Syzygies

After cleaning ashes with a brush, I wore a dust mask and played with my new blower, to get the inside of my KK spotless. Then, setting up an extruded coconut ring around a piece of coffee charcoal, under an apple-filled smoke pot (for salmon on a bed of basil), I noticed that the fit is pretty good to blow air into the guru port. Got my fire to speed in a nice hurry.

Arbitrary flow control, 3 position switch and feathering the on button. Da bomb for starting fires. Tool only shown; takes M18 system battery.

Start with your sharpening kit. Spend what's left of your budget on the knives themselves. There are many approaches, but Shapton GlassStones get my Fujitake VG10 Chef's Knives twice as sharp as I thought possible. Check the hardness on your knife steel; there's a separate line for traditional, softer Japanese carbon steel knives, but these stones are suited for modern Japanese knives, and also work far better than traditional Japanese water stones on western knives like Wüsthof. That frustration, trying a waterstone you bought in your twenties on a western knife? It wasn't you. I rarely use the 1000 stone, working instead 2000, 4000, 8000 as my knives need refreshing. The 1000 is useful for reclaiming a dull or western knife. I believed the same for the 500 stone, and I rarely use it, but it's heavily discounted if one buys the set. Then, of course, who cuts the barber? One absolutely needs a diamond stone to flatten and clean the water stone surfaces every time, or one is missing out on most of the performance. $476 for the 2000, 4000, 8000 and both accessories, or $547 ($71 more) to include the 500 and 1000 stones. Shapton GlassStone 500 Grit ($55) Shapton GlassStone 1000 Grit ($63) Shapton GlassStone 2000 Grit ($71) Shapton GlassStone 4000 Grit ($80) Shapton GlassStone 8000 Grit ($113) Shapton Glass 4pc Set 500x, 1k, 4k, 8k ($264) Shapton Sharpening Stone Holder ($116) Atoma 1200x Diamond Plate ($96)

@golfingfool I cook with parchment paper for other purposes. On the KK, it's the safest way to transfer a pair of unbaked bread loaves from the kitchen to the fire (using a pizza peel). I was taught to steam fish en papillote by making an airtight package with parchment paper; the paper traps steam as the fish bakes. So would aluminum foil. So would white parchment paper, though I don't know that the white parchment paper is even food-safe when heated; the coating on white parchment paper was never designed to take heat, though it might. Pink parchment paper is lousy for en papillote, because it passes some but not all of the steam. This is exactly why people prefer it for barbecue. If you're happy with parchment paper, you'll probably be even happier with pink butcher paper. Here is my Amazon source for pink butcher paper, $37 for 150'. Pink/Peach Butcher Paper Roll 24" X 150' in Durable Carry Tube, FDA Approved, MADE 100% in the USA, The ORIGINAL meat smoking paper for Texas style BBQ

It's like pushing all the buttons in an elevator, only this elevator is like that scene in Being John Malkovich, all the buttons say "at". @mguerra One needs to type "at" then start typing a user, and wait for the pull-down menu to select said user. Otherwise one gets text, no highlighting, no notification. In my experience (Chrome on Mac) very buggy, editing can hang, harder to enter return for a new line, necessary to save and edit some more. There is probably (what I observe, not what I've read) a limit of one user per post that one can tag in this way. @tony b I can get around this by editing again. Perhaps it's one tag per edit? @Stile88 not for everyone. For you? @ckreef my second tag in same editing session. Sometimes one can? Buggy. @Syzygies and of course one can tag oneself. When I first learned the programming language APL, there was an operator that deleted other functions. Of course it wouldn't work on itself.

