Syzygies

My latest toy arrived, a La Chamba Paella Pan, 12" from My Toque. I have actual carbon steel paella pans from The Spanish Table, which I will continue to use for classic Spanish paella using Bomba rice. This will be primarily for rice dishes broadly construed. Turkish? Indian? Hopefully I will figure out how to use Massa brown rice, the rice that turned me around that brown rice could actually taste much better than white rice. This would also make a nice Moroccan tagine. The classic tagine shape (which La Chamba makes) is a nod to a fire handling style that none of us practice; it has become pure theatre that I'm skipping. I'm also eyeing this as a nice cassoulet pot. I now have five La Chamba pots from various sources, and my friends have more. They have been made for eternity in the same Colombian village from black micacious clay, which lends strength. I've read accounts of potters in the U.S. southwest who have trouble breaking their mistake pieces made from micacious clay. The pots feel like incredibly dense wood, are basically non-porous, and I don't worry about or heat or flame. I'll turn a burner on high, or put a room-temperature pot into a hot oven or KK. I've never broken one, and I doubt it would be easy. The surface is smooth enough for sautéing at the start of a cook. They are so buffered that the more conventional shapes make great bean pots. I have lots of experience with other kinds of clay pots. Riado's Moroccan Souss tagine, also high mica, unglazed for cooking rather than show, and a steal at $29, is perhaps my favorite other piece. I'd love to buy everything in The Spanish Table's cazuela collection. Yet if I'd never heard of a clay pot other than La Chamba, I'd be very happy. My Toque does an impeccable job of packaging and shipping these pots, though I suspect they'd arrive fine on a dare, with just a UPS label glued to the bottom. As these are entirely handmade, I've seen variability in how lids fit. In my small sample size, the best specimens have come from My Toque. I suspect that their long relationship with La Chamba guarantees them the best pieces.

Aside from being better designed and built, the KK does handle differently from other ceramic cookers, as those of us who came from other cookers can attest. It acts like it is both better insulated (it is) and has greater thermal mass (perhaps also an artifact of the insulation). Landing a jet is different from landing an airplane, and sweating pipes with MAPP gas is different from sweating pipes with propane, even though each pair is logically the same. I found myself making adjustments when I switched to the KK. I use both CoCo Char (KK Extruded Coconut Shell Charcoal, for low and slow or critical cooks) and local hardwood briquettes (no off-tasting fillers) for everything else. Were I rich I'd just use CoCo Char, along with the occasional bincho or lump for effect. CoCo Char is so neutral and clean, one only worries about the heat soaking itself. CoCo Char is poor man's bincho. With any other charcoal, I find that fire handling dominates heat soaking in my thinking. The Achilles heel of all charcoal cookers is fire handling. In our dreams we have multiple hardwood fires, and we move beautifully mature embers from our seed fire to the cook fire. The occasional green wood makes an appearance to show off our advanced skills, but no flavors from the initial combustion of wood are accidentally introduced. The fire is deliberate, we are distilling the wood as an armagnac distiller is choosing the best part of the mash. Using a cast iron Dutch oven smoke pot, it is practical to control our smoking woods. It is harder to control our fuel charcoal. There are two kinds of charcoal fires: All coals burn together in an arc for a short cook, or the fire works its way through a day's supply for a low & slow. Many of us can identify a sooty taste from lesser charcoal as raw charcoal lights in the latter case, and that is why we exclusively use CoCo Char for these cooks. For any other charcoal, I want the fire to be everywhere, as one gets using a chimney in a Weber, before cooking. It helps to light everywhere with a weed burner torch. It helps to wait. Beyond this, there are still other motivations to wait. Grilled chicken is a prime example: As a guest, having Weber grilled chicken is an exercise in enduring the off tastes of burning chicken fat. Still, with better equipment, we associate that taste with grilled chicken. When manufactures first tried to move away from cans for tomatoes, consumers missed the taste of the can. The ideal paella socarrat crust is golden, not tending to black, but countless fond memories of beach paella make Spaniards rather tolerant of socarrat that is "further cooked". Some people who try smoke pots miss the off tastes of combusting smoke wood; were it simply a matter of flavor strength, they'd use a bigger smoke pot or take more care to get the pot going. When there is time, I like to cook chicken indirect on the tail of a too-hot fire, so the chicken cooks primarily from radiant heat from the KK walls, with no taste of burning fat. This is a choice, and the timing takes practice. A KK stays hot for a long time after the fire dies down; take advantage of this. We also like to use the tails of fires for other purposes, if we are staying up: A foil-covered Spanish cazuela is great for roasting potatoes and onions tossed in olive oil, salt, pepper, and pimenton. This is the ideal potato component for a tortilla (Spanish omelet), even if the original recipe instead deep-fries the potato. Or a half dozen sliced red bell peppers, tossed in salt and olive oil, cooked down till the liquid is nearly gone. With a hotter fire, give a carbon steel pan such as a paella pan another round of seasoning: heat it, rub in a very thin coat of lard, and let it blacken and cool at no higher than 600 F. With other ceramic cookers, a very long preheat can be critical for handling loads at the brink of capacity, such as 25-30 lbs of butt in a K5. With my friend's K5 I then heat the smoke pot in a gas grill, and add it while rebuilding the fire before adding the meat. This saves staying up for hours wondering if the cook will ever stabilize.

