Syzygies

Re: Livvy turned 14 in June Woof! Woof!

WAF Our next-door neighbors happily took our old K7. One set of their parents has a green egg, and they've enjoyed our cooking on same said K7, so they jumped at the offer. For those of you on the fence, it's impossible to describe how quickly the "transfer of affection" takes place. The KK is phenomenally well-designed. Looking back at the K7, I feel the same "make the best of this" optimism mixed with horror that one feels upon first addressing a strange campsite grill. In either situation, a good cook can shine, but why struggle? My cover story has been that the K7 cooked fine, Laurie really wanted to get the new cooker (how's that for Wife Acceptance Factor!?), but as the one-who-cooks-with-fire, I'm thrilled.

Dolly celebrates her 16th birthday with a hike on Mt Diablo. Her secret: pork butt or brisket on her kibble, to keep her engaged.

The "drywall dust" filter is a great idea. As a reformed shop-vac guy, however, I can't see bothering with any route except the old paintbrush into a suitable catch container. It's clever having the draft door at floor level, take advantage of it. And why clean all the way? Ash will return...

Been there, works really well if this is your primary use of the shop vac. I found that it eventually clogs the vac filter. On our old K7 I just scooped with a yogurt container. Doesn't matter if you don't get the last 10%, there will be more ash. To soon to develop a pattern for our new KK.

Yep, it came! Spruce Green, we're very happy. JohnnyBoy was a great pleasure to work with. I wish I could buy a suit that fit this well! The fabric clearly breathes; I wouldn't use it to cover ten boxes of printer paper. For this application, however, breathing is a huge win once the sun comes back out.

Re: Interesting Trophies!! Why do those trophies look really sore from a long swim?

Hey, people say the same thing about the KK. You can get halfway there for less than half the money if you're tone deaf. Same with Macs. As a mathematician I am stunned at my good fortune to be alive in the first century of the computer revolution, and I would need to be institutionalized if I dwelled too long on the degree to which Microsoft has ruined that experience for the masses. They're the frozen ground patties of the meat market; the only difference is that the E. Coli don't arrive till you hook up to the net. Macs are rib eye steaks. Linux is brisket, takes work, or great if ground into burgers.

I'm a Mac person, but I've been buying various youngsters in our extended family Dell netbooks. Awesome value for $300, size is nice too. They make a regular laptop look like a 1970's cell phone. The definition of full monty hi def is 1920 x 1080, a 16 by 9 aspect ratio. For work I always buy Dell monitors that go 1920 x 1200, which is a 16 by 10 aspect ratio. The extra height is nice for documents. This will "letterbox" nicely to 1080 for hi def video. I don't have a TV signal in my NY apartment, and I recently replaced my old tube TV with a $200 Dell 1920 x 1080 monitor, which goes with a $40 up-sampling DVD player, my stereo system, and my Netflix subscription. A vast improvement; anyone who hasn't done so already should get every tube out of their life. A MacBook is 1280 by 800 native resolution; The MacBook Pro resolutions are 1280 by 800 (13"), 1440 by 900 (15"), and 1920 by 1200 (17"). These are 16 by 10 aspect ratios, which all will "letterbox" to a 16 by 9 aspect ratio. However, only the 17" has the full pixels for hi def as it is defined. What complicates this is that Macs as of now don't read Blu-Ray disks, which is the only way to deliver this many pixels to a laptop, so any DVD is up-sampling to any of these screen sizes. They all have the horsepower to do this much better than a $40 up-sampling DVD player. Similarly, anyone considering an Apple TV that has the money to fly KK class just ups the ante and buys a Mac mini instead. Over twice the horsepower, and fewer restrictions.

Re: Polarity question Been there, recently, a friend had an expensive coffee grinder with the timer dial thingy on the fritz, grinder worked fine. Turned out not to be mechanical, there was a friggin' twenty component electrical circuit behind the dial, that had failed. It became a classic case of the bomb squad "which wire to cut" dilemma. 'Cept, being A/C, twice as many ways to get it right. Put a hardware store screw-on switch on the cord, took out and bypassed the circuit, and they're back in business for another decade. Of course, one wire really is ground, safer to have the switch shut off the live wire as soon as possible, rather than always having live current running through the motor where it could find another ground. (Just because A/C keeps changing sides on itself doesn't mean one wire isn't doing all the moving.) So perhaps you should put things back how you found them.

We need a LOL-cooker caption contest for this pic. (Nice digs, by the way.)

