wilburpan

Here are the teak side tables. As a woodworker, I can say that these are nicely made. The wooden top is attached by screws on the underside, and Komodo Kamado took the time to plug the screw holes to prevent rust. Grate grabbers, with teak handles. The teak handles are really nice to look at and to hold. Spare parts kit. Notice the fiber gasket for the damper top. I’ve seen the felt gasket that’s used in most kamados, and was struck by how thin they are. There are a number of posts on this board about this issue. Here’s how thick the gasket is for the damper, with my finger for comparison. Impressive. The main gasket that seals the top and bottom of the grill is no lightweight, either. It’s made of food grade silicone, and there are two raised areas that create an airtight seal. Because the gasket is made of silicone, if I spill sauce on it, it will still work. And it’s easy to clean. I ordered a rotisserie basket. My family really likes duck, and I am going to try to cook duck on my KK grill, so I thought a rotisserie basket would be a good thing to have. Unlike every other kamado, KK grills come ready for a rotisserie. And if you’re using a rotisserie on a KK grill, it stays airtight.

Finally, here’s the top grate, which rests on the main grate. Finally, a run down of the accessories that came with my KK 23â€. First, the heat deflector. This is made of the same refractory cement that the grill is made of. It’s a beast. Normally it would sit on the handles of the charcoal basket. I forgot to take a picture of that, however. Sorry. Speaking of the charcoal basket, here are the components of the basket splitter. From left to right, you see the piece that splits the charcoal basket in half, a solid plate that fits into the basket, and two half grates that also fit into the basket. In use, it looks like this, using the solid plate and one of the half grates. Kamado Joe has gotten a lot of attention for the divide and conquer system. I think this setup is even more flexible than that. You can use the center divider and the solid plate by themselves to split the basket in half. The solid plate and the solid portion of the center divider forces all the air to go through the charcoal. You can also add the open grate which allows you to fill just the top half of one side to reduce the amount of charcoal you need for a short, high heat cook. Or put both open grates in and use the top half of the basket. It’s a surprisingly flexible arrangement.

Here’s the charcoal basket. I put it on one of my patio chairs for scale. It fits into the grill very nicely. The lower grate, again on my chair for scale. It has a door that can open up for access to the charcoal. Here’s the upper grill. It also has a door for access to the charcoal. Both grates in place, with the access doors open. And for a final size comparison, here’s the main grate on my old gas grill. It may look like the KK 23†main grate is smaller than a three burner gas grill, but because of heat loss, I never grilled out towards the edges of my old grill. I’m going to get more effective cooking area with the KK 23â€.

Here’s all the stuff that came inside the KK 23†grill. Like CeramicChef’s grill, a lot of stuff was packed inside the grill itself for shipping. The top items were strapped and tied down really well. This is what came out of the grill. Many packages. It was like a clown car. I kept pulling things out of it. Here’s the damper top. It was strapped to the skid, and was packed in a way that protected it very well. Here’s the view into the unloaded and empty grill. You can see the two piece firebox, which means that there shouldn’t be any worries about cracked fireboxes like I’ve read from BGE, KJ, and other owners. One thing to note is how tightly the firebox fits to the inside wall of the grill. This means that all the air that comes in through the bottom vent will come up through the charcoal, which is one reason why the KK is so efficient. Compare that to the Kamado Joe, where you can see gaps between the firebox and the inside wall. This allows air to come up around the firebox, bypassing the charcoal, and is less efficient.

The feet of the grill, the knobs, and the various draft doors are also well protected. At this point I spent some time removing a heroic amount of wrapping material and cutting the straps that held the grill to the skid. In the picture of the foot, you can see some pieces of wood that are nailed into the bottom of the skid. These wooden pieces help keep the feet of the grill in place. I used my crowbar and hammer to remove those pieces of wood from all four corners. It’s really nice that a crowbar comes inside the crate to help with this. Get a nicer crowbar. You won’t regret it. I didn’t get a good picture of this, mainly because I was so excited to get the grill off the skid. Sorry. Even then, the grill wouldn’t come off the skid, since it was resting on some pieces of plywood that made a box that sat underneath the center of the grill. I was able to get the grill off by standing at the front of the grill, grabbing the lid handle, lifting slightly, and nudging the grill off the box. I could then roll it down the ramp. Now that the grill is off the skid, you can see how I set up the ramp and the box that was underneath the grill. The wheels were resting on the four darker pieces of plywood. The pieces of wood that framed the feet of the grill are all on a piece of cardboard at the top of the picture. This was the other part of the unpacking where another person would have been very helpful. Clearly, I got it off by myself, and I’m not a huge guy by any stretch of the imagination. But if I had to do it over again, I would have gotten another person to help me get the grill off the skid. Even so, this process didn’t take that long to do. It only took me an hour and a half to get from the time the crate got into the back patio to when I rolled the grill off the skid.

