Syzygies

My Trompo King arrived, and I'm looking forward to a first cook, three Tandoori chicken legs. I'm happy to have ordered their Four Spike System, and nice that it comes apart in pairs. I'll usually use it as shown. Also nice that it comes with two center spikes. The longer spike is too tall for the main grill on my 23" KK, but would work on the lower grate. The spikes are shipped taped to the tray, and the adhesive comes off easily with isopropyl alcohol. I'm considering returning their TK Grate, shown in my first picture. Most aftermarket grates are likely to work better, such as the closer mesh, wider grate shown in my second picture. Their grate was clearly sourced as one could also do separately. Had they designed the grate specifically for the Trompo King, it's highly unlikely that they would have been dumb enough to specify an odd number of grates, making it impossible to center. For general use their grate is not wide enough, or closely spaced enough, to do its job. [The moderators have configured our forum to mark any post as edited after revision, with no five minute grease period for catching spelling errers. I've come to accept their looking out for us, we shouldn't spend all our time an the forum, so I'm not fixing this post wonce I submit it, not matter how much work it might stand to benefit from revizing.]

Wow, both authors wear their glasses better than I'd be able to pull off. 😎 I'm normally profoundly suspicious of the current trend that one needs a successful blog or other social media presence to get a cookbook published. These are generally not the people I want to learn from. However, Gourdet got his start working with Jean-Georges Vongerichten, whose NYC Asian fusion restaurants are spectacular. The Joule sous vide website features some recipes of Gourdet's, for those who like to get a read on an author before buying a book: Three Asian Grilling Classics Reimagined, With Gregory Gourdet The Char Siu pork tenderloin, sous vide, looks like he's ahead of me on something I've been trying to figure out. I'll try it. I'll probably finish over the Solo Stove.

For many, many years I'd buy a 16" unglazed terra cotta planter saucer from Home Depot, and double-line it with heavy duty aluminum foil. "For many years" as in, many of those years it would crack and I'd buy another. Still a cheap but effective solution...

Yes, I've had my eye on that. Thanks for the heads up! I jumped. One can stack the welcome discount code "WELCOME2SW" on top of the sale. I like the idea of this rig as a general smaller drip pan, blocking less airflow than the KK double drip pan. While we love tacos, and we'll put this to the signature use (pineapples and all) my first experiments will also revolve around Indian tandoor. The vertical orientation is even "correct", and this will allow hotter temperatures without directly burning the meat.

Yes. Like @Troble said. I gave my electric guitar to a student because I couldn't reproduce the sounds in my head. I can't reproduce the BBQ sauce I can taste in my head, either. On one hand I get lost in the middle, prepared foods, aisles of the supermarket, and I don't aspire to a gift for grabbing bottles and mixing them. I've long harbored the prejudice that sauce hides inferior meat, and the most spectacular meat is best appreciated with salt, pepper, and smoke. I'm still there for ribs; for butt and brisket I stop at the local Mexican grocer to buy an assortment of dried chiles, and make up a rub. I do like Chinese and Japanese barbecue sauces, and we've been experimenting with Char Siu Bao and Ramen, where barbecue meats could find a shining role. This will be a summer exploration. Until we were canceled by the pandemic, I've cooked a barbecue lunch each summer for Laurie's Greek church. Four pork butts or so, cole slaw, several pounds of Rancho Gordo beans as a pot beans side. We serve barbecue sandwiches that need to appeal to a diverse crowd (when the Eritreans contribute to a pot luck I always finish the red sauce left on their platter with whatever injera bread is left), so a mainstream sauce is mandatory. My favorites (in this category) are from Smoke & Spice. The attached PDF is my wall sheet for big batches of their Bour-BQ-Sauce for the church lunches. It's scaled to bourbon bottle sizes. At many commercial BBQ places, including in KC, the sauce (with much more bite than the above recipe) was my favorite thing. Bour-BQ-Sauce.pdf

