Syzygies

So 106 F here, second day in a row, and a spare the air day also. Our usual way to cook salmon is to brine it, then smoke it in the KK in a cazuela over a bed of basil. Too hot outside... We're finding more uses for the "indoor K" Musui Kamado. I bought their white Dutch oven so Laurie could see ghee cook. So why didn't I realize before today it's a perfect "court bouillon" cooker for fish? Court bouillon is such a classic French technique that it has fallen from favor. I don't know why. Using the Thermapen, and aiming for 125 F internal temperature in a bath held at 200 F, this was spectacular.

BernzOmatic Lawn and Garden Torch Affectionately known as a weed burner. Anything in the category will work. Many of us use these to start our fires. It's particularly useful for dense charcoals such as KK extruded coconut, and for aiming where the fire starts, such as under a smoke pot. I first saw something like this used by @jiarby in a 2003 cooking competition (the judges refused to decide whether his chili or my gumbo was better). He had a more substantial flame thrower, more like something Arnold Schwarzenegger would use in Commando. An innovation I'd recommend is to add a hose clamp somewhere on the neck of the flame thrower. Then it can rest on the lip of the KK, leaning also against the top grate of the charcoal basket. Now you can step away to refill your wine. When the igniter fails, keep the old one so you have two at once. Dennis notes that once a fire starts, it needs more oxygen, not more heat. He used to recommend a hairdryer until I posted that I loved the Milwaukee cordless M18™ Compact Blower. To be clear, this blower is anemic for any other purpose. My favorite cordless blower uses my lawnmower battery. This blower is however worth the price just for starting fires, particularly if you already have Milwaukee cordless tools.

I'm on a 23. The basket is circular, and can rotate to any angle. I chose fire in back for this cook, so the fish would be in front, not dripping into the fire.

Weber Large Grilling Basket "Baked" fish with charmoula sauce is a perfect application for a KK with the basket splitter. Show is a whole red snapper, with some identifying features trimmed for wife acceptance, marinaded baked and sauced with a half recipe of green charmoula. An olive oil marinade will flare up in any direct setup, such as my favored Solo Stove for quick grilling. This depresses me. It reminds me of "Weber" chicken that tastes mostly of burned fat. Worse, if I'm asked to do the grilling as a guest, but the flareups can't be avoided. Here, one gets charcoal grilled flavor while baking indirect, with no flareups. To be fair, bad cooks burn their food, good cooks live in fear of burning their food, and great cooks walk up to that edge. I've seen French cooking accounts where one wants to reduce but not eliminate flareups. Still, what I've done here is a compromise I can accept. With the KK I can phone in better food than I can afford at a restaurant.

