Syzygies

Re: Golden Gate Meat Company Yep, that is the BBQ tradition. Along with staying up all night minding a cooker made from spare oil rig parts, rather than sleeping like a baby after sending a month's pay to some guy in Bali. This is also a forum where discussions of Waygu beef take place. I like the Niman Ranch take on the parallel question for pork: They like their pigs to spend hard winters outdoors, and recently trendy pure breeds just can't take the midwest cold. I can only say that this $76 brisket made fantastic barbecue. Inexpensive briskets have been hit-or-miss for me. I wanted our guests to be dumbfounded, and I needed a reliable source. (And a reliable cooker. Because the KK is so tight and well-insulated, it exchanged less air than my old K7, for a moister brisket.) It's hard to carry out a controlled experiment, because the treatments optimized for cheap meat are different, and could make Charlie Chaplin's boots taste great. I like more naked approaches, where the meat itself has nowhere to hide.

Golden Gate Meat Company I've made quite a few briskets, and more so even than ribs or butt, the meat makes the 'cue. I can kid myself that my technique entered in, but truth be told, the Komodo Kamado makes easy work of cooking a brisket, putting me more in the role of an Alsatian wine maker, trying to stand out of the way and not screw up what nature created. For anyone in the SF Bay Area, by far the best source of brisket I've found is a butcher shop at the Ferry Building: Golden Gate Meat Company They have a dry aging room. I tried eight days once and one could eat the brisket with a spoon. My guests loved it but it was too much for me; perhaps the sweet spot is four days. I bought an 11 lb brisket on Monday for $76, to serve last night at a friend's party. Rubbed in 0.6% sea salt by weight, then black pepper and pan-roasted ground dried chiles (actually, in a freezer vacuum pack left over from a previous rub), and some Aleppo pepper to bulk out and heat up the rub. I put hickory chunks and apple chips in a two quart cast iron dutch oven "smoke pot" with three 1/8" holes drilled in the bottom, lid sealed on with flour paste, set this on coconut extruded lump and cooked the brisket at 210 F for 19 hours. Foiled and toweled in a cooler for the two hours before serving at the remote location. This is quite the opposite extreme of a fast cook, which I want to try, but with ample marbling in the meat, it works. A half hour's work, some waiting, and a stronger crowd reaction than spending two days making gumbo. I'd say this was my best barbecue ever, except it had a quiet "I can do this any time I like" reproducible authority to it. The Komodo Kamado did a better job than my old Kamado K7 ever did, and a huge advance over getting up every two hours to tend an offset firebox metal cooker. Brisket rocks.

Making a prototype will still be helpful. For example, it takes some shaking to effect the sort. One might make a fixed structure by accident, and lose this ability.

Everyone has their favorite cleaning method. I do like to alternate low & slow with 600 F, but I also mechanically scrub the grills. The main grill fits perfectly in a hot water heater pan, plugged with a rubber stopper. Soak then scrub with wadded up aluminum foil. Now a 600 F cook is enough to clean the grill.

I've been using charcoal screens for years. I made screens out of 1" and 1/2" mesh, because that's what I had. Later I added rails so they'd fit snugly on a wheel barrel. They're also handy for sieving garden soil or compost. Like the time we were overserved at a neighbor's crawfish boil, and agreed to take home all the waste for our compost. It never smelled, but we're still finding shells and such that never broke down. Keep it simple. The above solution takes up very little extra space, and can be made in one short session.

Welcome! My favorite barbecue book is Legends of Texas Barbecue Cookbook: Recipes and Recollections from the Pit Bosses You don't actually follow the recipes, you channel the pit bosses and cook for yourself. One lesson that we're also learning piecemeal here is that 220 F need not be a low & slow religious tenet, pretty much everyone in Texas works out barbecue technique for themselves, adapting to their exact cooker (and what happens to the fire when they close the store at night, yada yada). That's exactly the right perspective for a new KK owner. Look in particular for the threads here on cooking brisket at higher temps. Though do start out cooking pork butt at the classic 18 to 20 hours at 220 F till it falls apart, and only then play with shorter times, higher temps, and not as cooked when you stop. This book also got me out of a "sauce makes the 'cue" perspective. I'd never seen the merits of a 12 ingredient sweet glaze on indifferent price club ribs, but this book leans further in the "salt, pepper, and smoke" direction than any other book I've seen. All the rest form a tight American cooking genre that leans toward assembling processed foods, as if one could actually assert one's personality and rule one's suburban back yard through buying choices. We eat whole foods, even grinding our own flour (no more difficult than grinding coffee, with the right equipment), and the Texas book best fits our temperament. Equally important, the KK is a very flexible oven that can be used as a barbecue pit. It's not a barbecue pit, per se. Follow any book that tells you how to use an oven. (One favorite of mine is Ranjit Rai's Tandoor: the Great Indian Barbecue.) Or no book at all.

