Syzygies

Re: Everyday Misc Cooking Photos w/ details n66906 Fish tagine in a soapstone pot in the KK. Why run an oven indoors, in this heat?

Re: Bronze Behemoth Game On! 2 Yep, the Windows theme song: "But I've found a driver and that's a start!"

Sous vide ribeye steaks So tonight, we cooked some local grass-fed ribeye steaks, sous vide in vacuum bags at 134 F for an hour then seared on the lower KK grate. A classic sous vide technique, known in the local BBQ dialect as the reverse sear. My first try at this with real sous vide equipment. The texture was amazingly like restaurant prime rib, my usual defensive dining choice at any credible place that means well. Next time we may go a few degrees lower (134 F is medium rare and we prefer a bit more rare) and I may encourage more of a raging inferno for the fire. The sous vide technique, nevertheless, makes for an extraordinarily predictable, reproducible result. I can see why restaurants like it.

Re: New to ceramic cooking It's a small world, and I don't know of a cookbook that does this justice. We've all learned by experiment and from each other. If one doesn't naturally cook with fire, it's possible a gift Komodo might not take. If one has grabbed every opportunity to milk the best out of whatever fire-cooking apparatus was available, I haven't heard of a single case of buyer's remorse. A good ceramic cooker (KK makes the best) is a pizza oven, tandoor, smoker, Weber, pie and bread oven, you name it, all at once. I'm a mathematician, we believe in going to original sources. The tandoor predates the KK by oh, thousands of years. One of my favorite cookbooks is Tandoor: The Great Indian Barbecue by Ranjit Rai, ISBN13: 9781585671441, ISBN10: 1585671444. Written for Indian audience, and alas out of print.

Re: Apricot Pork Loin Pinwheel Roast We're going to have to make this. Too good. A bit of a stretch, but this reminds me vaguely of "cima" a rolled veal breast popular in Genova, Italy. Nice, France and Genova, Italy used to be the same region before the countries of France and Italy emerged, and I learned a very similar dish in French cooking lessons. But apricots? Yum. Moroccan rocks, they do fruit and meat all the time.

Re: fathers day cook !!!!

Re: Trying High Heat Brisket For First Time (pics) And the verdict? (Another traditionalist, but very curious...)

Re: Fathers day piglet...... That's truly beautiful. I'm so jealous, Laurie won't even let me cook rabbit.

Re: Best Smoking Methods With KK? Smoke Pot (link) As the originator, I don't have WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor, a stereo term relating to speaker size) to ever try another method again. Try it...

Re: Everyday Misc Cooking Photos w/ details Yum! Leftover pastrami makes great hash.

Re: House-cured pork shoulder and sous vide beans The interior dimensions of the SousVide Supreme Demi are 11" long by 8 3/4" wide, and 6" deep, with a domed lid giving a bit more headroom, e.g. for a 6" deep steam table pan set on a rack to insure water bath circulation. Here are the specs for steam table pans: One Sixth Size 6 15/16 x 6 3/8 176 x 162 mm 4" deep, 1.7 quarts 6" deep, 2.4 quarts One Ninth Size 6 15/16 x 4 1/4 176 x 108 mm 4" deep, 0.9 quarts

Re: House-cured pork shoulder and sous vide beans So the pork was great cooked eight hours to 190 F over apple smoke. Not quite pulled pork, but a section of shoulder handles the long cook and high temps better than chops, which are quickly ruined once they get too hot or sit. However, the outer bits were leaning dry. I solved this with some Mazi Piri Piri sauce (spectacular, artisanal production) but next time, wrap in bacon or caul fat?

So we picked up a 4 lb piece of boneless pork shoulder at a farmers market, and brined it a couple of days following a Paul Bertolli house-cured ham recipe. 2.5% salt by computed weight, scoring the meat as 80% water. Sugar, allspice, peppercorns, juniper berries, onions, carrots, fennel, parsley, thyme, bay, heated to 160 F and chilled. Meanwhile, we used a stoneware loaf pan in a SousVide Supreme Demi to cook half a pound of Rancho Gordo beans for 24 hours at 200 F, with garlic, white onion, salt, pepper and epazote. The Demi can accommodate either a One Sixth Steam Table Pan or two One Ninth Steam Table pans, which is what I'll use next time. Effectively, they sell the least expensive and most compact, precise steam table on the market; I'm trying to get them to make steam table adapter plates as accessories. Sous vide culture is hopelessly entangled in molecular gastronomy and skyscraper food, Alinea and El Bulli, when many of us just want to be Italian peasants using 23rd century equipment, on computer control so we can go work in the garden. Food elitism is a crippling disease. My to-the-point criticisms are that vacuum packing in plastic creates barriers to acceptance at many levels, and people are far better cooks if they can taste and adjust as they go. Vacuum packing is well suited to restaurant use where one perfects a protocol and repeats it endlessly. Imitating this at home has its place, but shouldn't be the only tool in the home sous vide arsenal.

Re: Chicken Fat - Split from First Rotis Cook topic.

Re: are cloth awnings over a KK ok?

Re: new member - waiting on delivery Colorado That works! Congrats x2.

Re: First Rotisserie Cook: Very nice

Re: Best Cut of meat for "Pulled Beef"?? But isn't there an easy way to set up a temporary account? Just mention your Komodo in your first post. That's a great idea. I've long eyed beef clod as the ultimate barbecue short of cooking an entire animal, but I've never gotten to it. I'd aim for brisket, not pulled pork, but still. Here's where I first learned to romanticize beef clod. Every cut is what it is, this is a great source book for understanding the cuts and what Texans have done with them: Legends of Texas Barbecue Cookbook: Recipes and Recollections from the Pit Bosses One way to encourage any beef slow cook to melt is to have it dry aged first. A week was too long for brisket, which was nevertheless amazing, we just didn't hit the dry-aging sweet spot. One could almost use a spoon.

