Syzygies

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.

Here's a post of mine on my favorite tandoor recipe for the KK: Tandoori Chicken. Read that thread. More generally, I recommend the book Tandoor: The Great Indian Barbecue by Ranjit Rai. One can simplify these recipes considerably, e.g. buying a tandoori spice mix at an Indian store, but it's still better to do the dumbing down yourself, rather than having someone making simplifying choices for you. This guy is the real deal. The book is Indian, reprinted for but not aimed at our market. There's a lot of synergy to how a tandoor works, and also to how a kamado works. One doesn't want to necessarily mix and match, any more than one would want to splice the genes of a zebra and an elephant. Rather, play around and get the results to taste good. The KK is certainly capable of the intense heat one wants. I've been using the upper rack, turning every 5 minutes at 600 F while basting with ghee. I want to try the rotisserie instead, at a lower temperature.

Re: Parchment paper No, instead add the yeast after the sponge cools down to an appropriate temperature. Might not get the flying start it gets by proofing the yeast, but it works.

I don't think you'll be happy cooking it to that stage. If it were me, I'd cut it into thick (double chop) medallions, brine them in a light brine (< 1/2 cup salt per gallon, but at least 1/3 cup, and less sugar), and smoke/cook them to 140-145 F internal (to taste) When I buy this cut, I get it from a butcher bone-in, and cut off a very meaty rack of country ribs, to cook 6 hours like spareribs. That portion around the bone benefits from the long slow cook. More frequently I do a "house-cured ham" recipe, making up a seasoned brine and computing the salt.

Re: Parchment paper

Yes that's sad; condolences to his family. I remember his posts well from back in the day. Profile of Harry Demidavicius

So we made an experiment with lamb shoulder yesterday. Marinate in a garlic, olive oil paste, with rosemary and lemon peel from the garden. Cook 6 hours over apple smoke at 230 F or so. By the time it should have come off, we were many bottles of wine into a neighbor's party, which turned into dinner, so we brought it over as another meat course. Well received, but I had been hoping for a cross between pulled pork and braised lamb shanks. I never foil, but I'm thinking foil the last several hours, next time. Perhaps even make a wine reduction to add at that point. Not much left, though there were five dogs in attendance and I love dogs. Made a quick hash for lunch with red onions, yellow potatoes, parsley, half-dehydrated garden tomatoes from our chest freezer, Aleppo pepper, salt, pepper and an ample splash of white wine. Better than I remember from last night, the wine helped to moisten the meat. Any advice? Is it possible to make slow-cooked lamb shoulder of the gods in a KK, or do I have the wrong animal? Roast lamb shoulder is a specialty of a region of Spain, served in cazuelas, but roasted at a higher temperature: Ribera del Duero is famous for its slow cooked roast lamb; Asador in Aranda

That's way cool. I have to say, a long narrow bed beats a square bed, I didn't know this putting in ours.

On a lark we used boiling water to make a sponge for pizza dough last night, waiting till the temperature dropped to add the yeast. Using (home ground) whole wheat flour, the sponge instantly turned to cream of wheat breakfast cereal, giving me pause. (As in, where are the take-out menus?) But the final dough kneaded much more smoothly, and the crust was the closest we've come to Italian cracker thin crust greatness. Just a thought. I've never heard of this for bread dough (I like to experiment), but the first time I saw anyone make pasta dough, it was for pot stickers, and boiling water is apparently part of the standard technique.

I've taken four weeklong intensive classes with Kasma loha-Unchit in Oakland, CA (people travel to take these classes) and I've taken a month-long food tour of Thailand with her. Her web site, and cooking, is the authentic real deal. Plenty of online recipes, ingredient recs (note my photo credits in many places): http://www.thaifoodandtravel.com/

Yes, the Lazzari factory is nearby: Lazzari Fuel Company http://www.lazzari.com/ Brisbane, South San Francisco 11 Industrial Way Brisbane, CA (415) 467 2970 I generally load up my VW GTI with 8 40# bags of oak lump, and perhaps a bag of hickory or apple chips or chunks. The price is right. If you're going to go with one smoking wood, choose apple. Not too aggressive, everyone loves it.

I'm a fellow K expat, also in the Bay area (Concord). Looks like your K held up better than mine. [said in understated tone to background laughter in various forums]