The top and sides of the crate are attached with lag screws, two at each corner. I used my ratchet wrench with the 10mm socket to remove these. After that, the crate can be lifted up and over the grill. This was the one part of the unpacking where you really need two people. The crate itself isn’t very heavy, but it is bulky, and you have to be able to lift it over the height of the grill. It’s impressive how much additional protective wrapping and padding there is on the grill. So I have to spend some time taking the wrapping and padding off. Now I can get a better look at it.

Next step: unpacking the crate. Here are all the tools I used for this. A drill with a #2 Philips bit, a utility knife, a ratchet wrench with a 10mm socket, garden clippers, a hammer, a crowbar, and a pair of pliers. CeramicChef can attest to the terrific packing job that Komodo Kamado does with their crate. Suffice it to say that my crate arrived without any damage to the outside or inside components. The boxes on the top are some of the parts of the grill, and the accessories I ordered. Here they are. I asked for two boxes of coconut charcoal. I wanted to see what this stuff was like before placing a big order. Here are the other boxes. Two teak side tables, the new model grill grabbers with teak handles, a charcoal basket splitter, an 8†rotisserie with a 6†reducer, and the new baking stone sized to fit the upper rack. The crate is marked with all sorts of useful signs. The first thing is to take off the top board, which doubles as a ramp that will help with getting the grill off the skid. Underneath, you can see that the top of the grill is held firmly in place by the top of the crate.

About a month ago, I had a great day. I was able to set this up in my backyard. But first, let’s go back to the beginning. I hope you’ll bear with me on this first part, because I have relayed the story here and there, but I wanted to have the whole story in one place. This is my old grill. It’s a Kenmore propane grill, with a standard three burner set up, but the really nice feature this one had was the ability to also use charcoal. There’s a small tray on the inside that can be loaded with charcoal, which you lit with the gas burners. I know that some folks think that stuff from Sears is not the greatest, but we were really happy with this grill. I had the flexibility of cooking something quickly with propane, and could use charcoal for when I had time to get the charcoal going. But unfortunately, it died at the beginning of the summer, after a good 10 years of service. I thought about replacing the burners, but that would have been a very messy job that I just did not want to deal with. I started looking for another propane/charcoal combo, but there weren’t any quite like this model. And then I discovered kamados. After watching a bunch of videos, I was convinced this was the way to go. At first, I was interested in a Kamado Joe Big Joe in red. I placed an order around Father’s Day, figuring that I might be able to be back to grilling by July 4. Well, July 4 came and went. Then the rest of July went by. Despite contacting Kamado Joe, both directly and through my dealer on numerous occasions, I never could get an answer as to when I could expect my grill. August came along. My family and I left for China for a three week vacation. I told my dealer that if my grill came while I was gone, to please hold it until I got back. No problem from their standpoint. I figured that would be great: we’d enjoy our vacation, and since we would be gone for three weeks, we were sure to come home and start using our brand new grill. During that trip, I had a lot of time to think about the grill, and to get more into the details of the various kamado grills that were out there. And that’s when I began to appreciate the features that were built into Komodo Kamado grills. I also began to read about issues with Kamado Joe grills that began to make me nervous: grills arriving after a long backorder wait with broken parts, and no parts being available to fix the situation; fireboxes cracking in use; bands holding the lids coming loose; less than perfect performance from the felt seals; misaligned lids, and so on. That’s when I started to really reconsider my choice. I had asked a couple of questions here before, but then I started to look into Komodo Kamados in earnest. While in China, I began to talk to Dennis Linkletter by email about the Komodo Kamado, and he was quite gracious in answering my questions, even though he was also on vacation at the same time for part of our dialogue, and even though I told him that I had a red Big Joe on order. The cost was one hurdle to get over. The other was the look of the Komodo Kamado. Granted, the look isn’t for everyone, including my wife at first. But after looking over the options on the KK website, we eventually settled on the same pebble black finish that CeramicChef had for his 32†Big Bad. There was only one catch: that finish wasn’t available at that time. Luckily, my wife seemed amenable to the Olive Gold pebble finish. After our three week trip, we got back home, and I checked in on my Kamado Joe order. Still no luck. Still no firm delivery date. I took that as a sign. I cancelled the order, called up Dennis, had a terrific conversation with him and placed the order. I still had to wait, but at least I knew where my grill was: on a ship on its way to the U.S. That placed me way ahead of where I was with the Big Joe. At the end of September, I got an email from Dennis. Good news: the ship with my grill made it to the Port of Los Angeles and cleared inspection. Bad news: this happened. A fire broke out at the Port of Los Angeles. Luckily, it was contained without too much damage or any loss of life. At this point, I could only enjoy the entertainment value of all of this. It was as if the forces of nature were determined to keep me from grilling some burgers and steaks for my family. The fire held up the processing of packages for a whole day. After that, there was a logjam of packages that needed processing. Eventually my grill made it to the Komodo Kamado warehouse, onto a truck, and on its way from L.A. to New Jersey. This turned out to be the smoothest part of the whole ordering process. Dennis sent me a tracking number for the grill, and I was able to track its progress across the country. The expected delivery date was Oct. 10, but the grill got to NJ one day earlier than expected. I got a call from the trucking company yesterday to schedule a delivery time. I asked if they could bring it to my house that day. They did. And at about 1:30 in the afternoon, one day early, this came. The truck driver was nice enough to bring the crate up our driveway, around the house, and to our back patio.

