Syzygies

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]

Bark tastes odd, better to get the bark off. And the wood into chunks of the size you want. Other than that, just store in a dry place and let nature take its course. Should be good after a year, which passes faster than any of us would like.

Rotisserie Tweak So we ordered the six inch rotisserie from Viking, and the OneGrill motor. When I went to install it, there was a bit of slippage on the rotation, fixed by a piece of 5/16" x 0.028 stainless steel tubing from the local hardware store: The first picture shows what happens when I push the other end of the rotisserie all the way in, to prevent slippage. I have to hold the rotisserie by hand this way, not so practical with a live fire. The second picture is my fix, using a piece of 5/16" x 0.028 stainless steel tube. In other words, with this tube I can push the other end of the rotisserie all the way in, insuring no slippage. Just as any nearby discussion needs to mention flashback for newbies, let's throw in here that aluminum may or may not cause dementia (I don't recall) but galvanized metal is certainly poisonous, and has no place in a cooker. I made a point of finding steel tube for this reason. I tried three tubes. The first was longer than the "OEM" part, and ended up too long. So I cut the second to match the "OEM" part. For the third I tried leaving room for the extra spring Dennis threw in, but the second was better. Any ideas why my tolerances were off? I'm thinking Viking shaved a bit of metal off their bottom line? I measure 17 7/16" rim to rim for the rotisserie, what do other people get? Thanks. (Can't have slippage. Ever seen Jiarby cook a chicken, with half lemons under the skin for breasts? Without an even tan that would be rather obscene.)

Acetone Oh this brings back memories. When I was a little kid I made a "kill jar" for collecting bugs, with an acetone-soaked cloth in an old jar. I got four of the weirdest looking beetles, knocked them out using the jar, brought them back to my room and laid them out on card stock. I was about to label them when I was called to dinner. Came back and no bugs in sight. They never did turn up... My Mom got quite used to this. I later collected praying mantis pods to sell door-to-door for people's gardens. People would close the door "what? are you out of your mind?" then think about it and send their daughters chasing after me. (Oh boy I was too young to appreciate this!) Then I got bored and my entire inventory hatched in my Mom's closet. She had a word with me.

Right hand rule Rotate the fingers of your right hand in the direction you're planning to rotate the bolt, and your thumb will point in the direction the bolt moves. For more lift, you want the bolt to move in, tightening the spring. Believe it or not, I teach this same rule for multivariable calculus. There, the cross product of two vectors (e.g. flush with a surface) points in the direction of one's right hand thumb (e.g. a "normal" vector to the surface). It's possible to make a screw thread that goes the other way, but this is rare. For bike pedals, one of the two feet is threaded the other way, so the pedal tightens rather than loosens in use. Dennis doesn't have this concern, so he certainly chose a standard "right hand thread" for every thread on the Komodo.

Baby goat is wonderful. I haven't tried it on the KK, but I make it following "Baby Lamb Hunter's Style" from Ada Boni, still my favorite no-frills Italian cookbook. (Many of us of a certain age learned Italian cooking from this book when it first showed up on remainder stacks in the 80's.) (This also does wonders for chicken. It would probably make Charlie Chaplin's shoes taste good.)

You'll never look back! I was at post 262 when we made our move. You're obviously more decisive that me!

Brined salmon on bed of basil Our favorite way to cook salmon is to brine it lightly for four or so hours (1/2 cup salt, 1/4 cup sugar per gallon water) then lay it on a bed of supermarket basil (the weed, not anything you'd make pesto from, but readily available and perfect for this application) then smoke over apple chunks gently at 225 F or so till melt-in-your-mouth done. A Spanish cazuela is a perfect vessel for this dish, but anything will do; the salmon never touches the pan.

I buy 40# bags of wood chunks from the Lazzari factory store in San Francisco. If I had to pick two woods, they'd be Apple and Hickory. We have perhaps seven kinds of smoking wood in the garage, and seven kinds of salt around the house, but truth be told, we'd be entirely content with bulk sea salt, and Apple wood.

I've done lots of experiments along these lines. I recall a rather strident debate on exactly this question on an earlier ceramic forum; let's first celebrate the more conversational tone here. The two salient points I believe are: 1. People get better results on full cookers. 2. It doesn't take much to tweak the humidity of a nearly empty cooker to resemble a full cooker. That said, my new KK is much tighter than my old K7, which in turn was tighter than any piece of metal I'd tried. I sometimes put a cup or so of water in with a cook, in some vessel such as a cup-shaped cousin to a cazuela. It's very easy to go overboard; then one is steam-smoking. Think of how good a pot of beans can be, then how much better baked beans can be than that. Same with e.g. the bark on a butt. Too much steam and the baked beans come out tasting like a pot of beans.

