Syzygies

M63 is nothing more than a name given by said competitor to an undisclosed product he purchases for resale. I learned as a kid, if I wanted to blot out some writing so no one could make it out, the most effective technique was to write other letters over each letter. Here, you are under a spell you need to break! Try making up similar, but even more impressive names for yourself. Like Z69. or P1120. Write ad copy to go with these names. Read these names, and the ad copy, out loud in the most pompous voice possible. Repeat until you start to laugh, and you are free from the spell. The compositions of the two cookers you ask about are as different as the prices, or the reputations of the makers. I have one of each, and the difference is absolutely night and day. The Komodo Kamado needs no additional refractory materials to be applied by the end user; it is already designed for the rigors of its intended use. Having watched the competing product fall apart, I don't dispute that some additional materials might have helped (or avoiding some astonishingly cheap materials that the competitor did use). What I have to wonder is why something like "Z69" wasn't used in the first place? But sometimes in life, it is simply time to move on. Many of the folks here came here by doing exactly that. The lucky ones started here.

Spatchcock chicken For comparison, try brining the chicken in less (to taste) than 1/2 cup salt, 1/4 cup sugar per gallon water, overnight, then "spatchcock" the chicken by cutting out the backbone and flattening it out bones down, skin up. Now cook on the upper grill at 450 F or 500 F or so. This goes quickly, be sure to check after 30 minutes and frequently thereafter. Or, far more work, make Tandoor chicken. It's great that the KK supports a rotisserie, but none of our experiments make us prefer the rotisserie to other methods. The KK is an awesome Tandoor oven, for example. Any gas grill can be a rotisserie.

Made 17 quarts of gumbo for a party tonight. Smoked the pork and the sausage in the KK, for a hint of the fire.

We imagined pizza, then short ribs (one Flintstones rack). Tonight was "sloppy joes" from the leftover short ribs.

The covers truly rock. Our neighbor (who got our old K7) is a serious artist woodworker. We're thinking of commissioning him to make us an outdoor table (like his) and the first thing Laurie thought of was "we should ask johnnyboy to make us a cover!" for the winter rains.

I switch back and forth between extruded coconut charcoal for low & slow cooks, and Lazzari hardwood lump for higher temps. I ordered a second charcoal basket, so I could avoid handling any unburned extruded coconut charcoal. The spare basket fits nicely on a 14" terra cotta plant saucer.

Talk about caloric restriction!

Re: 2nd device required The KK is more work for this, but a nice effect. The dehydrator has eight or more trays, that's lots of surface area = lots of tomatoes.

Yeah, when I was eight the pre-internet scam was to go around with barrels of used automotive oil, offering to seal people's driveways at an attractive price. I remember hearing this, then taking a picture of one neighborhood crew with my cheap plastic camera. They peeled out of there like they were abandoning a ship in the Sacramento river!

Time Travel For anyone into time travel, here are the web sites for this time line: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www ... kamado.com (Cut and paste the whole line.) Were there other domains? This one doesn't kick in right away. I'm baffled, 2003 was my first summer living with Laurie, and I tried using a rusty offset firebox left by her ex in all ways, as if it were a ceramic cooker. We started looking for an actual ceramic cooker in 2003; David and Kim at the Kamado cookoff in Sacramento, August 2003 were very persuasive. We bought a Kamado in February 2004, then a KK in September 2009 (is this really our first summer?). I could have sworn that I considered a KK in the fall of 2003. Did the ex-Kamado crew make sales before you adopted them?

Half wine barrels are easily come by in California, $20-$30 at local hardware stores. We started with one herb barrel years back, we now grow three barrels of assorted herbs, two of parsley, one of mint (for mohitos), and seasonally three of young Genovese basil for pesto. Not to mention all the flower barrels; if a neighbor hit a home run over our fence, it would probably land in a barrel. It's nice being able to rotate barrels, planting fresh every now and then, and ripping out the old once the new is producing enough for use. I wish someone had told me years ago how easy parsley is to grow. I always imagined it would bolt right away, and I'd use too much. Parsley grows beautifully, and it's hard to keep up with it. One of my inane judgments in my youth was that those who knew realized tabouleh was mostly parsley; the mostly bulghur version was counterfeit. We may have to dig out a tabouleh recipe to keep up.

Haven't tried again. I would have liked the meat to be falling off the bone tender, it was very tasty but tougher than that. Perhaps (I can't believe I'm saying this) a foil stage? I do like the idea of the KK as a charcoal oven, as much of the world uses, rather than a specific instrument for classic American BBQ and the occasional pizza. So I'll keep up the experiments with any meat one would roast indoors, to see what happens.