I finally got around to trying to cook steak on my KK 23â€. But first, I tried making a side dish of roasted garlic rosemary potatoes. I set the grill at 425ºF, put the heat deflector in place, and placed a glass 13x9 dish of Yukon Gold potatoes, cut into about 1†cubes, tossed with olive oil, rosemary, and garlic on the main rack. This went for about 45 minutes. These were cooked through, but I probably should have kept them on a bit longer to get a little more browning. They probably could have used more olive oil as well. I pulled them because the boys were getting hungry, so I decided to get the steaks going. I took off the main rack and the heat deflector, put the lower grate in place, and opened up the vents. I was at 600ºF within minutes. I forgot to take before pictures of the steaks, but they looked great, with lots of marbling. We had two bone-in ribeyes and a strip steak. I got them at a local butcher who is so old school that they cut steaks for you to the thickness that you want with a bandsaw. I made my usual grilling spice mix of one part kosher salt, one part fresh ground black pepper, one part cayenne, and one part oregano. Since I don’t have much experience with kamado grills, I’m not used to cooking so close to a fire so hot. I realized that my usual routine of cooking on one side and then the other would result in a steak that would be charred on the outside. So I kept an eye on the thermometer, and whenever it got to 550ºF I opened the grill, flipped the steak, and closed the grill. The temperature would drop to about 450ºF or so, and when the temperature got back up to 550ºF, I would open the grill and flip the steaks again. Here’s the outcome. Plated, with the potatoes and some sautéed spinach. And the interior. Not bad, for my first try at steaks with this grill. They were delicious.

Nice!

I don’t have a huge amount of experience with the coconut charcoal, but I’ve seen that as well, where a piece of coconut charcoal would disintegrate when moved after it’s been through one round of cooking. I suspect this is why some folks have two baskets, one for the coconut charcoal, and another for regular hardwood charcoal. That way you can just swap baskets instead of having to move the half-used charcoal around.

True, but as I mentioned above, I think that would be primarily from increased vacuum from wind blowing past the top vent, rather than wind pushing air through the guru port.

Yes, the top wasn’t spinning from the wind.

I think there’s a limit at about 5 photos. I hit that limit before on this forum. Ken’s got a LOT of pictures documenting his unpacking of his grill. They are well worth the time.

