Syzygies

Thanks. Part of the reason realtor fees are so high in New York City is that to measure the square feet of a building, you need a bevy of window washers to hold the measuring tape around the outside. Knowing this, I went out in the dark with a headlamp to measure my K7 main grill. 21.5" (not 22.5") !! I'll leave it to others to have fun with this. I actually went out twice. This is the outer diameter of the round grill circle. If you measure the longest straight grill rod, maybe you can eek out 21.8", and that's being generous. I have a paella pan now that's a tight fit with the handles sawed off, there's a chance I'll need to go down a size. Other than that, they look the same. My plan, to switch to the new cooker and keep cooking, looks good.

Re: disorder (link)

Had a great call with Dennis, sent off the payment, cooker will arrive in a few days: KK-Gen MBM-92 Nice guesses, we thought about all of those. We're partial to matte finish, we like the way this harmonizes with our yard. Had a last cook on the old K, tandoor chicken. Now I wonder if there's a neat way to do it with skewers like the Indians do, so no grill contact? I want to dig a square out of our asphalt and pour a flat concrete surface. It would be a shame to have KK tolerances, and still have the stock pool on one end of the paella pan, right? Anyhow, looking forward! Laurie is bouncing off the ceiling (I put her on with Dennis), anyone out there with Wife-Acceptance-Factor issues should just call her... Oh yeah, and I'd say that there's zero risk of Dennis getting bored with this and moving on. He sounded rather engaged with the whole enterprise. As one blessed/cursed with a decent case of OCD, I felt like I was talking with a kindred spirit!

We did think about that one! It's beautiful. But no.

Re: K7 to KK transition advice for Syzygies?

Re: No Prep You mean a spliff? Does that increase people's appetites?

Thanks, these are all great answers. Time to get Dennis on the phone, or however it works... Beamer me up Scottie!

Hi. We're ready to jump, replacing our K7 with a KK. We don't need help convincing us to do so; you already have. We're just hoping for a quick cut-to-the-chase from our friends here, before we order. Is 23" new inventory, e.g. the coming boatload pictured above, the flagship product which we want? (I'm guessing that this is an easy question.) Our K7 has an upper grill, main grill, crossbars to hold a lower heat deflector. I installed a guru port. The packages look very complete; do I need to special order anything to get equivalent functionality? (I'm adaptable, and will enjoy differences as long as I can do what I did before.) What's the subjective space comparison, working in a GenII KK vs a K7? About the same? I've drilled and filled holes over the years for various probes. Does running e.g. guru probes over the gasket ruin the tighter fit I expect, moving to a KK? Are there other ways to probe the KK without drilling new holes? Do I want the "gas option" for lighting fires? I alternate now between various methods (electric starter, fusion experiments with large quantities of alcohol, perching a propane torch near the coals and walking away to do other things). I'm feeling less judgmental than before about a "gas option", perhaps it's the way to go? I've hit 1000 F more than once by accident in my K7, and it didn't like it. Cooking steak 20 seconds at 900 F is an experiment only worth trying once; we generally cook at 600 F or less. Nevertheless, is there a maximum "stay below this temperature, or all bets are off?"

shoulder gives her something to live for Yeah, we make up freezer packs that are either for us or to enliven the dog's kibble. The pooch (my avatar) is nearly 16 and a discriminating eater; shoulder gives her something to live for. That was a new word from me, but this advice is absolutely spot-on.

