Syzygies

Re: extruded loading question I honestly don't think it matters, and I've gone through many boxes of this stuff. Were one worried about the fire going out, or not lasting long enough, a tight, regular crystal structure might have its advantages. But I've never had a fire go out, or not last 24 hours, so this isn't an issue. Were one worried about getting enough airflow, a loose, random packing might have its advantages. But I've never felt I needed more airflow with this lump. The idea that there's a right way to do everything has an intoxicated authority. This isn't always the case.

Re: V Pills for those on the go From a friend:

Limoncello Limoncello 750 ml Everclear (151 proof grain alcohol) 24 unwaxed organic Eureka lemons 500 ml water 2 cups cane sugar Wash lemons. Peel just the yellow part of the zests, into a 2 quart ball jar. Add Everclear. Let rest for 2 to 3 days, to make lemon extract. Boil water with sugar to make simple syrup, let cool. Strain lemon extract into simple syrup, bottle, and store for serving in one's freezer. Makes 1.5 liters.

Re: Limoncello Rosemary I caught the Limoncello obsession on various trips to Sicilian islands. There was an ice cream freezer at a little shop on the walk back from snorkeling on Panarea, with some house-made limoncello tucked away deep in a corner. Nice afternoon lift! I later collected methods everywhere I went. On the Amalfi coast for our honeymoon, we inquired whether the limoncello was house-made, getting the enthusiastic response "Sempre a casa!" Is the rosemary your innovation? I never saw it. Then again, everything happens in Italy. Here in SF, Boccalone sells a wonderful 'nduja with twelve ingredients, which they claim is authentic. (And authenticity is overrated! Better to channel what people would do under your circumstances.) I never saw more than pork, fat, salt, red pepper, in Calabria or for sale in NYC, and my Calabrian cooking lessons take this view. I've tried various citrus, including many Meyer lemon experiments. In Italy they'll argue that the southern Italian lemon, with a thick rind almost leaning grapefruit, is superior and essential to the recipe. I had the absolute best results with the best examples of organic (ordinary) lemons one sees only every few years at market. This has to be a crime of opportunity; what's available on demand isn't good enough. One has to make the comparison, doubling the amount of rind but steeping for at most 48 hours. This is a minority opinion but one held by some Italians; I'll never go back. To my taste, the 40 day steep is too brown in appearance and taste, by comparison. (I know it's not actually brown unless one does something wrong. I said by comparison.)

Smoke Pot One easy way to obtain a very refined smoke in a KK is to use a smoke pot: Drill a few 1/8" holes in the bottom of a two quart cast iron dutch oven, fill with apple and/or hickory chips or chunks, and seal on the lid with a flour-water paste, mixed in a ziplock bag with the corner then nicked for squeezing out the goop. (The idea is if the lid comes loose, one gets convection, defeating the purpose of the smoke pot.) Now set this over the coals, and light the fire directly under the pot. This is an empirical observation, not a theological observation. The idea comes from the standard method for making charcoal. I'm not suggesting that those who use this approach are making armagnac, while those using open chunks are making moonshine. This is something you have to decide for yourself, by experiment. So I'll probably have trouble understanding "I can't imagine..." responses (or simply be saddened by the lack of imagination ), but any "I tried both ways and I like open chunks better" response is simply an honest difference of opinion. (Laurie won't ever let me go back to open chunks.)

Clustersmoke Putting cold meat in the cooker is a competition trick to increase the smoke ring, which stops forming around 130 F. The judges have lost all sense of taste by partway through a competition, but they can still judge appearance and texture. Adding curing salts also has a dramatic effect, but they can spot this.

Alcohol I pour on as much 91% isopropyl alcohol as I dare, and throw in a match. There is an art to this. I've made some rather loud pings (the kind of ping that can upset the chickens in four neighbors' yards) when I get carried away, but I haven't lost any limbs or anything. It really doesn't take much, and there is a window in which one can close the KK. This isn't like flashback, which is dangerous. The combustion byproducts are said to be carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, so I steer way clear till the fumes burn off. After that, there is absolutely no sign of the accelerant, unlike lighter fluid, or even those wax cubes which leave trace smells in the fire. Isopropyl alcohol The carbon monoxide could be why you don't see this widely recommended. But it works, really well. Ethanol costs more, but one doesn't have to worry about carbon monoxide in the combustion byproducts.