I had mentioned that on my first baby back rib cook that I was surprised as to the meatiness of the ribs. We ate ribs with our friends Saturday night, and we gave them a rack to take home with them. We ate leftover ribs last night. Tonight we needed to do something different. Step one: pull the meat off the ribs. I was surprised how easily the meat came off, even though these leftover ribs had been sitting in the fridge since Saturday night. Step two: quesadillas. We still have enough leftover ribs for at least one meal, maybe two.

I can attest to that. My vent settings for cooking these ribs at 225ºF were nearly identical to the above description. My lower vent was open just enough so that the opening was a skinny triangle. Any more open and the opening would be a skinny trapezoid. (Hope that description makes sense.) My top vent was turned about 1/4 of a turn. Yup. Indirect stone, sitting on the fire basket handles. Ribs on the main grate and upper grate.

The ingredient list on the bottle reads: salt, sugar, paprika, spices, garlic powder, soybean oil, less than 2% tricalcium phosphate to prevent caking. Now that I’m done with this bottle, I’m going to try making my own. This rub was very good, but the ingredient list makes me think that it’s mainly salt. I may steal your recipe.

Rib cooks are not unique, for sure, but this was my first try at them. Yesterday we had friends over, and I figured four racks of baby back ribs should be good for two families. I went over to the local butcher, to get four racks, and found that he had them in packages of three. So I got six. I found that I can get six racks of ribs onto my KK 23â€. I took a KISS approach to these ribs. I coated them with rub ( Melvin’s Bar-B-Que Dry Rub Shake), got the grill set at 225ºF, and let it go for about 5-1/2 hours. This was the result. They were great. Our friends said that they didn’t need to put sauce on them, which I took as a sign that they turned out well. One thing that I didn’t expect was how much more meat you get on baby back ribs that you get from a butcher compared to ones that you get at a restaurant. Usually I can eat a half slab of baby backs pretty easily, and a full rack if I’m really hungry. I was stuffed after half a rack.

Welcome! It looks like you got your KK 23†just about the same time as I did. What color tile did you get?

I do think it’s more of a top vent/Bernoulli issue, at least in my case. Here’s why: 1. I don’t think the prevailing wind was blowing at the bottom vent that morning. The round shape of the top vent means that the Bernoulli effect can happen as long as wind is blowing by in any direction. Besides, even if the wind was blowing directly into the bottom vent, that also means that it’s blowing by the top vent. 2. The bottom vent was only open a crack. The opening at the top has got to be larger than that, even though I only unscrewed the top vent a little bit. 3. Physics. I ran this by my dad, who’s a physicist. He agrees that it’s unlikely that wind would force air through the bottom vent to any appreciable degree.

When I made my first pulled pork over the weekend, there was an interesting thing that happened with the temperature. The temperature was probably pretty steady overnight. The grill was holding a steady 230ºF when I started at 11:00 pm, and was at 220ºF at 6:00 am when I checked it. Then as the sun came up, it got pretty windy outside, and stayed windy for a while. A couple of hours later, I checked the grill, and the thermometer read 325ºF. The pork had an internal temp of 175ºF at that point, so I shut down the vents and let the grill coast until the pork hit an internal temperature of 200ºF. My question is, why did the temperature jump like that? I don’t think it was a problem with the charcoal per se. The best explanation I have is that when it got windy, the wind blowing past the upper vent drew more air out from the inside of the grill (Bernoulli Principle), causing more air to flow through from the bottom vent through the grill, which got the charcoal burning hotter. The pork came out really good, so I’m not particularly worried about whether this is an issue. But I was curious as to why this happened.

I know that there are plenty of pulled pork writeups, but this is my first time ever trying out a low-and-slow cook. After the day of Korean BBQ, I tried my hand at cooking a Boston Butt for the first time. I used a basic procedure (coat the pork with rub, put it on the grill fat cap side down at 225ºF, and let it go until the internal temperature gets to 195-200ºF), and I used Melvin’s Bar-B-Que Dry Rub Shake, mainly because I had it on hand. This was given to me as a gift a while ago, and this was the first opportunity I had to use it. Before: After: And pulled: It was delicious. We made pulled pork sliders with some friends for dinner tonight. The most interesting part of this was the logistics. When I started cooking the Korean BBQ, it was about 1 PM Saturday. I did a second round of cooking at about 4 PM. I knew I wanted to start the pulled pork yesterday evening to make sure it was done before our friends got here, but my grill’s thermometer was reading a good steady 450ºF even after the second round of cooking was done. I wound up starting the pork at 11 PM Saturday night at a temp of 225ºF. The pork was probe tender at 9:30 AM Sunday morning. I then grilled some Korean BBQ leftovers at about 4 PM that afternoon. I think my grill will really appreciate the break I’m giving it today. It hasn’t been at ambient temperature for the past 30+ hours.

