Syzygies

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!

I'm unlikely to experiment with the FinaMill, because I don't want to lock into someone else's system for storing spices. This is something I've thought long and hard about. My first recollection of school was teaching my classmates to play Simon Says backwards, and the student teacher leaving in tears. So I don't take direction well. Hario Ceramic Coffee Mill -"Skerton Pro"Hario Ceramic Coffee Mill -"Skerton Pro" Recently, our ancient, inexpensive "Pavoni" grinder started to fail. All it really needed was a good cleaning. This however prompted me to buy the new edition of the Hario Ceramic Coffee Mill. Various people had figured out you really want to run this with a cordless drill/driver, so the new design features a handle that slips onto a hexagon stem that's drill/driver ready. I was never before able to grind spices as finely as one can buy them pre-ground. Now, the spice I grind this way are so fine and fluffy that they're actually hard to pinch. They squirrel out of the way. Not sure how I feel about this. One could back off on the grind. Peppermate Traditional Pepper Mill For general use we have a number of colors of the Peppermate. It was billed to me as a "cook's" pepper mill: It doesn't make a waiter's impression like the ornamental pepper mills many people get as wedding gifts, but it can grind a teaspoon at a time like no one's business. I first saw these taking Italian cooking classes with Giuliano Bugiali in his New York apartment, long ago. (He has passed.) The one pepper that is a challenge to grind is Sichuan pepper. Two passes at different settings with the Hario does a wonderful job, I'll cache a few weeks worth at a time. Good Sichuan pepper can be hard to find. Back when the real thing was contraband in the US, I saw a worker at a Flushing, Queens Sichuan restaurant open a cabinet at the front of the store, housing a 50 lb bag. Their Sichuan pepper clearly rocked, as the meal was already reminding us. I approached the worker with an outstretched twenty dollar bill, only to have the woman manager tackle me. This was their livelihood at stake. So if I claim this is the best Sichuan pepper I have ever found, I hope my recommendation will be taken seriously: Sichuan Tribute Pepper (Mala Market) One can't go wrong with anything they sell. Their best Pixian chili bean paste, best soy sauce, and best vinegar are each transformative. I buy all of their chilis.

One of the more descriptive Amazon reviews for Pok Pok Thaan Thai Style Charcoal says "Slight fruitwood flavor, much lighter smoke than mesquite, hickory or oak." It depends how you use it. Those of us hooked on KK extruded coconut lump love it for how it burns with a nearly neutral flavor, so the smoke we taste is the smoke we deliberately add for flavor, using smoking woods. Nevertheless, one friend with keen tastebuds (he has won wine tasting competitions where they permute the same 12 bottles a few hour later) could pick out the coconut. I can even pick out the coconut, but I could see colors on our black and white TV as a kid, so who knows about me! The Achilles heel to any ceramic cooker used for low & slow is that we're continually burning unlit charcoal as we cook. You can't simply light everything at once and coast 24 hours. In a wood-fired pit, people tend the pit, ideally having one fire to create embers and another to actually cook using only fully developed embers. If we use ordinary charcoal for a low & slow, we taste the charcoal as it lights. I can use ordinary (good Fogo lump) charcoal in my Solo Stove because I'll use too much fuel, then wait till it burns down to almost spent embers. All fires taste roughly the same at this point (though Mesquite is still a bit nasty!). KK extruded coconut lump doesn't impart off flavors as it burns like a fuse, for ceramic cooker low & slows. That's why we love it. Pok Pok has more flavor, but it's not objectionable even if it burns like a fuse. The flavor reminds me of roadside barbecue in Thailand, but I could see colors on our black and white TV as a kid, so who knows about me! This is all relative. Some people like wretched amounts of smoke. I imagine they've had their heart broken too many times on the trail of commercial barbecue, so they want to taste lots of smoke to be sure. Once my wife tasted barbecue using the smoke pot I devised, I was never allowed to use wretched amounts of smoke again. My rear shed is a museum collection of every generation of extruded coconut charcoal sold, Richard through initial Dennis experiments through current Dennis. If I ever ran out and couldn't get KK extruded lump, I'd happily use Pok Pok for low & slows. It's also great for general use if you can ignore the price.