Mushrooms There are nights we don't light the fire...

Re: Would you have cooked this Chicken? Yeah, Fergus Henderson (one of my zombie masters) says to use whole heads of garlic in stock, skin on. I compromise by halving through the equator, for exactly this reason. (Wasn't it soylent green?)

Re: Three Extruder Machines are in the House! No but someone who didn't know all the back stories could misread it...

Re: I know my history In response to a private message, let me clarify that my picture was a mashup intended to look obviously fake; the perspectives deliberately don't match. Had I wanted to mislead anybody, I can do better. I have no doubts about the veracity of the original picture. The joke was obscure and did not belong on this forum. It did not refer to Dennis. There are few people I trust to the degree I trust Dennis, and every long timer here will tell you the same thing.

Re: No lift gate That thing is amazing! Can it also turn the KK upside down to shake out the ashes?

I know my history Lucky us! I found another ceramic pioneer with experience stealing boats!

Re: Ok, got a tracking number I hope you're bringing them some 'cue?

Re: Bronze Behemoth Game On! 2 Also from Modernist Cuisine's Nathan Myhrvold on Culinary Myth-Busting, Bacon, and Barbecue Hmm... I learned such a method years ago, from Paul Bertolli's 2003 Cooking by Hand. It isn't rocket science, one estimates the weight of water in the meat, and adds the right amount of salt to the brine water to reach a desired salinity at equilibrium. Salt divided by total water, not exactly e=mc^2. So now "We've invented" reminds me of that famous Hemingway quote about Henry Miller,

Re: Bronze Behemoth Game On! 2 I just saw this the other day, but from a different source, which I suspect is the original: Modernist Cuisine's Nathan Myhrvold on Culinary Myth-Busting, Bacon, and Barbecue Nathan Myhrvold was CTO at Microsoft, and is spending his billions on a food lab that birthed the $625 five volume treatise Modernist Cuisine. I'm actually rather interested, though I think scientists make poor cooks, I don't have their "only book you'll ever need" mindset, and some reviews cite inexplicable errors in the first printings.

Re: Pizza at 650 F Glenn! Thought you might be lurking. Long time no see! The cornicione was entirely shaped by the positioning of the sauce, as much as anything to keep it from spilling off the pizza onto the stone. A wet dough fairly explodes at these temperatures. My difference in dough thickness from center to edge was no more than an inevitable accident of my shaping technique, I did nothing to encourage it. No ferment, we went by the book (other than the choice of flour) to first try Rosetta's technique. Usually we make a sponge, and I'd like to experiment with slow fridge rises.

Re: Pizza at 650 F That's a great page, if a bit stream-of-consciousness in its editing; only the punctuation and formatting gave it away I wasn't reading the last chapter of Ulysses. He mostly tells you what doesn't matter, yet one could still come away thinking pizza is harder than it is. Like so many things, pizza is on dog-time: The best pizza is the pizza you're having now. And my honest reaction to his photos is about the same as my reaction to pretty much anything I do: Good, but for the effort I put in I should do better. White flour is great for technical stunts, but we can't imagine giving up the flavor of freshly ground whole wheat flour. It's a bit funny having him wax philosophic over the importance of sourdough starter versus yeast, while he's using white flour and canned tomatoes. Sticking to Tweeter-length insights, one of my baking books explains what the names of French baguettes mean, and how the differences affect shelf life. In short, rye helps with flavor and keeping (and with the occasional whole village acid trip), as does either sourdough starter or a sponge. We'll get back to a sponge approach: use the yeast, water and half the flour in the morning. Proceed on a normal schedule later in the day, with the salt and the remaining flour. 80:20 rule says this is nearly as good as sourdough starter, but not as high maintenance. My lifestyle doesn't permit keeping sourdough starter alive. He's dead-on right about an autolyse stage, having the flour and water sit together for at least 20 minutes before kneading. Grinding one's own flour, the dough is thirsty, and one needs this rest stage before any application, such as fresh pasta.