I have each size somewhere, the largest goes in my KK. My source is http://www.temperatureware.com/potspans.html. Pictured on the hot plate was the three quart. Duck confit looks yummy, I'll reheat for dinner tonight. When I'm sure I'm following a correct recipe I'll try aging the confit first.

It's clear to me (as I said in my post) that using a commercial rice cooker is a smarter idea than using a soup warmer. Go to the sous vide Magic link I gave to see what cookers he recommends, then find them much cheaper at Amazon, or in an Asian supermarket. It all comes down to capacity. My soup warmer holds maybe 7 liters, but for many purposes a 10 cup rice cooker (I like the stainless Tiger) would be much handier. My hot plate is very old and I haven't seen it for sale in a while. It's a Tablecraft Products "Rangette". The key feature is a stainless sealed cover for the burner, rather than black coils that stink and make you feel like you're living in an SRO that's about to burn down. Buying again, I'd at least think about induction hot plates? Though I don't understand yet how they work, probably wouldn't work with e.g. my soapstone pot.

So years ago I had this idea that the same PID circuit used in the BBQ Guru, that anyone could pick up for $50 on eBay, could be used to control, say, a soup warmer. I bought a soup cooker at a restaurant supply store, never got around to wiring it, saw that NYTimes article last month, and ordered the controller shown on the right from http://freshmealssolutions.com/. Very straightforward, power in, power out, a probe, and a set point. (There's also a timer I ignore.) It was trivial to take apart the soup warmer, screw both power leads onto the same side of the thermostat (rather than passing power through the thermostat, which in my case was by now broken) and have an always-on heated water bath. Plug it into the controller, and voila, easily holds any temp I want to within a degree. Of course, I was "right church, wrong pew" as that site's idea of a "found object" water bath is a restaurant rice cooker. Not a fancy "slippery logic" electronic control, rather a basic on/off that the sous vide controller can take over for. Their idea is better. As the picture shows, I also have a good quality hot plate, and the sous vide controller does a great job of controlling that, also. As it happens, right now I have a couple of duck legs vacuum packed with goose fat and simmering at 180 for 8 hours (following my zombie master's confit recipe in "Under Pressure"). I'm using the hot plate and a soapstone pot, which was already the slow cooker of the gods, before the PID controller showed up. Nevertheless, this whole sous vide thing is way overhyped, when it's really just a simple tool that's spectacularly helpful at improving accuracy of one's technique inside. Sort of like the guru, outside. For me, true maturity is being neutral (a good approximation is D.G.A.F.) about what other people think. As in, if I ever say to you I don't like the Beatles because they're too popular, just, please, club me with a 2x4? So we all have to get past the idea that sous vide is cooking at 141 F while speaking with a Belgian accent. It's also getting home late from work, throwing bangers straight from the freezer into a 180 F controlled water bath, getting really distracted, coming back 40 minutes later and not finding the water at a rolling boil, with the pouch puffed up nearly to bursting like the first Soviet space walk. Instead, find beautifully simmered 180 F bangers, fry them thirty seconds a side violently while the mash goes through the microwave, and sit down to a great quick dinner. Oh yeah, I took flak before for noting analogies with the Finney method for reverse searing. Laurie loves that approach to pork chops, without sous vide equipment. But it's standard sous vide 101. Set your steak to exactly the temp you want, then sear it. This happens to also be exactly the modern standard way to cook a good hamburger in a restaurant; if your burger is the same doneness all the way through, this is what they did. Hey, there's such a thing as independent discovery... I thought of sous vide in the 1980s reading Harold McGhee, and didn't follow through with the scientific immersion heater order because I didn't have the bucks. I'm thrilled to be finally playing with it now. This controller would be worth it for the single purpose of reheating freezer packets of pork butt.

Re: Johnny Boy's KK cover Maybe Laurie can remind me what our tree is called; I call it the "schmutz" tree. Actually, that's harsh. It gives us wonderful shade. When I textured our old K7 with black mortar, it introduced a yellow threads effect that money couldn't buy.

Johnny Boy's KK cover Welcome! As a recent KK owner ourselves, let me plug Johnny Boy's KK cover: http://komodokamado.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3290 You pick the color to go with your KK / yard. I want to grin every time I see our KK, but in California rainy season I grin instead every time I see the cover. Extraordinarily well designed and made, and essential protection. For example I have no trouble lighting charcoal that was left in the KK through a week of rain.