Answer in a new thread: Fermenting Hot Sauce

Yup. I've been making around 3 gallons a year for friends, for the past five years. I don't make beer, wine, anchovies, you name it because I can buy better. The uniform position of my friends is to remind me that we can't buy better hot sauce, and the new season is upon us, have I started yet? I read up on classic hot sauce fermentation (pack pepper mash and salt into an oak barrel for three years, trim off the black, add vinegar), and tried to figure out how to modernize in small batches. My goal is no artifice, the straightest line from A to B, a recipe anyone would discover coming at the same problem. (As in, if you feel the temptation to add your special mark, just don't! One is aiming for a classic.) We live near a national beer-making supply outlet (http://morebeer.com/), so it's easy to buy carboys, fermentation locks, cleaners and pH equipment. I have a commercial blender (the Vita-Prep) which undoubtedly makes working with the pepper mash easier, but isn't essential. The key is to recognize that a quick ferment (a month or two) is the same kind of process as making sauerkraut or kimchi. If one can find either that hasn't been preserved or sterilized, the juice makes a perfect starter. Fermenting is key; I've tried both ways, and skipping the fermentation just isn't in the same league. One risk in home fermentation of vegetables is botulism, which doesn't survive below a pH of 4.6, while the fermentation drives the pH well below this point. pH meters cost $80 and need maintenance more than once a year (replace saline storage solution around probe) to survive several seasons, but provide assurance one isn't about to bump off one's friends. Other than this, we don't sterilize the finished product, preferring the uncooked taste, and haven't had a problem. Use disposable vinyl or latex gloves at all stages of handling the chiles. One could elaborate; just trust me on this one. Later, when adjusting the salt, taste in moderation. One also has to go with the best local chiles, which can be an adventure to track down. (It is also possible to order pepper mash from afar, but I'd rather be the one picking over the peppers with a few beers and a baseball game on the radio.) We lately go with a Thai-style pepper sold on or off the bush in Asian farmers markets (Alemany is best) in the SF Bay area, which looks a lot like the original tabasco pepper. The riper the color, the less vegetable left to ferment; we've seen significant variant year-to-year in how active the bubbling and expansion of the mash gets, with this year's very ripe (and yes, very hot) mash a minimum. The three gallon carboy shown has headroom for the most expansion we've ever seen, yet we're only up an inch, which means that at night air is actually getting back into the jug through the fermentation lock. This could spell disaster; it hasn't yet. The oak barrels used to breathe; a friend of mine did lose a batch in New York to mold. If I had a fridge in the garage with room, I'd certainly experiment with a longer cold ferment, which would need less worst-case headroom, and might be dramatically better in flavor. Our recipe: Buy 12 pounds of chiles to make a couple gallons of mash, stem and pick over. Grind with 8% sea salt by weight and distilled water; strain the mash to recycle the water, so one has enough liquid for the blender action, without making the mash too soupy. Include kimchi juice now and/or pour it on top later. Adjust the pH to 3.2 by adding several TB of white vinegar per gallon. Funnel the mash carefully into a sterilized 3 gallon carboy (splatter can encourage mold) and stopper with a fermentation lock, using vinegar again as the lock liquid. Let ferment a month or two until activity subsides, then fill with champagne vinegar (white vinegar will do, but champagne vinegar is neutral yet more refined). After an arbitrary delay (a month? When you get around to this...) grind the mash again as finely as possible, add more sea salt to taste, sieve and bottle in 5 oz "woozy" bottles easily found on the web. Sterilize the bottles before filling in a boiling water bath. We apply labels with packing tape, and seal the caps with good vinyl electrical tape, for a nice home/pro balance. One can seal with heat shrink tubing; it's more work.

MSR Stowaway Pot - 475ml (0.50 quarts, $15.95) MSR Stowaway Pot - 775ml (0.82 quarts, $17.95) MSR Stowaway Pot - 1600ml (1.69 quarts, $24.95) Nice find! I may have to move forward from the bronze age, and try this. (I'd go for either or both of the larger ones.)

chile bricks for freezer I misread this as "chile bricks". Lately I've been making up all but the salt for my rubs (roasting and grinding dried chiles), saving in the freezer in vacuum packs, and pulling out as needed for low and slow. Salt first, separately, by weight; my ballpark is 0.7% to 0.8% of the weight of the meat, guessing to subtract bones. Your bricks sound good!

Carbide? I don't remember it being a problem. People who routinely drill metal use boring oils (meant to bore holes, I don't mean canola ), you might use any oil on hand. Cast iron is soft, I don't remember this being that difficult. Now sawing the steel handles off my largest paella pan so I could close the lid, that was difficult!

I like that experiment. Simplest version would be to place a one quart dutch oven, then build the fire around, up and over it. One issue is to make sure that the dutch oven gets enough initial heat. This is why I like starting the fire by propane torch, under the pot and near the holes. Since one only needs a localized small fire for low & slow, this makes sure the fire starts where it can do the most good. The paste really isn't such a big deal. A pianist practicing 90 seconds has me beat on any dexterity task I face in a day. As I've said, this is a routine fix for poorly fitting lids, steaming couscous in Morocco.

Our rule of thumb is two pounds of tomatoes per packet, which we scale as the batches go wetter or dryer. I.e. we expect 10 packets from a 20# box of Romas. We weigh what we end up with, and divide by 10. Other times, we use the 225g to 250g rule, and it's close enough for how we dry. We had a first-ever disaster this morning. Our neighbors had left us a beautiful but seriously out of hand tomato patch to pick. I'd composted what was too far gone, but saved everything that "looked" right, sometimes using the good half of a tomato with a gouge on the other end, and using many tomatoes that were starting to split and riper than ideal. I tasted as I worked, and thought I was ok. Then I overloaded all 12 trays of our dehydrator. I couldn't get out of my head an unfamiliar smell, from picking the overly ripe patch. Then this morning, the entire batch lost to mold, drying at 155 F. Lessons: All the canning / preserving books say this: Use ideal, unbroken fruit. Any fruit that's less than perfect, eat it now or compost it. Like with wine, if you won't drink it don't cook with it! Go with thinner slices (smaller Romas split in half are fine, but a 1 lb monster in three slices is not), and be generous with the salt. (At least 1/2 tsp per tray?) The "12 tray" rule of thumb may not apply here, 8 trays may be all one unit can handle in this application, we'll buy a second unit next year to end up with two 8 tray units. (That said, we've never had this problem before.)