Re: Best Cut of meat for "Pulled Beef"?? I keep learning this the hard way: There are three kinds of meat tissue: muscle, fat, and the stuff that liquefies into gelatinous goo during a low & slow cook. Some call it collagen, but it's a catch-all category. It's easier to say which cuts of beef have a snowball's chance in hell of melting like this (err, rather confused metaphor, sorry) than which cuts will do so. Brisket can melt like this, but I see all too many pictures of otherwise delicious-looking brisket that show uninterrupted expanses of lean meat. Indoors, for a stew, short ribs are absolutely the most reliable cut, for melting into a stew. Outdoors, their surface area to mass ratio has them dry out as they melt. But you could experiment with boning a whole rack of beef short ribs, and rolling it like a boneless pork butt? I'd have trouble resisting putting a bone or two in the middle of the roll to stick out each end, but that's me just messing around. Or you could stuff it? This seems like another good time to queue up that food-porn classic by our very own Dave Zier: Scroll to 1:40 At the San Francisco Ferry Building Farmer's Market, Marin Sun Farms used to sell "pulled beef" sandwiches. They were somewhat like a sloppy joe. We asked which cut, and the cook referred to a "baseball" while pointing to his own shoulder, where I imagine clod comes from. Perhaps if David is into regional butcher lingo he can decipher this.

Re: First Rotisserie Cook: Very nice Great idea, but nonstick? Anything placed that close to a fire has to be known to be safe at fire temperatures. I've thrown out $100 nonstick pans that overheated once. (The smell convinced me where reason stepped aside and my wallet objected...) Along these lines, galvanized metals release toxins when heated to fire temperatures. I prefer stainless steel over any alternative given the choice. (After watching Tod Browning's Freaks in an altered state long ago, I have this obsession about not wanting to poison my friends. Perhaps I'm being over-cautious here, but it's an issue to consider.)

Fire bricks n66873 In my pre-ceramic days I experimented with bricks, e.g. the above attempt at an Ozark pizza oven. Just in case (you didn't say), fire bricks can withstand higher temperatures before they explode.

Re: Top Sirloin Like!

Re: First Butt and Ribs on the KK Stick to your guns! We've tried both ways, we're all over the dry rib approach. I do like the occasional sticky sauce masking cheap meat, when someone else serves it to me, but for ourselves we'd rather track down good meat, and not mask it or turn it to mush. We salt first, separately by weight as a percentage, then put the rest of the rub on. The percentage is a matter of taste, but having a target percentage sure insures reliable results.

Re: Taste Differences I liked the answer from Dennis in a different thread: The KK uses less fuel, hence yields reduced fuel off-tastes. (I paraphrase.) Coming from a different ceramic cooker (a troubled starter marriage that fell apart) I expected that I already knew how to "drive" a KK. I didn't, really; a KK has significantly better insulation, so one is indeed more miserly with fuel. The use of unlit charcoal is potentially the Achilles heel of any ceramic cooker. In contrast, old-school barbecue involved a separate fire, to get hardwood embers ready. In practice, for high temperature cooks I gauge exactly how much fuel I'll want (like calculating the arc of an artillery round) and it is fully lit when I cook. For low temperature cooks I prefer the best charcoal I can get, which is either good lump, or (ideally) the coconut charcoal Dennis will soon be selling again. There's the rate of burn, as Dennis notes. One also gets different combustion byproducts in different burn scenarios. A very slow burn may produce fewer harsh volatiles? I'm guessing. One psychological note: Over-thinking all this is part of the arc of mastering a ceramic cooker. Soon you'll have all the right instincts, it will be unbelievably easy, you'll just cook. I'm rather OCD myself, I've been there, I'm not judging here. Two equipment notes: [1] I bought a second charcoal basket from Dennis. I keep the spare on a terra cotta plant saucer in the garage. This allows me to switch between two fuels (in my case, oak and coconut charcoal) with as little handling as possible of the precious and partially used low-and-slow fuel. [2] For low & slow smoke flavor I drill three 1/8" holes in the bottom of a two quart cast iron "smoke pot", fill with chips or chunks of smoke wood (usually apple or hickory or both) and seal the lid with flour-water paste squeezed out of a ziplock with nicked corner. I then set this on the fire. I'm getting a very small fraction of the potential smoke from a much larger quantity of wood than one would burn out in the open. It tastes different. (Like programming languages, one needs to try both alternatives to come to an informed decision, though plenty of people are eager to debate alternatives they haven't tried.) Part of my cooking philosophy is to look for and exercise any opportunity at selection. This doesn't require skill, just resolve. Parts of food taste better than other parts of food; pick the parts that taste better. This is why I remove the green germ from garlic. This is why I'd rather have a smoke pot select the best 10% of the potential smoke from smoking wood. A different burn produces different volatiles, this is the same as my answer to your original question: The S L O W charcoal burn in a KK tastes better.

Perdue Petrol That's interesting. There's a characteristic aroma to "chicken cooked on Weber" that one doesn't get, even cooking direct without a drip pan, on a KK. I don't miss it, rather I cringe now when I smell it coming off a Weber. The KK can be used more like an oven, less like a broiler, and greater distances lead to less rendering and sputtering fat flame-ups. The trick is to get enough rendering for crisp skin, but we've been managing fine...