Fogo Premium Hardwood Lump I just had four bags of various FOGO charcoal delivered, to help protect my hoard of KK coffee charcoal. They're my next favorite source. Pok Pok Thaan Thai Style Charcoal This is extruded like KK coconut, but with a different flavor profile. Expensive but worth a try. I love it, but perhaps I just miss Thailand.

Here is a very old thread where I make Tandoori Chicken from "Tandoor: the Great Indian Barbecue" on my previous ceramic cooker: Tandoori Chicken

On my KK I simply cook on the main grill, perhaps with a drip pan to control flareups. For example, chicken tandoor gets basted with ghee. You could baste my old hiking books in ghee after a spice marinade, and you'd swear that this updated Charlie Chaplin classic dish was best thing you ever ate. Yes, once you see it you won't need anyone else telling you this, it will be your opinion too. It's a real, published in India masterpiece that makes no compromises but is nevertheless easy to execute if one has the spices. It's all about spice and marinade handling.

Steven Raichlen PBS Project Smoke ~ Tandor Lamb On a KK, of course. One can find "Tandoor: the Great Indian Barbecue" used sometimes. It's one of my favorite Indian and BBQ cookbooks.

The double bottom drip pan, and a foil lid, would be perfect for this Yucatan dish (cochinita pibil): In a Bay Area underground oven, chefs are making smoky, earthy pork just like it's done in the Yucatán

That's actually some black cod that cost more than my first car, with green charmoula. Ointment of the Gods, except the olive oil causes flareups. I'm tempted to leave olive oil out of the marinade stage. The fire pit is a Solo Stove Ranger, Frankenstein-paired with a Breeo Outpost 19 adjustable grate, all riding on a Harbor Freight Utility Cart. My neighbor has half a dozen alternatives for BBQ equipment. I could get by for life with just a KK ceramic cooker and a Solo Stove grill. I can set up and light wood chunks and charcoal with iso alcohol in 90 seconds, be back in the house cooking sides till it's time to grill. I love the Solo Stove. When I want the deep flavor of slow-cooked barbecue, or a pizza night, I use the KK. (The Sonos bass response really was outstanding inside the KK. This wasn't disrespect. When Yanni played inside the Pyramids, was that disrespect?) Solo Stove (KK thread)

My 23" KK was our second ceramic cooker, and my wife bought it. We've fed 80 people at her church pork butt out of it. The 32" does a lot.

So... The thermometer cable port is 1/2" inner diameter. Any reason we're not using that with the KK Hot/Cold Smoke Generator? I never run a thermometer through that hole anymore. I get better results sticking a probe into the mechanical thermometer hole in the lid. As a bonus, I can control high heats for bread without exposing the thermometer cables to excess heat. There is this idea that it's better to run the smoke through the fire. I certainly considered this, designing the original smoke pot. There, I'd made experiments where at high enough temperatures the gas from the smoke pot would actually catch fire. So this seemed reasonable. But we're talking science here, and I don't know how important this issue is for cold smoking.

Sunterra SANTA MARIA 36" CART 3601-36DSICRT CD1 Lone Star Grillz Santa Maria My neighbor has this style of grill built in, in his back yard. The other end is a pizza oven. Then his other equipment. My old POSK was #2 but he got rid of it long ago. His collection now rivals Jay Leno's garage. So he loves the Santa Maria grill but he doesn't use it much. I'm a big fan of adjustable height grills. They simplify timing your fire. While my 23" sees duty for centerpiece cooks, my hybrid Solo Stove rig sees frequent use for preparing ingredients or grilling a single steak or two sausages... I can set up and light a wood/charcoal/isopropyl mix in a total effort of 90 seconds, go in to manage everything else I'm cooking, and time my return for grilling. With an adjustable grate, what's at stake is how long the grilling takes, not whether it works. Solo Stove Ranger ($215) Breeo Outpost 19 ($129) Harbor Freight Service Cart ($38)

