wilburpan

And as for that Akorn crack, geez, you REALLY know how to hurt a guy!  That was a low blow.  You ain't even playing by the Marquis of Queensbury rules!  

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!

 

 

7)  KK at 500*F.   Use foil, per Dennis,  or your SS heat deflector on the middle grate.  Place the chicken, breast side up, on the large top grate for 20-minutes.  Then damp the temp down to 350* for the remaining ~ 40-minutes/until thigh is to 175*F.  

 

 

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.

After looking at your steak photos wilburpan...I had to take some steaks out of the freezer today and take a break from pizza making

 

I am a reverse sear griller...but it mostly comes into play with steaks at least an inch thick...and even better at 1-1/4"+ thickness.  

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.

Dang. When I saw that picture, I swear I thought that the red balance on my monitor needed adjusting.

We really like our china. We’ve used it almost daily since our wedding, and I always chuckle when we use it when eating “mundane†food like pizza or hot dogs. About the only time we don’t use it is when we are making straight Chinese food, when all we need are rice bowls. It would be awesome if Wedgwood made rice bowls in a matching pattern.

I forgot to mention that while the ducks were hanging in the backyard, a cat came by who was very interested in the situation, until I stepped into the backyard and then he took off.

Our china is from Wedgwood. It’s the Oberon pattern, and we got it when we got married. My wife is very practical, and at the time she said that we shouldn’t register for fancy china unless we planned on using it a lot. She thought that this pattern could be used for everyday use, and it’s the only set of dishes that we have. I have to say, she was right. These plates seem to fit well with fancy meals and burgers.

I love that scene from A Christmas Story. I crack up every time I see it, although probably not for the reason that most people do.

We wound up going to a relative’s house for Thanksgiving dinner, so we had to call an audible on our plans for cooking this weekend. Here’s what we wound up having Smaug make for us over the rest of the weekend.
 
Smoked ham. I made a simple glaze with dijon mustard and brown sugar. The sweet potatoes are destined to become sweet potato casserole. 
 

 

 
More roast duck. One technique to help get you really crispy skin is to hang the duck up in front of a fan. It was a relatively windy day, with temperatures in the mid-30’s, so I decided to use my backyard.
 

 
Last time I made roast duck, I was going for a Peking duck flavor. This time our sides were mashed potatoes, spinach, roasted Brussels sprouts and roasted cauliflower, so this time around I went for more of a French preparation. I seasoned the inside and out with salt and pepper, and put a quarter of an onion, a quarter of an orange, some garlic cloves and rosemary on the inside of these ducks.
 

 
It was dark when I took the ducks off the grill, so I didn’t get an action shot, but here’s how they turned out.
 

 
We had an impromptu play date for our boys, and they wanted burgers. So I made a half-dozen burgers, and grilled some portobello mushrooms as well.
 

 
I don’t know if folks are getting tired of me posting pictures of really tall burgers, but here’s the one I assembled and ate.
 

Nice! Haven’t tried brisket yet, but I’ll be coming back to this post for tips when I do.

Larry, you're gonna have to teach me that trick of posting videos in this new forum. Do they have to be on YouTube first?

Hi Tony,

The video needs to be on YouTube first. Once the video is up, or you find a video that you want to share here, go to the YouTube page, and click on the “Share†link. A little window will appear with all kinds of social media links, along with a box with a link to the video. Make sure that the box in front of "Share with playlist starting from†is NOT checked. The link will look like this:

Copy the link, and go back to the forum, and paste it into your post. Click the “More options†box to preview the post to check that the video will show up as you expect.

The video should show up like this. If it didn’t, reload the page to make sure.

(All credit goes to CeramicChef who turned me onto this song.)

I haven’t cooked a turkey on a KK, but I had a very similar situation regarding cooking a duck in that I wasn’t sure as to the best way to start. In the end, I decided to prep the duck the way I would as if I was going to cook it in the oven, and just used the KK as a substitute for the oven in terms of setting temperature, etc. 

For the crispy skin on the duck, I did what I normally would do with the oven: cook at 375ºF for the majority of the cooking, and increase the temperature to 400-450ºF at the end to crisp up the skin.

As it turned out, the duck was on the overcooked side because I let it go too long before going up on the temperature, probably because I’m still getting used to how efficient the KK grill is compared to an oven. Checking the internal temperature sooner would have really helped. The duck was still really yummy.

I’m glad the only change I made was to cook the duck in the KK grill instead of the oven, since now I have a much better idea of what to change for future cooks. The changes I plan to make the next time are to cook at a lower temperature and to keep a closer eye on the internal temperature of the duck. 

Actually, I didn’t know that you used to run a burger restaurant. Is there anything that you don’t know how to do?

My first job ever was working at a Burger King. As a result, almost every burger that I make is assembled like a Whopper. Burger King is pretty bad these days, but I have to say that the Whopper approach to burger assembly still works great.

Dang. The Beast makes the turkeys look like roast chickens.

And congrats on the brisket gig.

I am so sorry to hear of your loss. As a widower myself, I can empathize with what you are going through. Hang in there, my friend.

Ditto. My condolences to you and your family.