So, honestly, how good is commercial KC barbecue? The best barbecue I've tasted in my life, including any made by myself or friends, or tasted at a competition, was a brisket in Elgin, Texas. I flew some back to New York, and friends who could afford to do so started ordering it shipped. (It was of course best fresh, on the spot.) The Legends of Texas Barbecue Cookbook is one of the most inspirational cookbooks on my barbecue bookshelf, more for thought patterns than recipes, and suggests this quality is widespread in Texas. Franklin Barbecue: A Meat-Smoking Manifesto has the best actionable advice of my books; I've never been there but I suspect the line is worth the wait. In my experience, a random town such as College Station doesn't come close to these standards, and yet Texas achieves standards that leaves the rest of the country behind. I nearly became a professor at Duke, and during several visits I intensively explored the barbecue scene. I drove several hours to what was supposed to be the best barbecue in the state. Blocks away, I asked a wizened old guy sitting on the corner for directions. "Why would you want to go so far, when [pointing on the same block] is better?" I should have taken his advice. Commercially available North Carolina pulled pork was uniformly so bad that it taught me to abandon the apparent ropey standard in favor of a slightly less cooked but juicier version that can't hold for as many hours. I'm not trying to dis commercial KC barbecue, I just fear that people most familiar with good home-cooked barbecue will be disappointed. The quality of barbecue that KC places can deliver at affordable scale is impressive. Working class locals appreciate this tradition, and these places can keep other kinds of popular restaurants at bay. Nevertheless, with the wrong expectations one will be disappointed. When I visited India for a month, I went with the wrong expectations. At a Hyderabad conference, I was essentially a well-cared-for hostage, with few opportunities to try restaurants. (Mumbai is another story.) While no culinary moment blew me away, I came over a month's time to appreciate the rhythm of Indian food, something no cookbook can convey. KC barbecue is a part of life in KC, even if no culinary moment will blow you away. Go in with those expectations, hoping to come to understand the rhythm. I would be thrilled to stand corrected, here. I have met far more naturally talented cooks than I have become. I've worked hard for modest reward. At a far more talented scale, Bruce Springsteen should be a far better musician given the work he has put in. Also from my experience in research mathematics, I've come to understand and accept that life is like this. In cooking, it is most effective to find ways to replace talent with reproducible technique. Sous vide is widely despised because it does this so effectively. I am known on this forum for the smoke pot, and the bread steam generator, two devices that reduce talent to technique. Many friends have told me that my barbecue is the best they've tasted in their lives. I'm certain that my barbecue is typical of much of our collective barbecue on this forum, and in a different league than most commercially available barbecue. This is because Dennis has made the ultimate contribution to reducing talent to technique: A Komodo Kamado really works.

Barbecue means different things to different people. If you're looking for a lone guy who'll show us a trick or two, he'll be roadside sixty miles out of town. The most famous KC bbq (when I was there long ago) is a local chain that keeps McDonalds at bay. Different purposes, but good grub. Edit: Joe's, in Troble's post below, is where I believe I ate.

I still can't believe they didn't go for a roll.

I have a good friend who grew up in Alberta, perhaps a bit north of you. He said the hardest thing about the bears was that they wouldn't leave through the wall they used for entering.

Penguin: "Naw, it's just ice cream."

Exactly. And charcoal is like wine, you can taste the difference, into price stratospheres you'd rather not know about. (I'm the one who devised the smoke pot and let my wife taste the difference. At least that mod isn't costing me money!)

I gave away my rotisserie, it was too much work to clean. I like tending a spatchcocked chicken on the regular grill grates just as much. Then I bought an electric pressure washer for prepping our ipe deck before oiling. That's the lazy way to clean any BBQ grill, it would make short work of a rotisserie.

Curious how the third party solution compares with the adaptor sold by Thermoworks? Billows Mounting Kits I can see an opportunity here: Sell an adaptor that includes a BBQ Guru style airflow restrictor: As far as I can tell, there is no way to restrict the flow on the Billows itself. Review sites don't discuss this. Because the Billows is higher CFM than any BBQ Guru fan, this is less of an issue: One can further restrict the airflow at the damper, and the Billows will manage to push air through when it wants, with less convection when it doesn't want. Nevertheless, many of us actually use our BBQ Guru fan airflow restrictors, to control passive convection. Only someone who routinely depended on this using BBQ Guru products, and has never missed it after switching to a Billows, can convince me the Billows doesn't need one. "Huh? I had no idea my machine had this switch on it, and I never missed it" is a self-evident statement that's not exactly a testimonial.

Porter Road (forum thread) Porter Road (online butcher)

The last time I didn't specify / seek a tire specialist, the gas station mechanic plugged a Z-rated tire on my old sports car (a 2000 VW GTI VR6, obscure but it gets offers every time it's in the shop). That wrecks the speed rating, not that I was particularly exploring it. Nevertheless, no one should plug a tire, it's not worth the risk unless you're plugging the tire yourself to get home from further away than you trust the spare, and planning to discard the tire as soon as you can. I agree with replacing the tire here.

Yup, I was wondering if not everyone survived the meal!

Yup. For example, Japanese Kombu seaweed. I love a good Pinot Noir wine, and I understand there's alcohol in there. Still, I avoided parties in college where they poured grain alcohol into punch. MSG is cheating. Just because everything is sex doesn't mean you can't include a bit of romance.

