, rosemary, black pepper and nutmeg), oregano, salt, garlic powder, and onion powder. I cooked at 375ºF on the main grate with the deflector in place for most of it, and raised the temperature to 400ºF when the breast got to 140ºF. I took the chicken out when the breast was at 155ºF. The skin was crispy, but next time I think I might go to 400-425ºF, just to try to get the skin a little crispier. Oh, and why did I not spatchcock this chicken? I had a discussion with Meathead at Amazing Ribs about their beer can chicken article. That discussion went south pretty quickly, as Meathead seemed to not like my questioning a point in that article. Ultimately, he deleted our conversation. Since Meathead advocates spatchcocking chickens, I cooked this one whole out of spite. It was delicious, even though I didn’t follow their recommendations.

These steaks were 1-1/2†thick. Again, I can’t see how reverse searing would have given me better results.

Actually, I’m going to take a pass on sous vide. I’ve had steaks cooked sous vide before, and as I alluded to above, I don’t really see the need for that, at least for the steaks I cook and how I cook them. Plus, that would require the purchase of more hardware, and after bringing Smaug home, I think I hit my allotment for the year. Based on this experience, going forward, I’ll probably only do a reverse sear for my wife’s steaks, just to give it a head start for cooking so she can have her medium well steak.

My older boy did really well on his English test, so we decided to treat him to a steak dinner. I also wanted to try a reverse sear for the first time. First I made a cilantro chimichurri sauce. It’s a basic chimichurri sauce, except that I use cilantro instead of parlsey. The steaks were sprinkled with a liberal amount of my usual mix of salt, fresh ground black pepper, and cayenne. I set up Smaug to a temp of about 275ºF, put the steak on the main grill with the deflector in place, and let it come up to my target temperature. Then I cranked the vents open, took out the main grate and deflector, and switched to the lower grate to do the sear. Here’s the tower of steak, because who doesn’t love a tower of steak? My steak was a bone-in ribeye. It came out nice. Cutting it open revealed a nice even pink interior. So hurray for the reverse sear, right? Not so fast. This steak wasn’t reverse seared. This steak was cooked the old-fashioned way: plunk it down on the sear grate, wait 3 minutes, flip, 3 minutes, flip, 3 minutes, flip, and 3 minutes, flip. Here’s the reverse sear steak. It was a strip steak for my wife. She likes strip steaks more than ribeyes. And she likes her steak medium well. It’s her only flaw. This is the steak that I did the reverse sear on. During the first phase, the two ribeyes were on a plate in my kitchen. I brought them out when I switched to the sear part. I haven’t had reverse seared steaks before, but I have had sous vide steaks. I don’t really see that much difference between a sous vide steak and a steak grilled properly with conventional methods. The main reason for doing the reverse sear on my wife’s steak was so I could cook the inside to her liking and still get a sear on the outside. If I had cooked it using conventional grilling, the outside would be burned before the interior would be cooked to a medium well. In any case, the steaks turned out great. They were so good that we were halfway done eating them before we remembered that we had chimichurri sauce to put on them.

Nope. Just an oasis of paradise between those two armpits of cities.

I’m almost exactly between Philadelphia and NYC. PM me if you’re interested in having a look at a KK 23â€.

After reading the recent thread on pizza dough recipes, I did some Googling and ran across this alternative pizza dough recipe by Peter Reinhart. It’s not a make and bake recipe, but it says that you can make the pizza dough, divide into balls, and freeze it for up to three months, so that should reduce some of the time it takes to make a pizza.

I used the main grate for everything: the bacon, the portobellos, and the burgers. I just changed the temperatures for each item.

Either keep the temperature low enough so that doesn't happen, or stir up the cheese when you pull it before it cools to reincorporate it. I should say that I think the second option has a high likelihood of failure.

Makes sense, if penetration of the smoke flavor is what you need. Could this be a way of speeding things up? 1. Set up your grill with your favorite smoking setup, and put the cheese in some sort of open rigid container, like a small Pyrex baking dish, or ramekins. 2. Start the smoking process, and run your grill at a temperature high enough to slightly soften or melt the cheese, but low enough so that it doesn’t brown or cook. Since the cheese is more liquid, the smoke flavor should penetrate more easily. The rigid container is there to corral the melting cheese, and you can recut the cheese into blocks afterwards when things cool down.

Dumb question: why wait three weeks? How would the cheese taste if you ate it right away?

The soup bowls aren’t the right shape for Chinese food/rice purposes. This is what our rice bowls look like. The 5†cereal bowl on the page you linked to does look like it might work, but it looks like they are out of production.