Re: Korean Baby Back Ribs Laurie saw this and asked me,

Re: more info I have an answer in her words, which I've posted in the recipe section: Korean Baby Back Ribs

From a digression in another thread: Here is my friend's recipe for Korean baby back ribs: some brown sugar (I never measure it, but maybe 1/2 c more or less) 1c soy sauce 1 T sesame oil (from toasted sesames) about 3 to 5 crushed red chile flakes (the kind you put on pizzas) 5 cloves of garlic your toe sized ginger (ok, I've never seen your toe consciously, but you know what I mean) finely chopped 1/4 c water 5 scallions, thinly sliced 3 LB pork baby back ribs Whisk all the ingredients in a baking pan or a bowl Add the ribs and toss to coat (Here I stab between the ribs with something sharp like a Fondue fork, or a knitting needle but not too much or the meat will look like a rag) Here comes very un-American part--keep it at room temperature for about two hours. I know Americans will think the meat will go bad, but so far none of my guests died of rotten meat at my house, and I don't tell my guests I kept it for two hours outside the fridge) Then refrigerate overnight, turning occasionally--no need to stay up all night--just turn before you sleep and when you wake up) bake at 450 F or bbq

Between Dennis and an earlier supplier, I have thirty boxes. And I'll buy all I can, next offer. I recommend thinking big, next time the extruded coconut is available. (Notice I didn't get pilloried, from people buying the "inferior" batch after my review. The stuff is decent. People here clearly miss it.)

It sure looked like I could have used the deflector as intended. The smoke pot picture is actually from my "dry run" rather than my first cook. You can tell because I'm using lump charcoal, not extruded coconut. As it happens, I have a second charcoal basket on order with Dennis, to make it easier to switch back and forth between these two fuels. I actually used my 16" Home Depot plant saucer, wrapped in aluminum foil (shown above), as a deflector on the lower grill. It is a slick, low-rent solution. Just wrap the grease in the foil, discard, and go again, no SS drip pan to clean. I admired Dennis's drip pan and heat deflector separates, but I haven't tried them yet. What I'm really antsy to do is to load up his stunning rib rack!

In my pre-ceramic days I was six months in a rental visiting Berkeley, CA, and sharing a good gas grill with my upstairs landlords. They're friends; I'm still assigned to the grill at parties there. The one-who-cooks is Korean, and while sauced ribs is not normally my style, she makes the most incredible Korean / California fusion marinades. Her descriptions don't convey her sense of balance; I can't reproduce what she does. How she goes about ribs is all-wrong by BBQ competitor group-think, but boy do crowds devour them. A gas grill has nothing on a KK, but I made the best of it. I bought a rotisserie for it, and by far our favorite food this way was whole chicken, light smoke, Hawaiian red sea salt and black pepper on the skin. There was a party of fifty that set on three birds in as many minutes; Laurie and I only got to taste as we carved. Good thing Hyungsook had lots of other food. Since then, we've cracked the code on one way to make chicken on a ceramic cooker that we love, but it's not the same, and why not have some variety? So we're reading this thread with great interest, we'll probably take the (minor, after the KK) plunge...

I did get to try my 2 quart cast iron dutch oven "smoke pot" in our new KK this weekend. It fits fine, and worked very well. We were actually pressed for time, so I started my fire under Guru control before going out for the day, with the smoke pot set up but on the main grill, with a heat deflector between it and the fire. Then when we got home that evening, I quickly moved the smoke pot down onto the fire, and put on 25 lbs of butt and shoulder to cook overnight and into the next day. Because the KK is tighter than my previous cooker, and better insulated, there was much less airflow, leading to thicker, moister smoke. Great smoke ring penetration, and the same clean flavor we expect from a smoke pot. (I had wondered if I would actually go for broke, making all this meat for a party as my first cook on the KK, or using my tried-and-true old cooker. Once we unpacked the KK, there was really no looking back.)

Baby backs are in my experience trickier than spareribs. They're twice the price, aimed at a market that can't be bothered with spareribs. With the exact trouble you went through, you could have cooked spareribs. They can be cooked similarly, with baby backs needing less time and less rendering. On the other hand with "grade inflation" what used to be sold as St Louis spareribs is often sold now as babybacks. A pig rib is a pig rib, I like 2 1/2 to 3 lbs trimmed, best. I personally brine many meats, but never ribs. On the other hand, the salt is unpredictable by eye, going for a dry rub instead. So I measure 0.8% sea salt by weight (one would use more for boneless meats, but this accounts for the bones) and apply before applying a further salt-free rub of chiles and/or black pepper. At 250 F I'd agree you went for a long time. On the other hand, ribs look done when they're done. Peek earlier? A classic method for ceramic cookers and spareribs has been 3:2:1 where the middle 2 hours is in foil, perhaps sauced. With indifferent meat this is probably a great idea, but with the most flavorful pork we find this comes out mushy and hides the pork itself.

Here's a nice illustration of the KK shape: A whole pork shoulder, alongside a pork butt, 25 lbs of meat on the main grill with plenty of room. This wouldn't fit so easily on a round grill.

As a K7 to KK switcher, I'd be happy to field a phone call. The differences are too many to type. Everything is thought out better, works better.

Yeah, the side-by-side photo makes this point pretty clearly. There's room straight up over all points on the main grill, which is set a few inches down from where the cooker opens. Laurie really likes that the new cooker is bigger, yet doesn't sit so high off the ground. It looks more grounded, less imposing, fits in better with the yard.

Thanks. Actually, using a guru is always different than not using a Guru. Your advice is a good translation to the KK of how to proceed without a Guru. With a Guru, one wants the minimum opening that creates enough fan-assisted draft, without creating the possibility of a draft that could run away with the Guru fan off. Because the damper fits so well, it would appear to me that even a 1/8th turn from closed shut is plenty. But I was curious what other Guru owners had settled upon.