One could, and that is indeed simpler. I believe that one can taste the difference, doing it my way. The gases that emit are flammable, and I like to give them a chance to at least partially burn through the hot coals. For this same reason, one doesn't want to use a smoke pot at higher temperatures: At higher temperatues, the gases create a self-sustaining fire (pictured above through my draft door; pretty, huh?), and one no longer needs the charcoal. I in fact got the idea for a smoke pot from how one makes charcoal, which I also tried. (As a mathematician and as a functional programmer, I've spent my entire life trying to train myself to think abstractly, as in smoke=poach, grill=sear.) Here's a good tutorial: Making Charcoal Had Danny Meyer asked my advice before opening Blue Smoke, I would have recommended that he devise a "gas oven" for his commercial pit, where the gas source was a separate chamber that heated logs to the point where they emitted this gas. A modern abstraction of the classic "two fire" approach, I'd bet it would work spectacularly well.

Quite the contrary. I always thought the Greeks had it right, believing in many Gods.

gooshy semi-precious tomatoes We haven't opened a can of tomatoes in five years, and I now recoil at the taste, surprised that restaurants don't do what we do. Tom Colicchio's "Think Like a Chef" is a seminal cookbook for being more a conceptual text than a recipe staple-job, a modern-day Richard Olney "Simple French Food". (As a pool player is thinking ahead several shots, Olney teaches how Friday's feast becomes ingredients for Sunday brunch when guests stay the weekend.) Colicchio has a recipe for "precious tomatoes" that one roasts in the oven. One can also roast in a cazuela in a ceramic cooker. We used to do this. Lots of work. They're not actually called "precious tomatoes", but I then found that Thomas Keller has a similar recipe in "The French Laundry Cookbook", and "precious" is the only word I can remember from that book. (Or is it "importance"?) It seems that everyone has a recipe for "precious tomatoes". The concept is sound: Put up garden tomatoes as an ingredient year-round, and there are far better ways to do this than canning in jars. Meanwhile, friends back east like to pass for Italian immigrants, and go get boxes of Jersey Roma tomatoes at Arthur Avenue in the Bronx, to make into sun-dried tomatoes. They were good, but I've seen the trays in the sun on islands off Sicily, and what we were doing was not that. I'm also into ingredients, not appetizers, what would I want with 20 jars of dried tomatoes in good olive oil? So it came together for me, how to make "semi-precious tomatoes" at scale. As in, our neighbors are away this weekend and asked us to pick their patch that had gotten past them. 54 lbs. Last week at Monterey Market in Berkeley, a beautiful 20 lb box of organic San Marzano tomatoes. Earlier, 45 lbs from the best stand at our local farmers' market. And what we don't eat as salad each night from our own crop. Find one of those Bedmo 20% off coupons, and take it in to buy a Nesco® American Harvest® Snackmaster® Encore™ Dehydrator and Jerky Maker model FD-61. Then go to Amazon and buy eight more trays, to max out the dehydrator at 12 trays. This handles 20 to 40 lbs of tomatoes at a time, depending on how you slice. Set a giant pot of water to boil, and immerse batches of 6-8 tomatoes for 60 seconds each, letting the water return to a boil between batches. Then set tomatoes to cool, and skin them, removing blemishes. Tomatoes are a fruit, any bit that looks more like a vegetable has to go. Arrange thick slices on dehydrator trays. Sprinkle sea salt to taste; I find it easiest to use a salt grinder over each tray. Dry at 135 F to 155 F for 8 to 16 hours, until the flavor is quite concentrated but the texture is still "gooshy". Rest overnight in the fridge, so moisture can redistribute, then package and freeze. (We now have a chest freezer.) We like packages of 225g to 250g each. Ziplock bags work fine, but a vacuum packer is better. We use these anywhere one might use a canned tomato, sometimes adding water to plump them back up. The classic would be a putanesca sauce, combining a packet with garlic, 6 TB olive oil, herbs, chiles, olives, capers, perhaps anchovies, to go on fresh pasta. This would be second-to-last to go, if we were forced to give up specialized food habits. I'd stop fermenting my own hot sauce, and making my own stock, long before we'd give up these tomatoes. We also grind our own flour for absolutely everything, and alas, we would give up these tomatoes before we'd use storebought flour.

Hickory chunks and apple chips. More flour paste than necessary. Set in with fuel. More than needed for a 20 hour shoulder, but easy to reuse what's left. 16" unglazed terra cotta plant saucer, covered with two sheets of foil, as drip pan / heat deflector. (This isn't a KK; we hope to replace it with one.) I drilled three 1/8" holes near the center. That's plenty, but I don't think it matters too much. The issue is to allow gases to escape without allowing enough oxygen back in to start a fire inside the pot. So three 1" holes would defeat the purpose, but four 1/4" holes might be fine. On the other hand I'm a big fan of "minimum effective dose". Three holes in case two are unlucky, get blocked by chips of wood, and 1/8" is plenty big enough.

This idea has also been around for a while as a sous-vide technique. See for example A Practical Guide to Sous Vide Cooking: In science we're used to independent discovery; when an idea is ripe it starts coming up everywhere. Even Einstein was only a decade ahead of the pack with relativity, and that's an unheard-of lead. Independent discovery reminds some folks of the best ever criticism of Henry Miller: The rest of us are just thrilled to see many apostles out there. Whenever clear common sense flies in the face of habit, it takes many apostles for change to take effect. In other words, thinking of it ain't the prize, getting people to do it, that's what's hard. So yes, hurray for the Finney Method!