We've been making pizza for years on the Komodo Kamado, with the thin crust pizzas of southern Italy as our gold standard. Recently, we took a pizza making class with Rosetta Costantino, coauthor with Janet Fletcher of My Calabria. I highly recommend both her classes and her book. One can learn recipes anywhere, but she is a former engineer with a gift for technique. She made a number of points that sent us back to the drawing boards; this is our first attempt at pizza since the class, and radically different from what we made before. I'm more of a cook than a baker, and I've seen some great pictures of KK pizza on this forum, so these points may be already understood by some of you, but... [1] She has traveled for years with her infrared temperature shooter, measuring temperatures on the stone where the pizza cooks, for every wood-fired pizza oven she crossed paths with in southern Italy. No matter what extravagant claims were made as to the temperature of the oven, she measured around 650 F at the pizza baking surface, which is what she aims for with her own wood-fired pizza oven at home in the Oakland, CA hills. [2] I had always backed off 650 F or higher, aiming at 550 F to 600 F on the KK, because my crust burned first. Her dough recipe consists only of flour, salt, water and yeast. Nothing else. Any other ingredient will cause the crust to burn at 650 F. Using olive oil? Leave it out. Using milk? Leave it out. Using sugar? Leave it out. Nothing else. [3] The dough rises once as a single ball, and again as individual balls per pizza. One then expands each ball into a pizza, one at a time just before baking, cradling over one's hands. Use semolina flour for the brief transit on a pizza peel to the oven. It is imperative that one not compress the dough in any way during this brief handling. There's no point in repeating the dough recipe, you'll adapt yours to taste. Pizza is technique, not recipe. The salt is to taste. The water is basically as much as you can manage, still able to knead the dough. She didn't spell this out, but I hypothesize that the quantity of yeast, and degree of success of the rising, doesn't matter so much: The yeast creates little pockets, that the steam expands when baking, if one hasn't glued them shut during handling. For two pizzas we used 11 ounces of hard red winter wheat kernels, ground to flour using a Wolfgang Mock grain mill, sieving out the bran with a drum sieve, and padded out to 14 ounces using white baking flour. The dough handled like our sample dough in class, only a bit more durable. All the adjustments we now need to make notwithstanding, this was my favorite whole wheat pizza. (I've only encountered great examples of white flour pizza, in my travels.) Adjustments: I cooked on a FibraMent-D pizza stone on the upper grill, shielded from direct heat by a KK heat deflector on the main grill. With both lower draft doors pulled open and the top spun wide, I nailed 650 F on the nose using Lazzari oak lump. It's easy to also overshoot, so be prepared to stop down the airflow. Next, time, I'd using the main and lower grills; the edges of my pizza burned first, as if they were caught in a convection oven wind tunnel. Roughly speaking, they were. I could go thinner. The crust expansion surprised me. We now need to back off even further on the sauce, leaving out much of the oil and revisiting the choice of cheese. The crust bubbles created valleys where the toppings congregated. Our preferred sauce is an uncooked mixture of (skinned, salted, partially dried) garden tomatoes from the freezer, garlic, basil, capers, olives, anchovies, olive oil. Better to leave out most of the oil, and drizzle on some fresh at the table, as desired.

Re: Sous Vide Unit I thought about rolling my own. I in fact almost ordered some lab equipment in the 1980's after reading Harold McGee on the foolishness of relying on the boiling point of water to guide cooking. (I couldn't afford it.) This wouldn't have put me at the forefront; I didn't know it, but French chefs had already been using sous vide to maximize fois gras yields for a decade. So when I say the reverse sear isn't original, it's with full respect for bringing the idea to practice. We all get scooped, it's the way of the world. In increasing price, in different kitchens I own each of Sous Vide Magic Sous Vide Supreme and I want the Poly Science Sous Vide Professional I use the Sous Vide Magic to control my own cookware on a hot plate. It is intended for a rice cooker, insulated but not that flexible a shape. The Sous Vide Supreme is insulated and rectangular. One can use it as a water oven with 1/6, 1/4, or 1/3 steam table inserts, allowing tasting and adding ingredients as you go. I have beans cooking now; time to add the onions and salt. For the Poly Science, one gives up insulation for circulation, and container flexibility. It's the only pro-grade consumer device. Attach it to a polycarbonate Cambro as they do in restaurants, or to a stock pot. With any sous vide device one can taste and add ingredients as one goes, by using a sous vide (food safe at higher temperatures) ziplock (resealable) bag: Vacuum Seal Bags & Zip Pouches I swore I'd never be drawn to low temp meat cooking, to single degree precision, and at first I stuck to braises and such. But meats cooked sous vide then grilled truly rock, and 139 F is different than 140 F. Try skirt steak. One can get there with any rig and some ingenuity, but the better equipment makes it much easier. Reminds me of the grain mills we left by the wayside before splurging on the Wolfgang Mock. Or, for that matter, all the cookers before the Komodo Kamado. The other cookers work, and the Komodo Kamado is worth every penny. We know this story well.