Again Focaccia di Recco. The secret is to nail the dough consistency so it rolls paper thin without sticking to the board. And to find the right cheese, a local problem.

Bought the Kindle version. It looks great.

Actually I can't imagine. I'm not sure what fraction of those books I own (I haven't visited my New York apartment in two years) but it's substantial. I have everything Fergus Henderson has written. He's one of my Zombie masters. One trip to London I ate there as often as I could, the Maitre d' relaxed enough to describe to the best of his knowledge the St John diaspora. My first visit, I arrived early for lunch as was my typical mode, and recognized Fergus himself out having a smoke. I was all "Hey! Aren't you that guy in those internet videos?" I never did order the bone marrow with parsley. I do prefer elevating traditional British cooking to new heights, over any new age imported ideas. When I return to London this will again be my first stop. (When I return to Japan my first stop will be King Ken Ramen in Hiroshima for their Tantanmen, even if it means taking the train the wrong way.) From an old email: Anchor and Hope Pub I went there for lunch, bonded at the bar with cooks. Returned in advance of opening for no-reservations dinner in pouring rain only to realize this was THE spot, half of London seemed willing to wait hours for a table. A single is always nimble. I spotted a seat vacating at the bar, realizing I could eat there. Just as I grabbed it I heard a voice "this is the guy I was telling you about!" and I was whisked to my own private wood table for first seating in the dining room. I might have said some flattering things at lunch, while demonstrating some discrimination. Of course I felt obligated to order everything I could possibly eat...

Let's not forget that some of the most influential posters here are women. I talked my wife into buying my first ceramic cooker. She figured it would be an upgrade if I stopped using her ex's offset firebox. She bought me my KK 23" Ultimate. And when I put her on the phone with Dennis she was completely charmed. @braindocare you sure your wife didn't just want to talk with Dennis?

A source of stories you'd have to get us drunk to tell is the Kamado Fraud Forum. It concerns Richard Johnson's ceramic cooker company. He first put tiles on ceramic cookers; his tiles didn't stay on. Various of us here first owned ceramic cookers from this company; you'll see the acronym POSK for these cookers (no one remembers what this stands for). My tiles all fell off, and the KFF featured a photo of my repair. After seeing the lax supervision and workmanship at Richard's factory in Sacramento, I wondered how anyone's tiles ever stayed on. I gave my POSK to a neighbor when I bought my 2009 23" KK Ultimate. My neighbor now has an impressive collection of barbecues; the POSK is no longer part of the collection. My 2009 23" KK Ultimate has all its tiles. It still looks good as new. Richard abandoned a Kamado factory in Indonesia. Dennis has a thriving wood flooring business. His workers mentioned they had friends who'd lost jobs to an abandoned business making ceramic cookers. Dennis, being a good guy, decided to resurrect the business to help these workers. Dennis, being a tad obsessive, got very interested in improving the product. While there remains a superficial resemblance (tiles on a ceramic cooker), the Richard original is junk, while the Dennis modern incarnation is the best ceramic cooker on the market. Think styrofoam cooler versus a Yeti Tundra cooler, Portland cement versus modern ceramics. I was actually aware of the earliest Dennis KK models when I bought my POSK, but I fell victim to preferring "originals". Both Bob Dylan and Manfred Mann sing versions of "Mighty Quinn (Quinn The Eskimo)". I prefer the original, even though it's close to unlistenable. My bad. I should have realized that Dennis was the real deal; I missed being one of his first KK customers. I made up for this in 2009.

There's a great SF Bay Area butcher (Golden Gate Meat Company) that will dry age for us on request. I've tried dry aging brisket before traditional low & slow. Too far and one can eat the brisket with a spoon, but a few days is wonderful. What I'd use a dry ager for would be sausage. I have perhaps the largest Kaffir lime tree of any of Kasma Loha-unchit's students, and periodically I share leaves and limes. Perhaps the best sausage I've ever tasted was a Thai-inflected sausage offered me in gratitude by one of her students. I can't buy sausage like that.

I invented the smoke pot, and I've got all the parts on my yard table for converting my 2009 23" Ultimate to use the KK smoke generator and a BBQ Guru at the same time. All I need is to find the right directions. My wife and I have been together nearly twenty years, but she did worry about my tendency to keep changing my mind on the most sacred things. I'm like a pinball machine that keeps playing even though the kid walked away decades ago. This tendency is very useful in research mathematics, and needs to be managed in life.

Ha! I'd like to think tekobo and I are kindred spirits, though my conversation with Laurie about getting my own dry ager didn't go so well. But I do have a food hacksaw!