Socca (Farinata). Gotta love the Baking Steel.

Another paella, with the neighbors. Carbon steel pan from The Spanish Table. They turn black once they're properly seasoned.

There's usually one or two of those in a 40# Lazzari hardwood lump bag. I'd save them for the right cook, leave them whole. Trouble was, there was also too many crumbs that would fall through a 1" screen. I switched to their briquets, exact same taste and easier handling. There's a kind of fire where one prefers lump, but not how I tend to use my KK.

You mean there won't be a second draft door on the right near the back? I don't have the official gas lighter but I use that draft door regularly. My first choice for opening up full throttle, to get to 600 F quickly under observation. Sometimes I've stuck a weed burner in there to light from underneath. I could live without the latter, but I like being able to provide plenty of air. Perhaps I wouldn't miss that door on a new issue KK? For mine, the front ash shield is a retrofit, and the front draft door doesn't slide easily in and out with the ash shield in place. A "fit and finish" issue that would have never left the factory, but my KK was built before the new ash shields, which I nevertheless prefer. When I clean out the ashes, I have a protocol where I first slide in the front draft door, then I slide on the ash shield. The reverse order is an awkward fit. Perhaps this is the reason I shy away from using the front draft door to open up full throttle. This also could just be "live in a big house? use all the rooms?" psychology, I'm sure I could actually get by without that second draft door. But I use it.

This is the idea I'm going to try: Two 15" half round kiln shelves, on two kiln bricks, on the lower KK grill. $40 all in at a ceramic supply house for potters.

A pair of 15" half round kiln shelves would fit nicely on my 23" ultimate KK main grill, separated to allow a 4" gap for grilling the skewers. Or get two pair, for more height? I'll report back. One could push these together for a pizza stone. I found a similar kiln shelf had the wrong thermal characteristics for bread, and tended to burn my crust. I now use that shelf underneath a matching Fibrament baking stone, for bread.

I'm enjoying this book: The Japanese Grill: From Classic Yakitori to Steak, Seafood, and Vegetables They recommend wrapping two rows of bricks in foil (I'd use "fire" bricks meant to take the heat), as a yakitori skewer platform on a conventional grill. On their side, but in taller position, 4" apart to expose yakitori food but not the sticks to fire. I can also imagine asking a local metal shop to weld together some plates for me, to create a custom heat deflector with a 4" gap for yakitori, to put in my KK. Or get Dennis to design one. Or do it myself, to get over my embarrassment at not having "basic metalworking skills" as called for in Franklin Barbecue. I've seen a version of this in Chinese street food in Flushing, NYC: A giant letter "L" on its side. The vertical part is a charcoal chimney to get perfect coals ready. Then they rake the coals along the long trough, over which they cook skewers all day. I'd like to design a small version to sit inside my KK.

Flame Throwers

Burgers. Niman Ranch chuck from Berkeley Bowl ground using a GSM 10 Meat Grinder. Cooked on a 15" Round Baking Steel. Very good, this is the way to go, best of all worlds.

Yes, Jiarby (whom I haven't heard from in a while) is a professional competitor who lights his fires with something like that. That Arnold movie "Commando" comes to mind.

Yes, Lazzari hardwood briquettes, the yellow bag: http://www.lazzari.com/food-briquette-charcoal.html Same flavor as their hardwood lump, handles nicer for high heats. For low & slow I always use extruded coconut charcoal from Dennis.

The short answer is I lean OCD. Dennis attracts this type. The majority of my cooks are high temperature, and I tend to avoid two low & slow cooks in a row. Bread, chicken, steak, paella. I keep the fire going, and chase cooks with some eggplants, or a foil-covered cazuela filled with potato and onion slices, salt pepper paprika and olive oil, an ideal base for nontraditionally prepared Spanish tortillas (egg frittatas). Or what's left of a fire is ideal for seasoning carbon steel pans like a paella pan. Empty, I sometimes let the fire go to 700 F afterwards, which approaches a self-cleaning oven effect. I always clean after a low & slow, especially the grates. Most of my mess is collected into a 16" foil-lined terra cotta plant saucer, my heat deflector / drip pan. I'm bucking a pretty strong cultural tradition not to clean up much after barbecue; when I'm out having Weber chicken I can taste the rancid burning fat. Outdoor vendors in Thailand don't need to clean, because they're cooking nonstop. I don't like to leave low & slow remnants in my cooker. My habits destroyed my off-brand K7. I'm not sure Dennis would encourage my habits with a KK, but yes it still looks close to new.

