Syzygies

+1 Of course, part of the fun here is you can run experiments both ways, and see for yourself. I have a plastic cooler handy, with two large bath towels dedicated to this task, and rolls of heavy duty aluminum foil. Butt, ribs, and brisket go in this to stay warm after cooking. One virtue is that I can then show up at a collaborative dinner half an hour away, take another hour to get to the meat course, and all is well. As a bonus we drive home, leaving dishes in someone else's home. The usual scam where bbq cooks give the impression what they did is actual work. It's a labor of love, but no one complains about this arrangement! I found that any foiling during cooking itself simply made the meat mushier. Try this first for spareribs, where the "3-2-1" approach (foil 2 hours in middle) still has traction. My impression (I'll put this as neutrally as I can) is that if one has bought unremarkable ribs on price, and has a remarkable sauce to apply, and guests who prefer their ribs falling off the bone, then "3-2-1" makes sense. If one wants the meat itself to show with a hint of tooth left (properly cooked pasta rather than mush), then one doesn't foil. Try the experiment both ways, no need to believe us. We want you to find out for yourself, perhaps you'll come up with a better way. For brisket or butt, foiling turns the cook into a braise, might as well be doing it indoors! Not that there's anything wrong with braised beef, it's simply a different dish.

Touch trumps reason Touch seems to function on an independent plane to reason. I'm struck by the parallel here, I was just describing in a different thread how my gurus taught me to touch a pork butt to tell if it was done, rather than depending on temperature. So ashes to ashes, butcher to pit, if one has a sense of touch, it trumps reason. Steak chefs can tell doneness by touch, only the inexperienced need to cut a steak to peek. I once shook Jerry Brown's hand during his presidential bid. He instantly (think: Stephen King's The Dead Zone) sensed I wasn't voting for him, and his hand went limp as his attention turned. I feel most comfortable with tomatoes, after picking them all summer in CA. Back in NY, all the farmers markets have signs scolding consumers not to squeeze ("Tomato = Banana, judge by color") yet with imperceptable pressure I can tell in horror I'm holding yet another tomato that wasn't ready to pick. So, yes, I don't doubt the story Dennis relays.

I remember David and Kim's take on this (from a different era some here will remember): Butt is done when it's done, one feels it, rather than measures it. That said, I usually try to "dwell" at around 170 F as long as I can, and take the butt off the fire before 190 F. I like the fat mostly rendered, and collagens liquified, but I find the standard for pulled pork to be a bit stringy. There's a lot of different muscles in a butt; I like them to separate from each other, without turning to rope strands.

Yeah Glenn (jiarby) posted to a forum two years ago about eating their triple bypass, which he also reproduces at home. (The picture of the one he makes looked better to me.)

Nice marbling! Nice marbling! Ribeye is by far my favorite classic "steak" cut. I also love skirt steak (completely underappreciated) and hanger steak (those who appreciate it lock up the supply, not that easy to find).

I am mildly annoyed, as hard as it is to get my goat online. You paid how much for your cooker, and you're trying to McCain me ("oh, I'm so working class!") by romanticizing cheap ingredients? Believe what you like, but a river in Egypt doesn't make anyone a better cook. I'm sure the judges favor classic style, and have serious pent-up hostility toward "precious" ingredients, but don't doubt for an instant that part of competitive technique is the ingredient selection process.

Spare the rod... That rod reminds me of high school. After skipping homeroom 40 times in a row I got called in, and chose the paddle over three nights detention. The hero of our era was getting a particularly "attentive" paddling for worse misdemeanors. He managed to slide out of the way of the swing at the last instant, and the paddle-wielding vice principal broke his hand on the table.

One of my favorite meat brands is Niman Ranch, except that they've gotten pricey enough to make me shop around. But their opinion on Berkshire pork is interesting: First and foremost, they like their pigs to live outside in the winter, and like dogs, purebreds are at a distinct genetic disadvantage to mutts. So they prefer Berkshire crosses. Alas, with all of these good intentions, their sleep-in-the-cold pork often ends up with simply too much fat to make ideal bbq.

I always dry rub the untrimmed ribs (pulling off the membrane of course), in part because I'm lazy and I can compute 0.8% salt off the package weight. (For me, 0.6% salt is too little, 1% salt is too much, and I've never seen anyone who doesn't do this at least weekly who can reliably hit this "strike zone" by eye.) Then, I quickly pan fry the trimmings, when the ribs go in the cooker. There is no better lean port, period, than trimmings from ribs. I wish I could buy them as a cut, for all my cooking, e.g. asian dishes that call for a "bit" of pork. They're good left on, but not as good as pilfered.

Ha! Until I read this, I was sure that was garlic. "Old school" as in lay on the garlic, please?

Pizza (we're busy, but we need to eat!)