We're discussing low consequence science, and I have no doubt that you cook spectacularly well (and I would love to test this assumption if I ever get the chance!). However, anyone can cook better; that's what keeps us excited by the process. You would question the scientific approach in your statement if you substituted "surgery", "late 18th century", and "sterilization", and if you were the patient. For me, it is high consequence when I find myself thinking similar thoughts, because I fear aging. While I have a family history of brain hardware failure, I fear the software failure that can come first. Have I lost interest in revisiting questions I thought I had settled? As a mathematician, that would be career-ending. I came into BBQ in a period when "3:2:1" ribs were all the rage, the conventional norm and the unquestioned advice given to all newcomers. I basically did nothing but experiment in my first several years with a ceramic cooker, and I thought that foiled barbecue was absolutely wretched. One might as well use a crock pot. Much later, when Aaron Franklin's book came out, I was struck by his careful use of pink butcher paper. I made new experiments, and came to appreciate it. There's a parallel here with sous vide. Many people just don't see the need for it. The best cooks I know can outdo sous vide for traditional applications like steak, if they bring their A game with absolutely undivided attention, and nothing goes wrong. Any idiot can achieve better results than before with sous vide. So why would anybody want to be "any idiot" when we all aspire to be masters of technique? Life happens. I also need to fit in two errands, one of which becomes an unexpectedly long distraction. My guests are two hours late. That sort of thing. It is good to know robust techniques, over techniques that are superior in ideal circumstances. An MLB baseball season is 162 games; everything that can go wrong, will, and robust techniques win pennants. Aaron Franklin needs to hold finished barbecue for varying time intervals. We can't always count on guests that are ready to eat, to the minute, when I say the barbecue is done. I love how pink butcher paper holds barbecue. I recently included one rack of ribs as a teaser appetizer for a gumbo party, where I was already using my KK for other ingredients. The gumbo required all of my attention, and the meal timing was uncertain. While I prefer fairly plain ribs (no sauce with jars from the pantry to mask inferior pork) cooked never wrapped, here I wrapped in pink butcher paper for the last hour or two. These were the best ribs I've ever cooked.

By convention the white paper is wax coated, and the pink is not. Imagine how confusing it could be without such a convention?

I wasn't familiar with baking soda in rubs; I found this page informative: How should baking soda be used to tenderize meat?

I'll be smoking some pork chops and Catalan sausages for Creole Gumbo. Overnight "dry-brine" (rub to us) as advocated by Justin Smillie's Slow Fires.

My favorite pork chops are from The Local Butcher Shop, sous vide five hours at 136 F with 1% sea salt, Madagascar black pepper and agridulce pimenton, then finished quickly over coffee charcoal. I get flareup I'd like to minimize, so these greats look interesting.

My New England cousin used to put ketchup on her eggs, when she was a kid. That passed for novelty, when I was a kid. Sriracha would be better. Or a good homemade harissa.

Another way this can happen: Eating unlucky Chinese pine nuts. "Pine Mouth" and Consumption of Pine Nuts Ever heard of 'pine nut syndrome'? Neither had I, until I got it Laurie and I poured out two expensive bottles of red wine, cursing our luck that two in a row were corked. Then we remembered the catered banquet we'd attended, with pine nuts in the salad. One could actually feel sorry for the caterers, as they operate on margins that don't leave room for addressing this issue. On the other hand, rejecting inconvenient information is a loathsome trait, when the welfare of others is involved. One is playing roulette eating any pine nuts that cost less that $50/pound.

When my POSK7 (pre Komodo Kamado) lost its tiles I coated it in black material, and saved on fuel! On a hot day it wasn't far from low & slow temperatures before I lit the fire.

Purple Crack Berry is a strain of potato? It sure sounds like a strain of something...

I went without the heat diverter, and use them on either main or upper rack. My understanding is that unless flames are licking them, the stones survive. That's also my experience.

Is this what you use? General Mills All Trumps High Gluten Flour - Unbleached, Unbromated We grind our own flour, which comes out very different, but we could start using sourdough, and figure a way to up the protein.

A number that keeps rising like a tale told in a pub. I've taken various cooking lessons with Rosetta Costantino (My Calabria, Southern Italian Desserts). She's a smart enough engineer to have retired wealthy at an age where most people's careers are just getting going, so I trust her science. She went all over Italy with an infrared thermometer, inspecting these wood fired ovens. Yes, you can measure 900 F in such an oven, but this is never the temperature that the pizza experiences. Hotter than 550 F yes. 900 F no. Of course the first error is the belief that a number describes a fire. We all stick our bare hands into the air of a 450 F oven without incident, but not into 450 F fat. Neapolitan ovens are tuned to not actually incinerate their pizzas; the heat transfer coefficients of the oven floor are crucial. I cooked a steak once at 900 F, and didn't eat it. There are incidents, like watching one's winter shell tear like paper on a mountain top at minus 30 F, that teach us we don't really understand physics outside our narrow experience range. When an Eskimo dies from botulism by fermenting in a plastic pail, after their ancestors used seal skins for centuries, I outwardly bemoan their tragic scientific ignorance. Inwardly I tell myself it would be evolutionary pressure if I did something that stupid. I have no confidence that fat cooked at 900 F is safe for human consumption, after seeing my steak 20 seconds into that fire. It could be just fine, but the truth is that we don't have an experience base to assure us this is safe. Fortunately, this is not what Neapolitans are eating.