Position the hose clamp so it rests on the KK rim, with the wand pinned the other way under the charcoal basket. Reposition a few times if desired. MAPP gas burns hotter than propane. It could help with coconut lump, but I've stopped keeping it around, and propane can light anything if one is patient. I think I'm pretty good at sweating pipes. However, sweating pipes with MAPP gas compared to propane is like landing a jet compared to a prop plane. Everything happens twice as fast. My joints weren't up to my standards, and I reverted to propane so I could work more slowly. This is a good reason not to have MAPP gas around, avoid the temptation of using it...

I have a pair of weed burners that I use for all cooks. The first one stopped lighting, so I bought another, but kept both in service. I attached hose clamps to the middle of each wand, so they balance nicely on the KK rim, unattended. Pvt. Joker: Can you use weed burners to light KK lump for low & slow cooks? Helicopter gunner: It's easy. You just don't light them as much.

Nice presentation, but olive oil? There's a school of thought that infers: Seasoning is about polymerizing, and flaxseed oil is best at polymerizing, ergo one should season with flaxseed oil. I'm not going to spell out all the flaws in this reasoning, but one should be trained to not buy into such a logical sequence. Flaxseed oil does work reasonably well on cast iron, because cast iron has a rough enough texture. Try the same method (as described all over the web, e.g. Cooks Illustrated) on a wok or a carbon steel paella pan, and the flaxseed oil residue has a tendency to flake off. I was trained by my Thai cooking teacher to use lard (she laments its replacement by soybean oil in modern Thailand). If one views seasoning as "which fat to apply" and one's beliefs allow the use of pork products, then this is the best fat I've ever found for seasoning. (I've had several stretches where I made many, many experiments.) One wants a thin film of fat to turn black. The Komodo Kamado is an ideal oven for this, because the fumes stay outside, though a KK can get hot enough to approximate a self-cleaning oven cycle, which can destroy any seasoning that hasn't been burned in for decades. In practice, restaurant pans get beautifully seasoned after dozens of uses per night, night after night. They see whatever cooking oil the restaurant uses, plus all manner of food starches, which are mostly but not entirely removed between uses. In the abstract, not sure this reasoning is any better than "Oh gee! Let's polymerize!", but I've had the best luck by emulating restaurant cycles, frying potatoes and salt in fat. One wants the cooking to stick then release, that's a spot on the pan that can now properly season. Scrape it clean with a sacrificial wooden spoon, and keep frying. Pour olive oil once over a stone? Not so sure. In any case I'd recommend instead a custom order 1/2" baking steel round, which can be seasoned as I describe: http://www.bakingsteel.com/

I gave away my first over-featured BBQ Guru, and used a Pitminder till it died. It had exactly what I wanted, a manual "rotary phone" oven dial. When it died, it had long been discontinued, and I didn't like anything I saw available, and went two years without. I had some big cooks this summer, so I bought a DigiQ DX2: https://www.bbqguru.com/StoreNav?CategoryId=1&ProductId=22 They've had a bit of trouble with too thick a powder coat on the case, causing the control buttons to push inward under a hot sun, and activate on their own. In my case, it set my target pit temp to zero, which I suppose is better than 450 F. I exchanged it (outstanding technical support) and I've had no further trouble. In principle, one voids the warranty by opening the unit, but it's held together by one easily removed screw; if I had a major cook on the line I'd open it again, sand the holes clean, and ask for warranty service anyways. I'd buy this exact unit again. The WiFi has a definite appeal, but I like simplicity. I like that it fits the guru port on my KK, and I like that it runs on 12V not 5V, matching the needs of the LED lighting over our eating area. It was extremely helpful, stabilizing my friend's off-brand K5 while I was out playing. One doesn't need a controller for a KK. One doesn't need a GPS for a car. The right degree of automation is a personal choice. I had no trouble turning out great barbecue during the two years I was without a controller, and yet I'm very happy to have a controller again.

