Syzygies

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/

If there's not actually a seal, there will be a bit of convection. Picture blowing compressed air into the bottom holes. Would it come out the top between the lid and the pot? Of course. That said, I could imagine living with faintly more smokiness, sometimes by choice. After reading Aaron Franklin, and feeling bad I don't have the "basic metalworking skills" to cut up a 1,000 gallon propane tank, I started thinking. It wouldn't be too hard to thread holes into the Dutch oven "ears", and screw in stainless steel hex head bolts to secure the lid. Others like a camping stove sold at REI. I found it too thin, and thus too aggressive, but this is a matter of taste. [Edit] Shopping for another Dutch oven to experiment on, I'm between a rock and a hard place. The cheap Dutch ovens with ears to take a threaded hole have (according to reviews) poorly fitting lids. Lodge costs twice as much, and the only way I see to secure the lid would be with a single long bolt through the center of the bottom and the center of the lid. Could work...

Quite by accident I discovered that one can buy very coarse, fat cleaning scrubbies in the painting aisle of a hardware or box store. The ones I got are so fat (drum roll... ??) that they squeeze nicely between the grates. For scrubbing a grate in a metal water heater catch pan, these are ideal. I do also love my grill floss. It's bending around on me, may be time to see which size wrench...

Galvanized metals produce toxins when heated in a BBQ cooker. I came up with the Dutch oven smoke pot idea a decade ago, on the off-brand K7 I was using then. One can usually get away without flour paste, and it of course depends on the Dutch oven. After a few cooks where I had to rip apart the cook to get at a smoke pot that had lurched over on shifting charcoal and spilled open, I don't risk it. Really not a big deal, make a little ziplock bag and let the flour water paste sit a while, like hydrating bread dough. For me, the paste always thickens and settles into a fairly ideal and easy to use mixture. The tricky part of Dutch ovens are getting them started so the smoke fits your schedule. I tend to start my fires with a propane weed burner. (My other contribution to BBQ is adding a hose clamp to weed burners so they can perch just so on the edge of the KK. I also weigh salt, but I learned that from Paul Bertolli.) These days, I'm happier if I aim the weed burner at several side of the Dutch oven, only incidentally lighting KK extruded coconut lump charcoal under the pot as I completely heat up the pot. This gives me a quality of smoke I like, right away if I'm eager to add my meat.

After not buying a BBQ book in over a decade, I thoroughly enjoyed Aaron Franklin's Franklin Barbecue: A Meat-Smoking Manifesto, published in April 2015. http://www.amazon.com/Franklin-Barbecue-Meat-Smoking-Manifesto-Aaron-ebook/dp/B00N6PFBDW/ As everyone's circumstances are different, and our ceramic cookers behave very differently from Webers or offset-fireboxes, the only book I'd found useful back in the day was Robb Walsh's Legends of Texas Barbecue Cookbook, which by describing the history and diversity of techniques in central Texas BBQ, serves more as background philosophy for one's own search than an actual cookbook. http://www.amazon.com/Legends-Texas-Barbecue-Cookbook-Recollections/dp/0811829618/ Aaron Franklin is self-taught, while very much in the central Texas tradition. There's a remarkable similarity with self-taught bread bakers, who have written the most useful tomes in that category. The obligatory restaurant origin-legend is nevertheless an amusing read. Then an equipment chapter that dives headlong into how to make the ideal smoker from a 1,000 gallon propane tank, assuming basic metal-working skills? Ha, reading this is as close as I may come to welding. Franklin's preferred style involves a very contemplative, simple treatment of the best meat available. This was the hook that got me in: I felt like everything I'd learned in a decade was an itty bit of what he had figured out with a compatible philosophy, and that by the end of a day's reading I'd be transported much further along. Then the differences became apparent. His preferred pit temperature is 275 F for everything. Rub goes on by eye (no weighing salt) mere hours before cooking. He manages moisture along with smoke, and foils (or butcher paper for brisket) to close out the cook. Again like running a bakery, there are many schedules that could work, but one needs to figure out a protocol that maximizes production given the logistical contraints of available storage, equipment, and worker schedules. His discovered principles are as much a solution to these constraints as global truths. Our problems are different; my biggest logistical concern is fitting the cook around a night's sleep. Nevertheless I intend to try his protocols as close to verbatim as one can in a ceramic cooker. Once one has hit a plateau in anything, one can only go further by starting again from scratch, and seeing if the "science" one believes is repeatable. If I fear anything from old age, it is the "I already know I am right!" ossification that keeps one from venturing back down these rabbit holes. While I can "place" this book as cooking the highest quality meats in a central Texas tradition, its greatest strength is explaining a system of thought that allows one to adapt to changing circumstances. Mainstream books assume a Weber and cheap meats, teaching how to mask all this with 12 ingredient sauces. Franklin is unapologetic about the chapter on welding, but has dealt with his fair share of hardships trying to produce great BBQ while traveling. There's been much debate in this forum on the best way to cook brisket; Franklin sees a continuum of technique parametrized by the characteristics of the meat, melding the fast and slow approaches debated here into one world view. I nervously read into the section on "dwells" wondering if he'd flub the science, only to realize that he understood dwells better than any author I'd read. He then takes some of the myth out of smoke rings. I'd had the impression that BBQ judges get their tastebuds zonked early from bad smoke, and go by visuals that competitors learn to manipulate. Just as the crema in a good espresso is an easily manipulated artifact orthogonal to actual coffee quality. Franklin doesn't worry about producing smoke rings. The recipes are if anything an afterthought, one learns instead from all these master class side discussions. The recipes serve to consolidate the points in the book, to make it clear there really isn't anything else going on. It was fun reading this after serving pork butt to 60 people for Sunday lunch, and deflecting every "what did you do?" question with "as little as possible". The discussions on trimming and on slicing brisket are alone worth the price of admission. This is a "once every decade" BBQ book for me, highly recommended.

The digits flicker, we can't see it but the camera won't see all digits at once. A "twitter" version of car wheels rolling backwards in old movies.

By chance I'm cooking triple butts two weekends in a row. Not sure what's up with "7" on the guru. My camera is acting up. It won't take my picture in a mirror either, it's like I'm not even in the room!