Syzygies

I've been doing this a long time. What do I actually use, some or all of the time? A second charcoal basket, to save extruded coconut charcoal between low & slow cooks, while I use lump charcoal for high temp cooks. A terra cotta plant saucer for storing the spare basket, to contain ashes. (If one can afford to do so, one could simply use charcoal from KK for everything. We've thought about it, even 500 F chicken tastes better over charcoal from Dennis.) A basket splitter, to make more efficient use of good lump charcoal for small cooks. The splitter constrains the airflow to pass through the fire, even for a small fire. A cover. It rains here part of the year, and this keeps moisture out. Two long neck "weed burner" propane torches, with hose clamps added on the neck so that they balance on the rim of the KK, for lighting fires. A paint brush and a soft cloth dust mask for removing ash. A plastic painter's pan to set below the ash door, for collecting the ash as one brushes it out. This lives in the most recent empty charcoal bag converted to ash storage. Obviously, cold ashes only. Silicone heat resistant gloves. And other gloves, but these take the most heat. There are many options. A 3/8" wrench for scraping grill grates. Get one with the correct round to match the grate. (This is radically better than grill floss or countless other options. Anyone in a reasonable state of mental health will tell you that they're happy with the best solution they've found so far for a problem. Only trust comparisons, when someone has alternated between the two best candidates long enough to break their prejudices.) A metal water heater pan, some improvised way to plug the hole (figure this out at the store), and heavy duty scrubbies from the painting aisle (these blow away anything for the kitchen) for soaking and cleaning grills. (I'll sometimes trust a high heat cook instead, after a good wrench scraping.) I happen to have an electric pressure washer, for deck maintenance. After large low & slows (feeding 60 with pulled pork or brisket) it does a wonderful job of cleaning all grates (again, in the water heater pan). A paella pan, to use as heat deflector and drip pan. Line with foil for easy cleanup. (An official KK drip pan looks worth it to me; it will likely be my next purchase.) Two bath towels, and a cooler, for resting and transporting monumental meats. Heavy duty aluminum foil, for lining the plant saucer (easy disposal once the fat cools) and for wrapping monumental meats to rest in a cooler. Pink butcher paper, for following Austin Franklin barbecue technique. (The white is no better than aluminum foil; the pink breathes.) The official KK pizza stone, for bread or pizza. (I used to use a custom rectangular FibraMent-D baking stone, for two loaves of bread. Dennis got the pizza stone right, and I no longer use anything else.) A Baking Steel, for burgers or Japanese or Spanish griddle technique. The 15" by 1/4" round also fits an indoor oven and can be lifted by anyone. A 16" by 1/2" can be custom ordered, for more thermal punch. A Steam Pan, as described in KK as Steam Oven for Bread. A giant cast iron frying pan with the handle sawed off, filled with two spools of stainless steel chain, to go on the lower rack for bread cooks. (A KK single bottom drip pan would work here without rusting. Buy two, or keep moving the chain as needed.) Freeze 350g of ice in ziplock or vacuum seal bags, and slide the ice in to generate (after a delay making it possible to close the lid safely) enough steam to replicate a commercial bread oven. This is detailed in Keller's Bouchon Bakery but not original to them. This is superior to baking bread in a Dutch oven. Keller took much flack for this on other forums, from fools with zero understanding of physics who think that 10g of water from a plant spritzer suffices. A Smoke Pot, as described in A Dutch Oven Smoke Pot. Find a one or two quart cast iron Dutch oven, drill three 1/8" holes in the bottom, add smoking wood, and seal the lid on with flour paste. Nestle in with the charcoal, and heat it as much as possible while torch lighting the fuel directly under the pot. For low & slow cooks this controls smoke, avoiding nasty combustion byproducts; above 300 F even smoke from such a pot will taste as nasty as open wood. Try this at your own risk, you may be ordered to never use smoke any other way. I'm planning to test an all metal Kleen Kanteen as an easier alternative; I haven't yet. (One needs to work through an obsession with excessive smoke, if one has had one's heart broken too often on the BBQ trail from restaurants with inadequate smoke. There's a sweet spot where smoke is one more flavor in balance; find it.) A DigiQ DX2 BBQ Guru setup, for absolute control of longer cooks. This is indeed optional but very nice; I went years without after my previous unit died of old age. Then I committed to some major cooks for parties where I needed to be sure. A KK is remarkably stable, but if one goes eight hours without checking it can find a new equilibrium as the fire evolves. A Solo Stove Campfire, as described in Solo Stove. It provides a nimble way to make small fires away from the KK. For example, I now use mine to preheat my smoke pot. The applications are endless, and it's fun to use. What have I tried and discarded or given away? A rotisserie. Have you tried cleaning one of these!? I have found ways I actively prefer for cooking anything on the KK that one might use a rotisserie to cook. Chicken, direct at 500 F over a nearly spent fire, and tend it a few times. (If you do have an electric pressure washer handy, then cleaning a rotisserie would not be an ordeal. I don't miss mine. It was fussy.) As a rule, avoid all aspirational purchases in life. There's only so much one needs to do before baby comes home, one can figure out the rest as one goes. Try life without a rotisserie, for example, and see if a BBQ Guru is indicated.