Ahh, the purebred/mutt debate. I'm reminded of Niman Ranch when they ventured into pig, they preferred crosses to the breed-of-the-moment (whose name escapes me), because they could survive out in the cold better, which led to better meat. Wagyu is an expensive variant on dead cow. Independently, one can explore "grades" within more generic beef. The two best briskets I've ever made: #1 was an organic brisket, frozen, picked up in a parking lot meeting like it was a drug buy, from someone who'd given up on our working class farmers market as too downmarket for his wares. I'd kept his number. Very good marbling. #2 was natural beef from the butcher at the San Francisco Ferry Building, indoors from the farmers market. They have their own dry aging room, and I had the brisket aged 8 days. Next time I'd try 4 or 5 days, one could eat the brisket with a spoon. Everyone who'd missed the #1 brisket thought this one was remarkable. And I've missed a lot. Indifferent meat makes indifferent barbecue. One would think this is an easy lesson, but I keep learning it. The best brisket I've had out was from Elgin, TX. I'd guess they're cherry-picking pretty standard beef, they go through way too many per day to be giving each animal a night in a spa/brothel, or whatever it is Waygu does. Organic doesn't always translate to best results. For example, we bought beef cheeks once to duplicate a New York bistro favorite, and it was like eating Charlie Chaplin's boots. We figured the organic cows had smiled too much.

It is legendary that one washes rice from India, because labor is so cheap that it makes economic sense to pay someone to add tiny bits of foreign material to the rice. Boggles the mind, but the charcoal is sold by weight, right? Suspicious... When I've complained about too many small crumbs in my Lazarri 40# oak lump bags, they tell me at the factory to bring them in for a credit. I never do...

Brined Salmon on a bed of Basil So brine some wild salmon in 1/2 cup salt, 1/3 cup sugar per gallon for four hours. Rest on a bed of supermarket basil (those weeds no self-respecting Italian would use for pesto). Cook low and slow until just done to taste. I like apple smoke. This will melt in your mouth. Much less effort than butt, which is also a reasonable choice. But there's the politics: A KK is about much more than "BBQ". It's a "cooking over live fire" oven like much of the sensible world uses, and one should use it for any purpose one can. Starting with a non-BBQ item helps to reinforce this point. Seriously, our indoor oven went on the blink around the time our first ceramic cooker arrived, and one of our first cooks was a strawberry rhubarb pie over coconut charcoal.

The 0.8% salt for dry rubs was tuned by trial and error; I started by taking into account that ribs have a lot of bone weight. For a wet brine, I've been treating a pork loin as 70% water, and going for a target salinity of 2.5%, down from an earlier 3%. This is not that salty; Paul Bertolli goes for at least 3%. I use a spreadsheet, which doubles as a historical record; that's how I can now tell you what I do. The spreadsheet formulas are simple. A sample calculation went: Jun 21, 2009 Cut Bone-in Loin # chops 6 Weight of meat, lb 6.15 Water fraction, % 70% Salinity, % 2.5% Brine water, g 4,000 Meat water, g 1,954 Total water, g 5,954 Total salt, g 149 Salt, actual g 140 Sugar, actual g 90 Written out, 6.15 lbs * (454 g/lb)= 2792 g meat 2792 g * 70% water = 1954 g water in meat 1954 + 4000 = 5954 g total water 2.5% salt * 5954 = 148 g salt I have more cookbooks than math books, and Paul Bertolli is the only cookbook author with equations like this. You'd think one of the baking books (water content is critical to how bread comes out), but no.

I haven't used sugar in a dry rub, although there's always some sugar in my wet brines. Our basic dry rub is to collect assorted dried chiles from farmers markets or Mexican markets, pan roast, seed and grind with black pepper. It would take a long angel, devil on each shoulder debate to get me to use anything more besides smoke; I want to taste the meat. But I admire other people's variants, my Korean friend's fusion ribs rock, and that dry rub 101 looks tasty. (Ever try drying your own garlic in a dehydrator? Serous oomph.)

Make pizza next? A stint at 600 F takes care of pretty much anything. I don't like back-to-back low-and-slows, I worry more about how clean I got the grill in between...