Second. Over the years I owned various top-of-the-line FoodSaver external clamp vacuum sealers. They're a classic business model: Average quality, extraordinary customer service for casual users. If you look at their prices as warranty period rentals, and their machines meet one's casual needs, fine. I also owned several best-of-category external clamp vacuum sealers, an Italian brand no longer made that I deliberately chose over the Weston models. Somehow Weston gear reminds me of survivalists; it certainly looks more like it was built in someone's garage. I believe that they work well. I don't have direct experience to make the comparison, but were I choosing now in this category I'd probably go with the Cabela's Commercial-Grade Vacuum Sealer. One huge advantage of an external clamp vacuum sealer is that the bag size is only restricted by width, not length. For a whole brisket that matters. Another advantage is hot liquids, if one can avoid destroying the machine. Hot liquids will come to a boil and ruin the pump on an air pump chamber machine. With an oil pump chamber machine one can change the oil. Still, better to remember to only use chamber machines on cold food. I can't conceive of going back to an external clamp vacuum sealer, after owning a basic chamber vacuum machine. It's like going from an "egg beater" hand drill to a good cordless power drill. I own a VacMaster VP115 and VP120 (for two kitchens), both replaced by newer models. What held me back from the oil pump models was the weight more than price; I'd go with an oil pump next time, and consider other brands. An external clamp machine might drop air pressure by 10% (that's being generous), enough to get the bag to clutch the contents. A chamber machine drops air pressure by at least 80% (and this is for low end models). Scale matters. One can add steam while baking bread by spritzing in 10g with a plant spritzer, or one can boil off 300g of water, displacing the oven atmosphere several times over, using 30 lbs of metal as thermal mass. Scale matters. The pandemic has converted friends to chamber machines, as they stockpile hard-to-obtain foods in their freezer. We have a large chest freezer. At this point it's scary to see a textured clamp bag, because that dates it as too old to conceive of eating. However, in the transition we observed that chamber vacuum sealed foods kept much longer than external clamp vacuum sealed foods. After a year or two the textured bags look like they'd been put away in Saran wrap, and we'd discard them without checking the date. After four years a chamber vacuum sealed bag looks like it was frozen yesterday, unless it developed a leak by banging around. Sometimes we discard them because we've lost our nerve. When we use meats frozen this long, they're a bit subdued but fine. I'm reminded of a story I heard as a kid of a fancy dinner where 30,000 year old mammoth meat was served, found in a glacier. It tasted like mud. But that's 30,000 years stored in a glacier without proper dressing, not four years in a chest freezer. Chamber bags are much less expensive that the textured external clamp bags, though it doesn't seem so for initial stocks as one tends to buy 500 at a time. One can always cut longer bags, and one does need some slack so the part of the bag that seals isn't under tension. I strongly recommend 4 mil bags over 3 mil bags. One can also buy bone protectors to prevent leaks, or just make them as needed from smaller bags. Once one has chamber bags, spend the $30 on an impulse sealer, for sealing wet mixtures and liquids, a challenge for any vacuum sealer. One doesn't need a vacuum for liquids, the liquids do the work! I routinely burp the bubbles out of a 500ml (6" x 10") bag of chicken stock, by sliding the bag along a counter edge till it gloms tight, then seal. Impulse sealers need a dry run to warm up. I'll put up 16 bags of chicken stock at a time, to freeze for routine use. If I want less stock, for a French sauce or a Chinese stir fry, I'll thaw the bag in a sous vide bath, nick the corner, pour out what I need, and reseal using the impulse sealer.

We were all having scary thoughts about the Cleaver showing up on the veranda!

I'm a fellow 23" Ultimate owner. The KK is my charcoal burning oven with a lid. Tandoor, pizza, roast meats. I've fed barbecue to crowds of up to 100. At a certain scale the 32" would be handy, but I've always been happy with my 23". I'm actually not sure that I'd swap it for a 32" if I won the lottery, though I do understand the 32" appeal. "Reverse sear" is just standard sous vide restaurant, in the local dialect. For quick grilling, such as after sous vide, or to roast peppers and salsa ingredients, or charmoula fish (shown) I always use a Solo Stove. Shown is a hybrid rig on a Harbor Freight cart, with a Breeo adjustable height grate. Here's a forum thread: Solo Stove

Wow, great idea. Every time I feel insecure that I'm just not as committed as tekobo, I think back on the Tomato estrattu dehydrator I built a couple of summers ago, and I relax. We love to sous vide potatoes (cold water to 185 F = 85 C for up to two hours) then chill them, then dry them before browning in ghee. The dehydrator is great for the drying step. Making my own masa harina? Wow.

Not exactly what you asked for, but a good sauce one can buy, a spectacular sauce one can make: Roasted Chilli Paste – Nahm Prik Pao The recipe is by my Thai cooking teacher, now retired. I took every weeklong intensive she taught in Oakland, and traveled for a month in Thailand on one of her food tours. I even repeated one of her weeklong intensives: several people dropped out, and she invited me out of fear that without another set of fast hands the classes would go too deep into the evenings. She's very direct: Introducing me to everyone, she explained that I would be leaving if one absentee showed up, as the woman in question found me an acquired taste. Somehow this made liking me a matter of pride; I got along famously with this group. The recipe isn't as hard as it looks, and the paste is astounding.