I've posted a review in the charcoal feedback subforum: KomodoKamado Charcoal Feedback: Review and Comparison That subforum is restricted to posts and replies from people who have bought the stuff. I'd be happy to field questions and comments here, instead.

Pick up at terminal! I drove 30 miles to meet my pallet share, fitting 20 boxes on edge in a single layer in my VW GTI (with the rear seats folded down). I coud have fit 27 boxes easily. Anyone looking to save a buck should go to the terminal, if this works for them!

That's some serious food porn!

Yup. I remember watching the evening news as a kid; as I recall, Walter Cronkite was driving a car rigged to measure how many times one adjusted the steering wheel. Good drivers make few adjustments, and still guide the car as they intend. He was expressing audience-engaging frustration at his score. Dennis is describing a physical system, to which I'd add, the frontier where the charcoal is burning is another variable. Lump charcoal is easily lit, and this frontier changes easily. Want to bring a too-hot fire back down to 225 F ? Reduce the oxygen, and the "boat will turn" as quickly as the cooker walls can cool off. This can still be surprisingly slowly, but remember, we want all this thermal mass. With the greater density of extruded charcoal, the fire has more memory. Like a tree that keeps sending up shoots years after you cut it down, an oxygen-starved fire can hang in there longer, trying to create convection to get more air. Opening the lid gets it going again. Using a guru with the top damper not closed enough, it can pull the air it needs through the guru with the fan off (that's why the guru has a stepped shutoff slider). For low & slow, I'm used to all this, and my old "other company" K is leaky enough to make this a bit challenging. Nevertheless, with KK extruded I can half-fill my firebox, with much of the space taken up by a two quart dutch oven holding my smoking wood, and I can easily go 24 hours for any cook I can imagine. Part of the charcoal will be left for the next cook. I prefer to start slowly and well in advance with a very localized fire, and creep up to my target temperature without overshooting, then put in the meat. (BBQ competitors going for the deepest red smoke ring prefer to put cold meat into a cold cooker, as the window of ring formation is before the meat reaches 140 F or so.) As an experiment, I tried pizza at 500 F. Steering the KK extruded at this temperature was more sluggish than steering lump. The results nevertheless had a nice clean "wood-fired bread oven" taste. Does it taste neutral, or does it taste like coconut? When we first had our cooker, our oven failed, and we used the cooker for everything, including pies. I can't imagine a pie cooked over mesquite charcoal, which tastes somewhat like lighter fluid. Whatever fire taste coconut extruded charcoal contributed, it works. We think of it as neutral. The "flavor" of this batch of KK extruded is in the same ballpark as my remaining hoard of 2003 K extruded. For planning a low & slow cook, I think of both of them as neutral, and add apple and/or hickory wood (in a sealed dutch oven "smoke pot" with a few tiny holes in the bottom) for the smoke flavor I want. My wife strongly prefers this setup to any alternative; low & slow cooking over ordinary lump and open chunks of wood is out of the question. (We use oak lump for high temp cooks.) So I'd say that she has a sensitive palate, and as far as flavor goes, this batch of KK extruded can do the job.

Dennis and Glenn (jiarby) asked me offline to make various tests, beyond my feedback posted so far. I'm in the middle of a plumbing project (previous owner believed in recycling construction scrap, rotting the wall behind our shower), I'll post what I did as soon as I can. The differences with Doug's (nakedwhiz) numbers can be explained by different methodologies; our conclusions agree. Bottom line, I jumped on the first chance to purchase this charcoal because of my read on Dennis, which is amply confirmed by his post above, and a concern that one never knows, this might be my only chance to buy charcoal of this quality. This batch is quite usable. It exactly fits my needs for controlling flavor, the 22 hour pork butt I made last week was the best I've made so far. It is a deal one won't see again. And we all want to keep Dennis in the charcoal business!