One could even write equations for this, but the intuition is absolutely spot-on. Car dealers say "People buy horsepower, but they drive torque." In outer space, one can spin an arbitrarily massive object with one's pinky finger, but there is an energy transfer that takes lots of patience. For a perfectly balanced rotisserie, the bearing resistance tends to dominate. Unless you trim your meat first on a lathe, it will be impossible to figure out how to attain perfect balance, and the bottleneck will be lifting the imbalanced meat. Watch the meat as it rotates, and fiddle, knowing this is the issue. The best chicken I've ever had from a gas grill was using a rotisserie. I prefer managing chicken by hand on my KK grates, and we gave away our rotisserie to a new KK owner. He didn't want it either, but I never picked it back up and we lost touch. Part of the deal is that the KK grates are so much easier to clean up than a rotisserie. I never tried more massive roasts that might benefit from the rotation.

That is my absolutely favorite piece of meat on a pig. I used to sample bits of this by cutting it off a rib rack I had previously seasoned with dry rub, to check for salt, and quickly pan-frying. Fantastic for any purpose, up there with fish cheeks. I wish I could buy these separately in bulk.

The K5 is in surprisingly good shape, considering it winters in Ithaca. No cracks, one missing tile. Sacramento vintage, it depended what worker you got, as tile application involved unregulated application of a lot of white adhesive goop. My friend rarely uses it. I pulled out six inches of wet ash, then ran it 12 hours before putting in the butt. I beat my K7 to death before buying a KK. The K7 sees some use in my neighbor's yard, NO tiles. My KK takes the same abuse I gave the K7, and it basically looks brand new. Kudos to Dennis.

A bit disorienting cooking on my friend's off-brand K5, but we're making it work. We figure The Piggery http://www.thepiggery.net/pigblog/ sells these quarter round tree trunk butts to save the rest for their sausage work. In any case, "Pork Henge" works for fitting 25 lbs of butt into a small space. Preheating for 12 hours before rebuilding the fire and adding the meat, smoke pot was a useful step.

Here, here. I preorder three for my diaspora. After finding six inches of wet ash at the bottom of my friend's off-brand K5, I decided to run it without meat for as long as possible, then reload fuel before my cook. This left the problem of adequate smoke production from my smoke pot, going cold into an already stable fire. Luckily, there was a gas grill right next to the K5, which I used to preheat the smoke pot as hot as possible. Did the trick, nice smoke shortly after rebuilding the K5 fire. I'm also glad I sent an Amazon box of Dennis charcoal in advance of my arrival, and brought out my new BBQ Guru, keeping as much familiar as possible. http://www.thepiggery.net/pigblog/ The Piggery sells carefully raised pork at twice what we've ever paid before. A "Boston Butt" looks like a quarter round of tree trunk with fat for bark, and weighs at most five pounds. Pre-ordering means they save you some, not that they cut differently. Pork shoulder is of course the perfect cut for making sausage, which they sell lots of, so my theory is that this squared off potato of a butt is how their sales ecosystem works. This turned out to be a blessing, more area for rub, more bark, and I could fit five of these in a Democratic firing squad, fat up and out, under my friend's K5 dome. For a 25 lb payload, pretty much the limit of this equipment. [Edit] Yield was less than expected (though plenty). Sawing into quarter rounds (like a tree trunk with fat as bark) is something taking far less skill than, say, a Starbucks barista. I suspect they do have butcher skills, though Ithaca does place more weight on the politically correct ethical treatment of animals than any intelligence in the butchering. Nevertheless, with a band saw they aren't following the structure of the bones. I saw bone fragments I've never seen in any pork butt, or for that matter whole shoulder, in my life. If one posits more butcher skills, they are being selfish in making sure that the scraps they keep are easy to work with for making sausage, because that's work they have to do. Excellent flavor, though.

The cleaning pads I like best so far are 3M Heavy Duty Stripping Pads: http://www.amazon.com/Heavy-Duty-Stripping-Pads-No/dp/B001B58CRQ Above is an Amazon link. In practice, they're available with painting supplies in many hardware stores. If you ask for them by exact name, staff might know what you're talking about. I've been reduced to staring at the "prep" section of the painting aisles. These aren't heat-proof, so I generally use them while soaking a grill in a metal water heater pan with the exit hole blocked (improvise; there are many ways to do this; I screwed together some plastic parts). They're coarse and thick, stiff enough to clean nicely between the grates of a KK; they might not fit between the grates of a lesser brand grill. My practice is to do a rough clean in place with the Grill Floss metal tool, then soak and clean more carefully in my wading pool replacement. (Wading pools also work.)

I'm making three pork butts, second Sunday in a row. This time, in Ithaca for my niece's wedding, borrowing a friend's K5. That will be an interesting, close fit. I did bring out my BBQ Guru. The good news is the pig source: http://www.thepiggery.net/pigblog/