The final word on this should best come from Dennis. Though when I asked, he told me to let it rip. With a new unit, the ceramic material itself has been cured at higher temps than you'll ever create. It also insulates very well, particularly by comparison to some other brands. However, with a new KK you'll smell the acrylic (?) holding the tiles on if you go high temps. Even this is not harmful so much as disconcerting. I'm a veteran of suborbital flights from my K7 days (different brand), it seemed a convenient way to heat-soak the walls before pizza or tandoor, and it made for a nice "self-cleaning oven" feature. (I learned this from Jiarby, and we both ended up with serious cracking.) However, there is absolutely no advantage that I can see to overshooting the final cooking temperature on a KK, and some serious disadvantages: The KK is so well insulated that it stays at the highest temp that it reaches, rather too easily. At what final temp do you want to cook, and why? I've seen the pizza ovens in southern Italy that could probably smelt bronze. I've seen tandoors in India. The KK is a different oven, and temps don't directly translate. I've never seen any improvement in any food by cooking above 600 F, and to my tastes the sweet spot is at most 550 F. I regularly cook hamburgers at 500 F to 600 F; the technique changes from one end of this range to the other. I cooked a steak once at 900 F or so. The fat looked like it had mostly boiled off. It made me wonder if the remaining fat had transformed into a substance people shouldn't eat. In any case, it didn't taste as good as a steak that saw a 600 F phase, or had been cooked at far lower temps. So what are you trying to do? Don't overshoot your target cooking temp, but don't fret if you do, and ignore any new tile smells if you insist on being an astronaut.

That's great! Yeah, I can bust my hump for two days making gumbo for 50, or just make 'cue in the KK, to the same reception. It does almost feel like cheating, huh?

Ahh, I love this forum, we have to try that. I actually have four sizes of paella pans, I've just stopped using any but the largest. Plain? Laurie won't let me make rabbit and snails paella (for two distinct reasons), which is the plain classic. Coleman Andrews also refers to "wharf rat" paella, but that was a simpler time. I do believe the Spanish refer to the paella equivalent of Chicago pizza as "tourist" paella. The classic Spanish approach is over a very open fire at the beach, definitely not covered. We'd been covering any pan that fit and loving the taste of the fire this introduced, then I made some for a party for six in this largest pan, and was crushed that it was somehow missing something. After the guests left, I stayed up sawing off the handles so I could close the lid next time. Nevertheless, we've found socarrat elusive. Point taken.

Above are some pictures of the largest carbon steel Spanish paella pan that fits inside a KK, after sawing off handles: 50 cm. Apparently Spanish Table only stocks this size now in stainless steel. La Paella does stock this size in carbon steel: Spanish Table Stainless Steel Paellera 50cm 20" Carbon Steel Paella Pan (50cm) This is 1/3 kilo of Bomba paella rice, in 6 cups of stock and water, with a splash of wine. Enough paella for two with leftovers, so there's no reason to buy a smaller pan. Add saffran and a teaspoon of salt to the stock. The rest of the recipe can be improvised; the above is olive, chorizo paella with a box of peas from the farmers market. Two TB of capers in salt from the Aeolian islands adds a nice note. Close the KK cover to cook the rice. The salt bowl is from Dracula's castle. Go by scent to move from stage to stage; get an aid dog if you need one. Little dogs should get small servings.