Re: Taste Test #1: Cazuela Salmon on a bed of Basil

Here's another rub, more austere but plays well with other foods: 12-24 assorted dried Mexican chiles 2-3 TB smoked Spanish paprika sea salt, 1% of weight of pork butt 2/3rds as much black pepper Pan-roast and seed chiles, grind with remaining ingredients, slather bone-in pork butt with rub and olive oil till it all sticks, leave 24 hours in fridge (e.g. in a Cambro food storage container) before cook. Cook indirect 21-22 hours at 210-225 F using apple and hickory smoke, e.g. in 9pm, out 7pm the next evening. By morning the internal temperature will be nearly in the 170-180 F range, raising all sorts of fears that the meat will be burnt shoe leather by dinner time. It won't! Your goal is to slow the fire to 200 F, to keep the pork butt in this 170-180 F range as long as possible, melting the fat and collagens and tenderizing the butt. One is more or less "boiling off" the collagens and fat; there are amazing temperature plots on the web showing that the internal temperature will appear stuck, even falling, as the butt dwells in this range. Understanding this is the key to pork butt. Not rocket science, and it works pretty well even by accident, making this a quite forgiving cook. The butt should break out of this range, drifting up toward 190 F as serving time approaches; don't go higher, 185 F is fine. One can coax this along by bringing the fire back up to 225 F. The "authentic" norm for pork butt, achieved at an internal temperature near 200 F, is a way too stringy standard; the butt can be served anytime after it busts out of the 170-180 F range, if it stayed in this range for as long as possible. Now foil and towel in a cooler used as a "warmer", till serving time. Attempts to carve will be futile; it should just fall apart from slight pressure with a spoon. Great with tortillas made from fresh masa, if you live somewhere with decent Mexican markets. Last night, we also served guacamole, garden tomatoes, and pot beans. "Dry" is a function of maximum internal temperature, more than cooking time. A monunental single piece, bone-in, will dry less than boneless pieces. One also wants to be sure to have melted most of the fat; a long cooking time in the 170-180 F range serves this goal.

One rig used a second cooker to generate the smoke. Others built very careful fires, and placed large trays on ice between the fire and the cheese. The temperatures for cheese were indeed 100 F, one doesn't want to melt the cheese. For fish, one has more leeway.

Short answer, yes people do this. The BBQ Guru's most basic model, the PitMinder, will go down to 90 F; it has this sort of application in mind. I wouldn't try sticking such low temperatures by hand. Even then, you'll have trouble generating smoke; it takes heat. I'd make some experimental runs with small pieces of cheese you don't care about, before a production batch. These temperatures are potential havens for food poisoning, another issue one needs to straighten out. Smoke and salt alone aren't a sure guarantee one is safe. I'm sure the northwestern native americans who smoked salmon over alder weren't using preservatives (other than salt) or Gurus, but they had generations of very specific experience, some of which involved getting sick. So why focus on 80 to 100 F? This is the sweet spot for some piece of equipment you don't have; you have a ceramic cooker. Figure out what it does best. Perhaps e.g. at 140 F you manage to easily create a quality of smoke you like, with results you find delicious, but a ceramic cooker strains to imitate a different kind of equipment at 100 F.

This was part of Sunday dinner with the neighbors: I bought a 4.2 lb bone-in pork loin, and divided it roughly in half, into very meaty country ribs, and a boneless loin. I made a brine following Paul Bertolli's instructions in "Cooking by Hand", heating carrots, onions, celery, parsley, herbs, spices, salt and sugar in 4 kg of water, then chilling before adding the pork to brine for three days. It is crucial to nail the quantity of salt, and this requires accounting for the water in the pork. Estimating the pork as 70% water (this is too high, because of the bones, but also too low, because of the veggies. Perhaps this cancels!), I got a total of 5335g water, to which I added 2.5% sea salt, or 133 g, and 90 g sugar. This makes for a very light ham, which is how we like it. I cooked the country ribs for 6+ hours at 210 F to 225 F, and cooked the loin for 2+ hours to an internal temperature just over 140 F. I cut the ribs into individual ribs, and thinly sliced the loin. This makes for a very practical and delicious way to serve this meat. It was a hit; this amount of salt was just right for us. Again, the KK extruded coconut charcoal was a pleasure to cook with, imparting a very close to neutral taste, so my smoke pot filled with apple chips could rule the day. This is why I buy this grade of charcoal; I consumed about four pounds net for this burn (starting with 8 lbs, recovering 4 lbs), and that expense was the least of my worries. I was instead trying to nail the meal; I can't afford the French Laundry, and I'd rather eat at home. (The neighbor's dogs were inside to keep them from getting too jealous, and they literally broke a screen to get out, spending the rest of the evening frolicking around us with our dog.)

From Paul Bertolli's "Cooking by Hand", p. 174: I've been using 70%. One should really also guess and subtract the weight of the bones, if any. In practice, I have a spreadsheet with past values that makes the salt calculation for me, and a text file in the same directory with notes, e.g. "less salt next time?". So if the spreadsheet for a given cut (bone-in pork loin) assumes 70% and ignores the weight of the bones, this is self-correcting over time, as we discover that we like 2.5% salt using this formula. In other words, any formula that's roughly right and responds in the right direction to changes is a good thing, if one takes notes. Estimating the water weight of meat as either 50% or 100% is still way ahead of ignoring the water in the meat, which dilutes the salinity of the brine. What I used to do was make up a light brine and throw in the meat, ignoring the proportions of meat and water. One can never get consistent results this way, and getting the salt exactly right is part of nailing the cook. Getting back to this thread, as long as the weight of the water is many times the weight of the salmon, this calculation doesn't really matter. With a ham, the weights could easily be half and half, and this calculation matters a lot.