I have a chamber vacuum machine in New York; we use a good clamp machine in California. The potatoes are vacuum sealed already cut up, and go cold into a cold bath, then SV 85 C for 75 minutes. 85 C is the threshold for cooking pretty much any vegetable. They don't overcook, and this process neither adds nor removes water. It's pretty much ideal, and I've tried everything over the years. In particular, steaming or boiling potatoes it's pretty easy to overshoot. And it's very easy to cool potatoes back down in an ice bath if they're vacuum sealed. Or one could plan ahead, and just throw the packets in the fridge or freezer. Twice cooked starch is a thing. It's the secret to french fries, for example.

Wow, that looks great! I use parchment paper whenever helpful without apology; my sourdough bread is about to start its bake on parchment paper. I used to use parchment paper religiously for pizza. If one works quickly, spreading semolina flour on one's work surface is less hassle than parchment paper. I've switched. Of course, your spectacular crust and crumb suggests a wetter dough? If you need parchment paper to pull this off, so be it!

Yes, two is easier. A sous vide precook for pan-fried potatoes is perhaps our overall favorite application. Tonight we're making hash with leftover steak. For one meal involving a very particular foodie, I sous vide precooked potatoes 75 minutes (60-90 ok) at 85 C. I then dried them several hours on a rack using a fan. I then pan fried them with attitude in ghee. This was over the top; one could skip the drying phase. My friend was dumbfounded; he kept staring at pieces of potato in disbelief.

We leave a 12 quart Cambro set up in the laundry room, corner cut from the lid for the Anova. One begins to find very pedestrian uses replacing the microwave, such as defrosting and cooking peas as a side for dinner. Or simply defrosting. Set the target temperature to 0 C, and a circulating water bath defrosts rapidly while keeping the food in question as cold as in the fridge. Our favorite approach to red meat has become a several hour bath at 136 F or so, followed by a much shorter "roasting" in the KK oven. Once one asks the question if one is just playing Simon Says in attempting a hard sear, we find we prefer this softer approach. (Everything in our chest freezer is vacuum-packed in sous vide bags.)

什麼威爾伯說！

Link please?

Trust frozen squid. It's fine, one could call freezing a tenderizing technique. Look again, especially in any ethnic market freezer. I clean then freeze my own, handy in a chest freezer for paella or the even better Catalan Fideuà (noodles replace rice). I had been avoiding eating octopus because they're so smart. They're actually lawyers; when boom times turn bust they don't extend each other this courtesy!