My favorite California farmers market source for lamb raises Dorper Sheep, from South Africa. A "hair" sheep optimized for meat, rather than a "wool" sheep. Apparently the wool production of wool sheep introduces gamey notes to the meat. This guy ("Farmer Shep") doesn't finish on grain. On the contrary, he's also experimenting with moving his pigs through the family walnut orchard, fast enough to not destroy the orchard. This is in the spirit of Iberico pigs in Spain, allowed to forage a diet of acorns, oak, and nuts. This is my single best meat source, in either California or New York. One is not restricted to corporate practices. Taste aside, I am ethically uncomfortable with mass-produced meat.

Those are interesting links. And having settled on a solution never stops me from trying alternatives. One of our favorite aspects of tandoor cooking is basting with ghee. (Another signature use is twice-cooked potatoes; sous vide chunks from a cold start at 185 F = 85 C for nearly two hours, chill and air dry, then fry aggressively till well browned in the amount of ghee one wants to eat. Salt. We actually ordered a white Dutch oven for our Vermicular Musui Kamado as a visual aid to making ghee; I'll bring the original Dutch oven to my New York apartment for a second setup.) Our tandoori requirements are being able to leave the food in a fixed position which will cook evenly without one side burning getting serious "taste of the fire" not tainted by fats burning in the fire being able to baste easily on all sides with ghee, without having to move the food being able to remove the cook for careful Thermapen temperature testing, then return it to the fire if needed. Five vertical skewers well protected by an easily removed heat deflector / drip pan of sufficient diameter seems to me to be the ideal solution. The engineer in me is synthesizing and testing by experiment what I've learned from others on this forum. I'd be eager to try a better solution but it absolutely has to pass my set of requirements.

This advice is optimized for tandoori cooking, which is a reason by itself to buy a KK. The Skewer Hack vertical rack recommended by tony b arrived, and it is a true 0.25" so the Trompo King Four Spike System fits like they were designed to go together. To be clear, I am most excited about this rig for cooking tandoori in the KK. I can see a whole chicken working on the center spike other ways such as Jamaican jerk. We're likely to try Al Pastor a few times, though we love Carnitas. At the moment, cooking tandoori is something I want to do every chance I can. As various of us have discovered, Ranjit Rai's Tandoor- The Great Indian Barbecue is the definitive tandoor cookbook, written for an Indian audience rather than dumbing down for a western electric oven. It is expensive but worth it, particularly if one has an obsession with whole spices. I will soon start a thread dedicated to this book. The paella pan shown is 38cm, which is 15" rim to rim. The Trompo King drip pan is only 13" wide. Without other heat shielding such as the KK double bottom drip pan, that's not wide enough to protect the outsides of a cook from burning. I believe that the Trompo King Four Spike System was designed after the fact. Carbon steel paella pans are less expensive than enamel or stainless steel. If money doesn't matter, buy stainless. If one sees grace in saving money, buy carbon steel and accept that in this application the drip pan is going to develop character. One can find many 38cm paella pans on Amazon. I give an alternate source. Trompo King - Four Spike System - Smokeware Amazon.com - Skewer Hack Removable Vertical Rack for Home Cooking Tacos Al Pastor, Shawarma, Kebab, Brazilian Churrasco, Doner, Gyros - All Stainless Steel Durable - Easy to Use for the Oven, Barbecue Grill or BBQ - Garden & Outdoor 15" Carbon Steel Paella Pan (38 cm) | La Paella Tandoor- The Great Indian Barbecue- Rai, Ranjit

Did I say one needs a grate? One doesn't need a grate! (I've come to my senses.)

I ordered one to "take one for the team." I'll probably prefer it to the Trompo King drip pan; I have an unused 38cm (15") paella pan that will be perfect. Better coverage, more uniform tandoori cooks.