To avoid altitude sickness, it is the height you sleep at that determines your body's response. A conservative rule is: The first 7,000 feet are free. Sleep 1,000 higher each night to acclimate for best fitness at higher altitudes. One can slur or cheat this rule, but it's a good baseline if one has the chance to follow it. I climbed Mt. Whitney (14,500') on a 3 day trip by the "Mountaineer's Route" a few years back. ("Class 4", not the 22 mile trail slog, but not the most technical route either.) Following the above rule, I felt great on the summit. I signed up on the spot for a similar outing. After a week at sea level, I got altitude sickness on the next trip. Sort of like the hangover from hell. I had a great conversation once with Charlie Houston, leader of the first two American attempts on K2. He ending up hanging from the end of the most famous belay in climbing history. There are books on each of these climbs that make great reading if one is into that sort of thing. He became a doctor and the world's authority on altitude sickness. We took turns, he grilled me on the math of card shuffling (I coauthored a paper showing one should shuffle seven times) and I asked him about altitude sickness. But before this hike, I read his books.

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TinyURL Here's a TinyUrl for the map: http://tinyurl.com/2ar984x

That looks incredible. I just ate, and looking at those pictures is still torture. Any left?

Yeah, I only notice the issue when flipping burgers, so it isn't huge. Perhaps there should be some 9 to 3 testers (side to side, perp to the burger spatula), to see if there's an unforeseen consequence we're not picturing? When I read this thread title, it ran together for me with "what's cooking..." As in, if our KK isn't working the night shift on some butt or brisket, we're not serious? (Tonight's pizza rocked...)

+1! Why didn't I think of that? I'm sure the current configuration facilitates the hinge for adding charcoal, which I never use, and which adds to the cleaning workload.

I just slide a plastic painter's tray under the draft door, slide out the draft door, remove the ash screen, and go wild with a paint brush till most of the ash is no longer inside. I don't think I'd want a hole in the middle. Some of the ash does make it to the painter's tray. You'd think that there would only be four choices for how to put the ash screen back in. It generally takes me five or six tries to figure out which way it goes, and that's after just having seen the answer. One of the mysteries of the universe. Sort of like when New Yorkers come home from a night out, to their apartments with three locks. Any of these could turn either way. This makes eight choices, but some people are found passed out in front of their doors, having given up trying. At least they didn't have to drive home.

Welcome! You're going to love cooking this way.

My favorite sport along these lines is getting a KK reference into the K7 forum, without it getting deleted. Of course, not everyone on the KFF forum gets my sense of humor...

+1 Perhaps a longer ramp than that, but it wasn't necessary. I used the Sagulator to figure out how much my ramp would sag.

Pssst! For all you lurkers out there: The way to talk the missus into a ceramic cooker purchase (the KK would be the best choice) is to make noises for a few months first about building something for yourself in the backyard, a Sicilian pizza oven taking up 6' square, a communal oven suitable for an African village square, that sort of thing. The web abounds with plans for such things. Then "discover" the KK and wait to be lead, so much better looking, takes less space, more flexible... That would be my path. Never built the monstrosity in the middle of the yard, but I sure talked about it...

Re: neat idea Oh, his bags are different from that, and they need to be for his application. But the foodsaver can create a vacuum and seal plastic. And third parties already sell channel bags. Put it differently, once a general purpose computer (handheld or otherwise) can take over function once delegated to a specialized device, the specialized device often gets tossed aside. I make exceptions for cell phones, cameras, like a restaurant I prefer being able to do one thing well. But I don't need two essentially identical vacuum packers. And I would have bought the Stoker a long time ago if it were cleanly interchangeable with the Guru. Even now, the hoops I'd jump through would make me feel like I was using a serial-to-USB adapter.

Re: neat idea Sorry I wasn't clear. There's something economists call an externality, when a free market doesn't adequately price certain consequences of our actions. Pollution in general is right up there on this list. If the cost of disposal was assessed for all goods at the time of manufacture, there would be an incentive to come up with designs that had less end-of-life impact. The manufacture of a $100 machine has a significant environmental impact: The energy costs and pollution consequences of building the product itself, and of each material used. Some of that $100 goes to labor, or to corporate profit, but some is paying for events an environmentalist would wish hadn't happened. If my old car runs well, and a new car I'm considering gets 5 mpg better mileage, how much do I have to drive before the enormous impact of manufacturing the new car is offset by its modest fuel savings? My objection to this dry bag device is not only the inconvenience and expense of two essentially identical devices when one will do, but the environmental impact of manufacturing the second device needlessly. All so the guy could make more of a buck. That's pathetic. I'm actually politically dead center. It's everyone else who's off to the right!