Wow. By an extreme coincidence, I held this exact washing machine drain pan in my hands yesterday, at a local Lowes. It's flimsy. You'll return it. Our compost bins are no longer made, and falling apart after two generations of Harbor Freight straps. We rejected every purpose-built compost bin, and finally decided on seven industrial stackable containers: Global Industrial™ Straight Wall Container Solid - Stackable NRSO2422-14 - 24 x 22-1/2 x 14-1/2 I'll be cutting out most of the bottoms, and hoping for the best. They arrived yesterday, and needed lids. I checked out and rejected this drain pan, before reverting to $8 squares of cheap plywood, for now. Here is the original forum post on using a water heater drain pan to clean grates: Water Heater Pan (2010) That pan of course broke, being plastic. Here I switch to metal, beat up now but going strong. Water Heater Pan (2015) Yesterday's lid search did get me to review the category, and in another coincidence cement mixing tubs caught my eye. Though plastic they'd last a long time as Komodo grate cleaning pans, if one found a good size. It isn't rocket science, however, to plug the hole in a water heater drain pan. You're already in a hardware store, already in an inventive mood. Figure something out! Though of late I always use my pressure washer. The pan protects my yard. I'm asking myself why I don't take the plug back out. Pooled water only gets in the way. Here's my trusty water heater pan (Honey smells barbecue!): Here's the old compost heap: Here's a bottom bin for one of the new stacks. I'll cut out more of the bottom for other levels: It's hard to listen to "What If?" by the author of XKCD without calculating exactly how many holes I need to aerate the new stacks. And Laurie wouldn't have it any other way; this is her turf. What If?

Yes, but they don't also have my Rambo toys!

Yes. I originally was planning to "take one for the team" and also buy the best (not Mexican, but tuned for masa) hand mill. I do have two kitchens. The wet grinder worked well enough that I decided I was done. It does require tending. The wetter the mixture the less tending, but then you need to add more masa harina to compensate. And doneness isn't by the clock, presumably one could learn to spot when it's done, even 20 minutes in with effective tending, and bail. 40 minutes allows rather casual surveillance.

I've bought and used this, even though I have a serious library of KK coconut charcoal. This has more flavor, reminds me of the best roadside grilling on my trip to Thailand. Try a box, no matter what, then you can form your own opinion where it belongs in the firmament. It's worth a try: Pok Pok Thaan Thai Style Charcoal

I bought an electric pressure washer to maintain (clean before oiling) our ipe deck. Now I use it whenever I don't want to get my hands messy washing dishes. The gas range grates ... the Komodo Kamado grates ... a misused molcajete ... the possibilities are endless. I made sure to set it up so access was a minute or two, and if I was really serious I'd build it into the side of the garage, the way some houses once came with central vacuums.

Wouldn't it be easy to make an adapter? A better solution would be to mod the rear door using a Guru adapter: BBQ Guru Adaptors I'm actually rather surprised that Dennis doesn't sell this as a smoke generator accessory.

I've had my eye on that pot for years. Thank you! I don't really mind the flour paste thing. It's actually a bit romantic, like using flour paste to help pots that don't quite fit right in Morocco. For my steamed dumpling experiments, I much prefer a bamboo steamer to metal, it's a live drawing reflecting the hands we have in common with primates. And my earliest, never-reported experiments with alternatives to a cast iron Dutch Oven ended in culinary disaster: They came apart, caught fire, and infused my food with creosote. Still, that pot looked promising. I have other interests and a psychotic number of branches open to explore, and a cast iron smoke pot works. Sometimes I actually find the maturity to leave well enough alone, so I never tried it. Early on, there was a "smoke bomb" branch of this research. People would commission a stainless steel tube, threaded at both ends, and stainless steel caps. Think "pipe bomb". They'd drill the requisite three 1/8" holes in the middle somewhere (I feel like this is some Monty Python movie). These were expensive. I suppose once one had found one and paid for it, it was easier than flour paste. I like rustic. Of course, Dennis reacted by building a professional device. If I were to make any change, it would probably be to buy his smoke generator.

Second try's a charm. Based on my bread baking recipe, I guessed a Bao dough recipe based entirely on freshly ground flour, 2:1:1 Soft:Red:Rye, and raised the hydration. Handled like a charm. Back to my advice to just cook BBQ as I know best how to do, ignore any proposed techniques from books on producing filling.

Ok, first Char Siu Bao experiment in 40 years. Needs work but very promising category. Using freshly ground flour was a distracting challenge, but that actually worked. The primary issue is a savory filling. We know how to make spectacular BBQ on a KK. And any Chinatown sports many places that make spectacular Char Siu Pork; they learned from previous generations. What any cookbook suggests is neither. Don't be pulled off your game. Make the best BBQ you know how, exactly as you already know how, then sauce it appropriately as a Bao filling. That's how any restaurant works: They respond to the equipment they have. This is an awesome way to eat BBQ.