Re: Rib Bummer! We make up our rub with no salt added, then salt the ribs separately, after removing membrane but before applying rub, the night before the cook. We salt by weight. For ribs my recent rule of thumb is 0.8% salt by weight. Takes a digital scale to weigh the salt in grams; to convert the ribs, a pound is 454 grams. (Some people may find it easier to recall that an ounce is 28 grams. ) To me, 1% tastes too salty; you may want to start with 0.7% or 0.6%. In other words, we use 3.6 grams of salt per pound of ribs. For a recent cook involving 11.79 lbs of ribs we used 42 grams of salt. Find your "salt constant" and adjust accordingly. I have various salts weighing anywhere from 8 grams to 18 grams per tablespoon; one can't reliably measure salt by volume unless you're always using the same salt. People in other countries do wonder how we get by cooking by volume in the U.S. We do measure salt by volume for quick brines, but then we are always using the same salt: bulk sea salt from the bins in back of the local health food store. For longer brines such as a house-cured ham I do measure by weight, following instructions in Paul Bertolli's Cooking by Hand.

Ha. Just my luck, in our only picture our KK is covered up like a nun.

I was curious if any of these measurement techniques could be adapted to home use: http://www.astm.org/Standards/C177.htm http://www.iso.org/iso/catalogue_detail.htm?csnumber=15422 Who are these people, who charge for standards based on science developed in the public domain? You'd think that there would be an "open source" standards organization that pushed these commercial entities off stage.

Whoops. Egg on my face. What doesn't Dennis obsess about? At least I feel better that with all this theory I was having a hard time telling the stones apart in actual use! I'll start using the Dennis stone, I also agree that heating it up in a KK isn't a problem.

I have both the Fibra-ment stone in question, and the stone from Dennis. They're both great stones; in casual use I can't really tell that much of a difference. In practice I fell back to using the Fibra-ment stone, as it controls variables adjusting to the KK; I know it well. Density is not the same as thermal transfer rate. One can have a dense stone that's sluggish at retaining and releasing heat, or a dense stone that conducts heat too quickly. One example of such a material is soapstone, which one could naively crave as a pizza stone material, but in fact is never used to line pizza and bread ovens, despite its prevalent use to make massive wood-burning stoves for rural New England heating (e.g. a Vermont ski cabin). Soapstone has way too high a thermal transfer rate. The Fibra-ment people claim to understand and optimize thermal transfer rates. Pretty much everyone else pours a stone in the right shape, tries it, and sells it if they like it. Moreover, the Fibrament people refused to sell me a thicker stone, claiming it would be impractical for home use. It's one thing to open the pizza shop in the morning, with the oven running all day, and another thing to burn fuel from a cold start in order to make a couple of pizzas. Fibrament sells thicker material to line commercial pizza ovens, but strongly discourages home use of these thicknesses. That said, I have some cognitive dissonance applying all this theory to practice in a KK, or my earlier K7. I've been placing my stone on the upper rack, direct fire, no liner, with a long preheat till the fire is stable at 600 F or so. Cooking pizza directly on the stone, my crust burns before my topping cooks, and this is with a cracker-like crust and rather spare toppings. I'm striving for the best thin pizza I've had in Italy (Genova, or islands off Sicily) not the best glop pizza I've had in Chicago. My adaptation is to use parchment paper for the first three minutes, then a pizza screen (any restaurant supply house carries many sizes) for the remaining time. This way the crust breathes, and doesn't burn. One could instead use an indirect fire, e.g. with a heat deflector stone on the main grill, pizza stone on the upper grill. We settled on the parchment/screen approach because it works for us. I like the idea of a stone that's so hot, I need a screen between it and the pizza. The effect is as I imagine. Direct heat may heat the pizza stone primarily from below, with the stone itself functioning as a heat deflector for the upper dome. This is a very different environment from placing a stone in an oven. With a thicker stone such as Dennis makes, the problem may be mitigated precisely because the Fibrament people may be right: The thicker stone fails to heat through. But I'm guessing here. So if you buy a Fibra-ment, you'll be happy. If you have the stone Dennis makes, you'll be happy. Either way this requires experimentation to dial in the pizza you crave. My read is that the Fibra-ment people strive for the same perfection in their stones that Dennis achieves in his cookers, but they haven't tuned their stone to the environment in a ceramic cooker. On the other hand, Dennis pours his stone as a service to his customers, and his focus isn't on the pizza stone to the degree that the Fibrament people are obsessing over this. So in the end, it's up to you to make any stone work.

Pizza on Saturday, burgers on Sunday. Very busy weekend traveling to a plant sale in Napa, then preparing and planting our garden. The pizza was a perfect storm of everything that could go wrong when one is distracted (missing crust ingredients, new and very wrong cheese, ...) but I swear the KK could make Charlie Chaplin's shoes taste good. Burgers were better.