I've done six large pork butts (two layers of three). Seven (three over four) certainly, and it looked like eight (smaller four over larger four) would work. I'll know in July, as one such cook has become an annual event. Lamb shoulders are smaller, I'd be stunned if eight didn't work somehow. Keep an airspace all around between the KK shell and the meat. Between the different shoulders, not so much. Do what you can and don't sweat it. One loses bark where the meat touches, but it still cooks. One could preheat or allow a couple of hours more than usual for a cold start, which will give more familiar smoke. Something remarkable happens when a ceramic cooker is actually full of meat. I first learned this, meeting "David" at an off-brand cooker event in Sacramento in 2003.

This is a fantastic project. I'm in. Is there any chance of integrating this with a controller such as the BBQ Guru? Be both the smoke source and the fan for a 210 F low & slow cook? Easiest would be wiring that was plug compatible with the BBQ Guru fan port. And no matter how you set it up, some of us will figure out how to set up a relay so the Guru controls it despite your best intentions!

Here's a typical appearance, nearly done. One wants the fire to be well on its way to spent, so the walls of the KK are cooking by radiant heat. The skin color isn't as dramatic as other pics here, but this is everyday food for us. We don't eat the skin, or maybe we sneak a bit. What matters is the texture of the meat.

Woodworkers are known to make rudimentary measurements, and they still enjoy their work! I wasn't trying to be a troll, but I should have seen some resistance coming. My first year at a Fire Island beach house, I arrived to find that the old timers had claimed all the drawer space. Rather than whine about this, I lugged over a new dresser on the next trip, and made a chart assigning fractions as sizes for the various drawers in the room, suggesting that people be fair in claiming the new drawer space. I faced Kangaroo Court for this, but not because people took offense. They enjoyed having a pet mathematician who could cook, but they wanted to let me know that not everyone can do fractions. This same crew made me miss the ferry back so I would stay behind to bone out the rest of the chicken I had brought out.

(5*250-6*225)/(5-6) = 100 F, and 5*(250-100) = 6*(225-100) = 750 degree hours either way. 100 F is a lower base temp than I would have expected, but plausible for this rule. This supports your point that it depends on the cut. Using instead a base of 125 F, 5*(250-125) = 6.25*(225-125), suggesting that 5 hours at 250 = 6.25 hours at 225. So any reasonable base gives reasonable predictions.

As luck would have it, our first (off-brand) ceramic cooker arrived a dozen years ago, just as our indoor oven went on the fritz. Using extruded coconut charcoal, there was hardly a hint of smoke in this strawberry rhubarb pie. My true childhood favorite is sour cherry pie (we had a tree), but strawberry rhubarb is a close second.

Yes. I've seen calculus students, when asked to calculate a volume, give a negative answer. They weren't being idiots, they were just forgetting to ask the question, "Is my answer reasonable?" We all have to guess plans, 10 hours @ 225 F. And the best plans go awry, in all the ways you note. But we still need initial guesses. Yes, I'm saying that to a first approximation, linear interpolation is a valid methodology for adjusting cook times. My 8 hours @ 285 F felt at odds with Hector's 10 hours @ 235 F, even though the pieces of meat were different. Degree hours makes this precise; one would need to posit the ridiculous base temperature of 35 F for those two protocols to be similar, whatever the shape of meat. Let's back off and say that two protocols are plausibly similar if they correspond to a base temperature anywhere near 140 F. If the computed base temperature is nowhere near that range, then one is being an idiot. At least I was being an idiot. We're screening for plausibility here.