H&W Brazilian Gojo Barbecue Barbecue String 29cm/11.4in long, 0.7cm/0.28in diameter stainless steel tandem rod Skewer Hack Removable Vertical Rack (tony b) rod 10in length and 0.25in diameter SEAR'D Vertical Spit Skewer BBQ Stand 8" and 12" Skewers - 3/8" Diameter Trompo King - Four Spike System 1/4" hole (measured, matched spike measurement) Were I starting over (and I always start over), I'd just buy the Trompo King Four Spike System, and the Skewer Hack Removable Vertical Rack, and find my own way for how to handle the heat shield / drip pan. Issues to consider are cleanup, and heat deflection. One could lay heavy duty foil on the KK double drip pan, or line a terracotta plant saucer, or source a pan slightly larger than the Trompo King pan. Paella pans for example come in many sizes, and once one has made a thorough mess of a cheap carbon steel paella pan dedicated to this purpose, one will learn to relax about cleanup. This is all predicated on the Skewer Hack actually measuring 1/4". Using a dial caliper, I measured true 1/4" for both the Trompo King spike and hole, close enough to make me wonder how it slides so smoothly. Any deviation will affect the fit. The alternative vertical skewers are the wrong size.

I've described my first Trompo King tandoori chicken cook here. I love indirect on vertical spikes, however one manages that configuration. I had been using my Solo Stove for quick grilling a lot of the time, because it works so well with so little effort, but now I can see the KK staying hot all summer as I work through every tandoori recipe I can find. Planning my next tandoori cook (I'll slip an extra shrimp on the barby for you), I noticed Ranjit Rai's recommendation to use a piece of potato as a skewer spacer. That's a better way to lift tandoori cooks up the skewer a bit. One less grate to clean, and this would work with any of the skewer alternatives in this thread.

I bought a Trompo King and Trompo King - Four Spike System after a tip from the Trompo King on sale for Cinco de Mayo thread. I'm returning their grate. As noted in the thread, there are various alternatives, particularly if one owns the KK double bottom drip pan. As promised, my first cook was tandoori chicken from Ranjit Rai (recipe above in this thread). We were thrilled how it came out, and plan to make many similar experiments using the Trompo King. Tandoor: The Great Indian Barbecue by Ranjit Rai I like having five spikes, and a small drip pan I can carry already loaded from the kitchen to the KK. The Trompo King drip pan is however a bit small for this purpose. As Ranjit Rai notes, 482 F is a typical tandoori chicken cooking temperature. Using the KK double bottom drip pan on my lower grates, and the Trompo King on my main grates, I was able to easily reach and hold 480 F to 500 F for hours, for a completely indirect 30 minute cook. This is much longer than Indian timings, though my chicken pieces are larger, and there's essentially no radiant heat in this setup. One might want one's tandoori chicken to come out a bit more beat up from the fire? Approaches I've taken in the past risk too much fire crisping the outside of the chicken, before it cooks through. Using the Trompo King was the least stressful tandoori cook I've ever experienced. There was plenty of taste of the fire, and one could dial up the abuse factor by cooking at a higher temperature. As always, temperature readings in any fire-based cooker are relative to the design and configuration. The KK is far more nimble than a traditional tandoor at changing temperature. One might ideally want to cook at a somewhat lower temperature until the chicken cooks through to the bone, then let the temperature climb at the end for exterior abuse. I'm thinking start at 450 F, end at 550 F. Big picture, one wants to somehow cook tandoori dishes free-standing vertical, and indirect. If one has the equipment, the recipe is most easily prepared by grinding the dry spices in a Vita-Prep dry ingredient bowl, then grating the ginger and garlic on a medium Microplane, then blending everything together with the oil, salt, and yogurt in the same Vita-Prep bowl. Now vacuum pack the marinade together with the chicken. One could easily get by with less marinate this way, but like any brine process that could affect the equilibrium. Just don't stress over exact marinade to meat proportions. The marinade ingredients are not expensive. Cleanup is a different issue at 500 F, not the target temperature for the Trompo King design. One should oil the drip pan, or line it with foil, or resign oneself to long soaks as part of cleanup.

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.