After over a decade with push mowers (we have a small lawn) we bought the best electric mower on the market. Didn't exist last year, we waited lawn enough. EGO POWER+ 21" SELF-PROPELLED LAWN MOWER Of course, the real reason was to have an excuse to buy their backback blower using the same charging system, for starting fires in my KK. EGO POWER+ 600 CFM BACKPACK BLOWER Dennis, back at you!

One of Thomas Keller's famous tricks is to cook lobsters just far enough to remove the meat, make stock from the carcasses, and simmer the lobster meat ever so gently in a mixture of mostly butter, some water, very French name. People returned the lobster all the time as undercooked, though it wasn't. The idea didn't actually originate with him. Plenty of words have been written about this. A Chef Invents a Lobster Dish, And Pots Start Boiling All Over As for sealing bags for sous vide, I've MacGyver'd this entire landscape. (You don't think the smoke pot was my first try, do you?) In the 1980's, reading Harold McGee on the arbitrariness of the boiling point of water, and hearing some French chefs used their vacuum packers to help steam fish, I nearly cobbled together sous vide equipment from a chemical supply catalog before I knew it was a thing. I got by for years with PID controllers and modified soup warmers, before mainstream equipment became affordable, and I broke down and bought a chamber vacuum machine. Which everyone should do. So I can make A/B/ comparisons, and you should trust me. Yes, I know all about dunking ziplocks in baths of water while singing Dylan songs, or however you do it. That gets old very fast. Buy a $30 impulse sealer such as Metronic 12" Heat Sealing Hand Impulse Poly Sealer (just an example, search for the one you want) and some chamber vacuum sealer bags. Practicing first with water, figure out how to burp the air out as you seal. For the rest of your life this will be how you freeze stock, even if you own a $8,000 commercial chamber machine and have a staff of twenty. You'll instruct the staff to do it this way. Now, anything with enough liquid can be sealed this way, then sous vide in a Cambro / Anova circulator or your version of same. Stock. Add enough stock, then strain it afterwards. You now have double stock. This is considered a good thing. Olive oil. Add enough olive oil, and compute how much olive oil you can buy with the money you saved by not getting a chamber vacuum machine. Tell yourself you have the money, you just don't have the space. Butter. Ditto. Melt it first. Red cooking Chinese liquid. Go find a recipe. If the Chinese had sous vide machines 5,000 years ago, the recipe would tell you to do exactly this.

Paella pans (lined with foil) make awesome drip pans. They're the right shape, one can tune the diameter. Toss the foil lining rather than a standalone foil pan, less waste.

Pete Wells, the New York Times restaurant critic, reviews Franklin Barbecue: A MacGyver of Slow-Cooked Meats at Franklin Barbecue Spoiler, he likes the brisket. This would be his second bong reference in a review; he can't be unaware of how widely quoted the first reference was: At Thomas Keller’s Per Se, Slips and Stumbles Per Se is his most recent but not most famous take-down; that would be Guy Fieri. As Not Seen on TV

A true race involves a pit stop. Ever try getting a Tesla back from the shop? I hear it can take months.

I'm 11/12 amused and 1/12 concerned.

If you're making up for lost time not being Richard Feynman as a kid, I can see trying for the amusement value. I wouldn't. I grew up on that exact model, camping with my family each summer. I now have the propane version, and it's very handy as an outdoor pair of burners. [1] Griddle for fresh masa tortillas to go with pulled port from the KK. [2] How does that old joke go? "Is seasoning a cast iron pan / griddle / paella pan / wok dirty? It is if you're doing it right!" Or was it "Do you smoke after seasoning?" Either way, better done outdoors.

Yes, I have a firm rule to not use my smoke pot above 275 F (210 F to 240 F is ideal). To further confuse the thread title, a cast iron smoke pot may be the "Firefly 2" of the barbecue world: Half the people who've tried it love it, the other half can't manage to get smoke out of it. I light my low & slow fires with a weed burner, taking special care to heat the underside of the smoke pot itself, and I've never had a problem.