Interesting replies. Let's just stipulate that nothing beats experience, and there is a boatload of gotchas and nuances here that any rule misses. For an interesting parallel, human stock traders have always valued judgment. Yet there was a time when no one had any idea how to value stock options, then there was a rule. People still bent the rule using experience and judgment, but the rule was a good starting point. The traders that started with the rule now live in bigger houses than us. The traders that ignored the rule sooner or later lost their shirts. Let's confine interest to the practical range of low & slow for large hunks of meat, say 210 F to 285 F, cooking in a KK. You had a plan, but you're starting an hour late. What's your best guess how to adjust your plan? Bend this guess using all the experience and judgment in the world, but start with a baseline guess. What's your baseline guess? My bias here is that cooks who proudly refuse to measure are foolish. This is most so in baking, but also in salting meat. One needs as much experience as Aaron Franklin to salt as accurately by eye as anyone can salt with a scale. Bend the note using judgment, but start with a number. I could start a similar thread on a running forum. I kept race records for many years, including my weight, and my race times were best explained by foot pounds per hour. Of course there were nuances, who was I dating? How was I sleeping? What running shoes? Was I training enough? But the rule worked. The philosophy of calculus predicts this; zoom in on anything that curves, and it looks flat. Asserting a pair of protocols yield the same result is asserting a value for the base temperature in determining degree hours. To give a formula, asserting m hours @ x degrees = n hours @ y degrees is asserting that (m * x - n * y) / (m - n) is the base temperature. For example, asserting that 10 hours @ 220 F = 8 hours @ 240 F is asserting that (2200 - 1920) / (10 - 8 ) = 140 F is the base temperature. Using this base temperature, 10 * (220 - 140) = 8 * (240 - 140) = 800 degree hours either way. So you were planning to cook 10 hours @ 220 F but you find your KK stuck at 240 F. To hell with my math, use your judgment. What is your initial guess how long the cook will take, before you begin prodding and using your judgment, to actually decide when it's done?

Recall the notion of a degree day. For example, growing degree days add up the surplus heat over a base temperature, often 10 C. Three days averaging 15 C, 20 C, 25 C add up to 5+10+15 = 30 degree days. What is the best rule of thumb for degree hours in barbecue? For example, in the thread Dinosaur Beef Ribs, Hector cooked 10 hours @ 235 F. Dave cooked 8 hours @ 285 F. Different pieces of meat, but it was rather evident that Dave overcooked in comparison to Hector. Could one have predicted this by an easy rule of thumb? A base temperature of 35 F makes these two cooks the same: 10 * (235 - 35) = 8 * (285 - 35) = 2000 degree hours, either way. But 35 F is obviously too low, and we know Dave overcooked compared to Hector. One can sous vide pretty much indefinitely at 135 F. We have 10 * (235 - 135) = 1000 degree hours, while 8 * (285-135) = 1200 degree hours. That difference is closer to what we observe, studying the two cooks in the thread. The rate of ideal heat transfer is proportional to the temperature difference, but real world roasting is far more complicated. One follows the water as much as the heat, to understand what is happening. For example, one can model the dwell in a pork butt cook by watching what happens to a wet towel. Nevertheless, a rule of thumb like I propose could be useful for anticipating the effect of small changes in protocol. If I know how long I like to cook a pork butt at 225 F, how do I adjust my cooking times for 240 F? That sort of question could be easily handled by a rule of thumb like I propose, at least for a first guess.