Re: Sylhet Red Chicken Curry (sous vide and grill)

Re: Sylhet Red Chicken Curry (sous vide and grill) That's why I mixed down the chiles, to a more flavorful blend rather than straight Indian chile. Still spicy but manageable, and the red ointment effect rings true from my trip to India. Nice thing about sous vide, one doesn't need stock to make up for evaporation. Instead, the meat throws some liquid into the bag, which ends up part of the sauce.

Sylhet Red Chicken Curry, adapted from 50 Great Curries of India by Camellia Panjabi. A technique example, combining sous vide and grilling for a dish traditionally cooked stove top. Fry a chopped onion in a few TB peanut oil. Add 4 tsp assorted chile powder, e.g. Chipotle, Cayenne, Pasilla, Paprika to taste. (With a world of chiles available, don't be slavishly authentic, use what's on hand.) Adding bits of water as you go, add 1/2 tsp ground turmeric, 1 TB ground coriander, then 1/2 tsp garam masala. Finally, blend a head of peeled garlic, a similar piece of trimmed ginger, and 1 tsp cumin seeds, together with enough garden tomato for the blender to work. Pour and cook into curry paste. Seal four chicken legs into two vacuum bags, together with the divided sauce. For a chamber vacuum sealer, one wants to cool the sauce first. For a FoodSaver or similar machine, it helps to seal with the bag hanging vertically, so any liquid has to climb through the microchannels. In other words, hang the bag off the edge of the countertop. Cook sous vide at 147 F for two hours. One can pull this off without any specialized gear. First, one wants bags that are food safe at higher temperatures, such as SousVide Supreme Set of 20 One Quart Vacuum Seal Bags SousVide Supreme Zip Pouches/Bags - quart size The latter can be evacuated using the water bath itself to push the air out, without a vacuum sealer. Second, one can steady a large pot of water at any temperature one likes, adjusting the flame and watching for a dip when the bags are added. Finally, scrape off the sauce and grill the legs, serving with the sauce over rice. The legs are cooked through, with no "boiled rope" overcooking effect, typical of stews, so grill just till the surface is as desired. The soft texture could be disconcerting, delicious as it is, so make sure the surface sees some abuse for contrast. Just as people got used to the taste of tin in canned tomatoes, and the market rejected packaging improvements, people expect "boiled rope" here. Less damage to the protein tastes better, but one wants to avoid the impression of serving a poached egg. I used Thomas Keller's Under Pressure: Cooking Sous Vide for ideas, but it describes a very different style of cooking, three star French rather than peasant Indian. There is a sous vide book aimed specifically at barbecue, but I haven't seen it. I met Thomas Keller yesterday, helping a friend build a shed on the French Laundry grounds. Seeing the place and two brief conversations put all his books in perspective for me. He is very naturally focused on execution, precision, and detail, and I appreciate that his books chronicle exactly what he does. I can do the dumbing down for myself, to use these ideas in practice.

Re: I'm interviewed about KK on Kingsford's Grilling.com A great must-read, with a serious grin factor. Loved the "morally ambiguous" previous boss, WAF and choo-choo train references. Like Robin Williams, your words skip the editing room.

Re: Bison Brisket and Pastrami Bison could be the perfect application of sous vide? "Medium rare" beef short ribs, flash-cooked as steak after the connective tissue breaks down, is a sous vide standard.