Syzygies

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...

Bambi 0519010710.jpg[/attachment:q8eobcax] If there's more than one kk available, I recently helped my brother put in an electric deer fence around his vegetable garden. The idea was to stun and dissuade, but we might have blown our calculations. Do zombies like venison? [Edit] Now he tells me the photo was a hoax. Something the dogs dragged in, inexplicably without leaving a mark.

Thursday Chicken Biagio's Artisan Farms So Thursday has become chicken night, because these guys bring an extraordinary chicken to our local Thursday Farmer's Market. Once, or twice, I could write off as coincidence, my imagination, or the Lake Wobegon "my dog is above average" effect. But three times? Our part-shepherd mutt gets very animated and barks the precise minute that barbecue needs to come off the Komodo. She is paying better attention than me, but is this a gift one can encourage in special dogs? (The first nick off the chicken on the board was part of her reward.)

Re: TMI- Charcoal I came up with the idea of a smoke pot after small-scale experiments making charcoal. Enclose wood in an airtight chamber with a few holes at the bottom, set this chamber over a small fire, and soon the escaping gases will burn and sustain the fire long enough to complete the process of making charcoal. A smoke pot borrows this idea for adding smoke flavor to a cook. It is a two quart cast iron dutch oven, filled with smoking wood, with three 1/8" holes on the bottom. One hole would do if it doesn't get blocked. Seal on the lid with flour paste, made quickly in a zip lock baggy with a snipped corner. Others have experimented with a "smoke bomb": a stainless steel tubes and caps, to avoid the flour paste step, which becomes routine with practice. (In parts of the world with poorly fitting pots, it is considered routine, e.g. making couscous.) Set the smoke pot on a low & slow fire, and one makes charcoal in s l o w m o t i o n. Laurie and I discovered that we vastly prefer the smoke flavor from a smoke pot, to that of a few wood chunks scattered in the open. This is a subdued trace effect from two quarts of smoking wood, rather than the full on effect of a couple of chunks. As such, it's chef's choice, like cooking with sherry versus whisky, and is best debated after trying both ways. (That's me being a mathematician, we don't accept "I can't imagine" as a form of argument, and we would be very embarrassed to ever make such an admission. Most of the world views "I can't imagine" as a perfectly acceptable utterance.) To relate this to the charcoal discussion, there are taste differences to how a fire burns. Just as an automobile engine can belch nasties if tuned poorly, or pass California smog if tuned properly, our fires can taste different, depending on how they are managed. How one burns smoking wood for flavor is one place I notice this. The other is the charcoal itself. There are many techniques for charcoal handling, and a low charcoal fire can taste dirty. One can get by, but this is part of why many of us are so excited that Dennis is making charcoal. The style of charcoal he's aiming to produce is absolutely the best for low & slow Komodo cooks.

Re: Boneless Beef Short Ribs Looks great. Yeah, short ribs are one of my favorite cuts. Not everyone likes bones, and on the bone these ribs shrink like crazy, so your boneless idea works. Sort of a variant on brisket. We've been partial to short ribs as a hamburger component, though lately we've been choosing the most nicely marbled chuck roast at our favorite butcher. It comes from one end, but I forget which end, and so do they if they didn't just cut it, so I go by looks. Short ribs are also perhaps the single best cut for beef stew. It stuns me how many good cooks don't actually have any clue how to pick stewing meat. Cheap is a happy consequence, not how one selects.

charcoal chimney mod I forgot a crucial part of the charcoal chimney mod: Remove the handle and the inner grate. Not sure what the technical term is here, charcoal chimneys typically have an inner grate, to hold the charcoal above a starter such as crumbled newsprint. One then has to pick up the chimney and dump the lit coals out the top. If you remove the handle and the inner grate, then you can pull up on the chimney with channel-lock pliers, and the lit charcoal spills out the bottom, into a nice loose fire with less jostling. This is the way to go. To light the charcoal in the chimney, one can still use crumpled newsprint, or a torch such as a propane weed burner. I sometimes trickle on high-proof rubbing alcohol, letting it absorb but not so much it spills below. Have the top hat and lower vents already set, touch the charcoal with a propane torch, close it and get out of there. Depending on the type of alcohol one could briefly be producing carbon monoxide, which is also a risk with any fire. However, the alcohol burns completely; once one reaches 500 F there will be no trace left. In contrast, lighter fluid is nasty stuff that makes food taste bad and makes the neighbors gag and make trailer-park jokes. Lighting with alcohol may be more dangerous, but it doesn't leave a nasty taste.

Re: Getting the KK to 500 degrees Yep, did that tonight. One can remove the handle (particularly if wood) from any of them, making it ok to leave the starter in the KK if you end up having 3 glasses of wine next door and forget. It's harder to remove the handle from "good" ones, so don't go too far up-market. I then use channel-lock pliers to lift out the basket, when I remember.

Re: Getting the KK to 500 degrees It's easy with the right airflow. Pack the charcoal as loosely as possible, pull out both bottom drawers most of the way, open the hat wide. Light the lump with a propane weed burner, if you have one. You'll go shooting right past 500 into low earth orbit, with practice. The art becomes setting up a more modest fire, that nails 500 steady while you're inside cooking another part of the meal. It will come easy with practice.

Re: Build Your Own BBQ Controller (w/Wifi) Is your probe really that short?

Re: Build Your Own BBQ Controller (w/Wifi) Someone needs to ask this, even if there's a good (negative) answer: With mini-ITX motherboard/cpu/vga combos selling for $45-$60 on Newegg (add memory, power), why spent countless hours trying to learn new languages and debug the whole sort-of-a-computer-on-a-chip route? Arduino sounds like an awesome olive oil, but I'm not sure it's the computing environment of choice. If we went this route, the unique contribution for BBQ would be a PCI-e card for the barbecue-specific IO. Perhaps interfacing with some analog discrete components for scale, but as we all know, analog electronics is kindergarten stuff, at least for what we'd need. Just asking. If I went this route, I'd get to code the controller in Haskell. Along these lines, aren't some $30 wireless routers running full-blown, open-source Linux? Hmm, memory, power, all the wireless hardware is already there, just a question of patching in some more IO.

Re: Build Your Own BBQ Controller (w/Wifi) What people do in audio DIY forums, once they get the design down, is to make a limited run of the custom circuit board. One buys the custom board from the forum collective, then goes to Mouser, DigiKey etc to buy the parts to populate it. Keep the surface mount components on a large enough scale, and one can (with care) solder them by hand. For discrete components I've engraved blank copper boards by hand; seemed easier than the whole chemical etch thing. One still has to drill holes, though one can just pay to have the prototype fabricated. Or there's the whole SchmartBoard approach; I've found their jumper cables incredibly handy for quick electronics mods.