Ok, the two data points here: Hector, 10 hours @ 235 F. Dave, 8 hours @ 285 F. As an experiment I was following Aaron Franklin's protocol for short ribs, a departure from my typical instincts aligned with Hector. He got beautiful sliced ribs, I got pulled beef with bones. Or, more simply, I overcooked these ribs. The "burnt ends" on each tip veered dry, my guests tore through the bark and the meat between bones. They did not share my disappointment. To balance the meal, hedge my bets and feed everybody, I also had a large prime Chateaubriand steak, sous vide 90 minutes @ 132 F. When I took the ribs off to rest, I cranked the KK up to 350 F then roasted the steak a generous number of minutes on each side, indirect same setup as the ribs. Had I done nothing, this would have sliced like restaurant prime rib, no sign of fire. It seems to be an unquestioned religious tenet that one should sear a sous vide steak briefly over direct flame at a very high heat. I don't actually enjoy the surface damage that induces; my approach here is a third way. The meat looked done with surface color and gentle sear marks from the grate, tasted of fire, and sliced up to a plate of medium rare goodness counterbalancing the ribs. I'll do this again and take pictures, highly recommended. For the record, 7 lbs of generously cut beef back ribs, and 2 lbs of Chateaubriand steak, served six adults with hardly any leftovers. This was part of a full meal with appetizers, sides, desserts and too much wine. I reflected later on my mistakes and the zen of barbecue. With a busy day and a "fly by wire" BBQ Guru setup, I did not handle the meat very much, and I should have. It then took me by surprise how completely the ribs fell apart. The meat can take frequent prodding, and the KK is stable enough to easily recover. Cooking indoors, I taste and prod everything at all stages. I can tell when fresh pasta is done without tasting it, by the exact tension as I stir the cooking water. The best pit masters (a level to which I have no right to aspire if I cannot learn this lesson) experience meat the same way. This is not a last-minute check for doneness, this is a continual opening of a door of perception. Imagine that one is serving guests that day, but also training for a future game where one will be presented with many pieces of partially barbecued meat, and asked to assess each piece with no context of cooking history. If one can learn to see this, one realizes that one was cooking blind before. I'd liken this to playing darts. The difference between math and games is that in math one gets to redesign the rules. One could imagine that a gift for barbecue is a knack for knowing cooking times looking at each piece of meat, like being able to throw a dart from a distance and hit the bulls eye. However, if one can redesign the game, one does far better to walk up to the target and push in the dart without a throw. This is continually handling and observing the meat as one cooks. Of course, one does need to play conventional darts, because we need to pick start times and temps for a rough target serving time. And the KK is remarkably stable, it steers like a freighter ship. Agile adjustments in temperature aren't really an option, at least downward. Recall how one finds camp along a river, bushwhacking in the woods: One deliberately aims to miss one way, so one knows which way to turn reaching the river. Here, one should start aiming to overshoot the target serving time, with temps like Hector, and know that there is potential goodness in Aaron Franklin higher temps. Observing the cook all day, decide exactly how to climb the temp to stick the landing at meal time. I'll try again, and that's my game plan.

This should be called the Komodo Affirmation Forum! Never underestimate the power of affirmation. A colleague and I got nice jobs because I kept telling him we were doing the right thing, when all seasoned advice was to take a more traditional approach. I was a broken record, "You're doing great! You're doing great!"

Beef back rib instructions are scarce on the ground, the economics heavily favors selling "shiners" to maximize the boneless rib eye steaks sold separately. My request for a generously butchered rack lead to several days of controversy at one of my go-to butchers. Finally this 7 lb rack was sold to me "it never happened" without boss approval. I wonder where the optimum is, I may be ruining perfectly good rib eye steak here, but I'm sure looking forward to the result.

When I want to wash my grill, I put it in a metal hot water heater pan (inexpensive at box stores, figure out how to plug hole) to soak. The absolute best instrument for scrubbing the grates is then a scrubbing pad found in the painting section of a hardware store. Much tougher than any kitchen scrubbie.

It's a bit of a drive for me (and I'm not available till May 19) but I could be interested. (Edit: I'm now in CA till September.)

The Three Stooges: Larry vs the Lobster Gumbo

Certain friends want to try grilling at 800 F, once they know it's possible. This is a lack of the self control it takes for a good cook to become great. Or perhaps just a healthy experimental nature? In any case, I won't humor them twice. It looks great, but it doesn't taste as good. Also, I don't know for a fact that the byproducts at these temperatures are more harmful than those at lower temperatures, but this is relatively unexplored territory, medically. I think of the Romans getting lead poisoning from their wine vessels. Or, "What's that new mushroom growing in my yard!" If one simply doesn't know, caution is a reasonable response.