Unfortunately, I don’t have recipes for the sides. We picked up the sides at the Korean grocery store, much like you would pick up potato salad at the deli. Here’s the scoop on how I settled on bottled marinade for Korean BBQ. My sister teaches high school Chinese, and as such she has a lot of Korean students. She was on a quest for a kalbi marinade recipe and asked her Korean students for some. The recipes were all okay, but none of them were outstanding. Finally, she realized that she was asking for the wrong thing. Instead of asking for recipes, she started asking her Korean students, “How do your parents make kalbi at home?†And the answer was universally, “First, they get a bottle of marinade from the Korean grocery store.â€

Here’s how to eat Korean BBQ. The kalbi is cut down to smaller pieces. A leaf of Romaine lettuce, some rice, and a dab of soybean paste are put together, and a piece of kalbi is put on top. The Romaine lettuce leaf serves as a way to hold it all together, and you eat it sort of like a lettuce taco stuffed with rice and kalbi meat. There are other cuts of meat that can be served for Korean BBQ. My second favorite to kalbi is thinly sliced pork belly. This goes straight onto the grill without marinating or a rub. Here are the before and after pictures. The grilled pork belly is eaten in the same lettuce taco setup as the kalbi, except that instead of soybean paste, I like to use a mix of salt and sesame oil. I also used the grill for more than cooking meat. One of our side dishes was seafood pancake, sort of like a pancake-like omelet with seafood incorporated into it. The grill was perfect for heating up the seafood pancake. And finally, here’s a shot of the other side dishes we had. Clockwise around the plate of kalbi, there’s marinated spinach, spicy fish cake, seafood pancakes, and edamame. If you’ve never tried Korean BBQ, it’s terrific. I’m so happy that I can make it at home again.

One of the things I’ve been craving since I went without a grill for most of the summer was Korean BBQ. I’ve seen some posts here on Korean BBQ-inspired dishes that look great, but nothing that seemed like how it’s traditionally done, so I thought I’d share how we do it. First, the choice of meat. We really like kalbi, which is beef short ribs cut specifically for Korean BBQ. There are two ways of doing this cut. The most common method is to slice the ribs thinly across the ribs, and they are portioned in three-rib chunks. The second is to slice the meat around the rib thinly in such a manner that you get one continuous strip of meat and the rib at one end. The first method is a less labor-intensive cut than the second method, and the two cuts are priced accordingly. The first step in making the kalbi is to marinate the meat. There are a lot of recipes out there for kalbi marinades, but we do what every Korean family I know does: use a bottled marinade. If you have access to a Korean grocery store, you’ll find all kinds of marinades, which can be overwhelming. But it’s easy to pick one out. On the label at the top, you’ll see it says, “Kalbi BBQ Sauceâ€. This is your tip that you have the right marinade, as opposed to the marinade for bulgogi or other meats. The second is at the bottom of the label, where it says “Pear Pure 17%â€. Asian pear is a staple of many Korean BBQ marinades, much like how many BBQ guys incorporate apple juice into their cooks. You want the bottle with the highest concentration of Asian pear. And that’s all there is to know about picking out the marinade, even if you don’t know a single word of Korean. Marinating the meat is pretty straightforward. Just pour the marinade over the meat. I usually use a glass baking dish with a lid for this. The bottle says that 30 minutes of marinating is enough, probably because the slices of meat are so thin. Having said that, if I can marinate overnight, I will. After that, it’s just direct grilling over high heat. I waited until my grill hit an internal temperature of 500ºF. Here are the action shots. First, the three rib cut. And the more expensive cut. The top three pieces are pork belly. The middle piece has the bone still attached on the left, the right is off the bone. Hot off the grill. To be continued, since there seems to be a picture limit.