Syzygies

I came up with this after a few experiments making charcoal; read up on how one does that at backyard scales. One heats wood without burning it, and the gases produced sustain the needed fire once the pilot fire exhausts itself. As raw wood chunks burn, they can emit various nasty byproducts, giving that "creosote" taste to food. Skilled ceramic cooks manage to place few chunks to minimize this, and convince themselves that they like the more distinct smoke taste from a bit of this effect (like the tingle on the tongue from eating fugu?). The alternative is to somehow seal the wood inside an airtight pot with escape holes, so the wood off-gases without ever catching fire. I seal the lid onto a cast iron dutch oven because if it were to jar even slightly loose, the convection effect would burn up all the wood like a chimney, leading to a smoke disaster. I mix a few tablespoons of flour and water in a ziplock sandwich bag, nick off the corner, and use it like a pastry bag to lay a bead around the lid rim, with a paper towel sheet handy for cleanup. Takes a minute or two if one isn't terrified of dexterity tasks, and the result is foolproof. After my reports on the K forum, various people tried a variant, building a stainless steel "pipe bomb" with a few tiny holes. An expensive special order, but skips the trivial paste step. What one doesn't want to do is to use compound metals like galvanized steel which emit toxins when heated; stick to simple materials known to be safe. A commercial cast iron smoke box has way too much ventilation; it's designed to salvage a gas grill. Dutch ovens can be found for $10 and everyone has a drill... This is only for low & slow! I use way more smoking wood than other approaches (2 quarts at a time) but "distill" only a subtle part of the wood's potential smoke. I consider it the difference between moonshine and bourbon, but to each its own. I'm tired of the theoretical debates this provoked; one simply has to try this, or ignore the idea. My wife is completely hooked, so I can never go back.

For low & slows, I always put my smoking wood (usually hickory chunks and apple chips from the SF Lazzari factory) in a 2 quart cast iron pot with 3 holes drilled in the bottom, and the lid sealed on with flour paste. (This is related to how one makes charcoal; it "distills" the smoke like good bourbon, and my wife doesn't like smoke any other way. The paste sounds tricky till you try it; Moroccans do this all the time with poorly fitting couscous pots.) I then lay extruded coconut around the pot, and use a MAPP torch to heat the pot and start the fire at once. For high temp cooks with Lazzari oak lump, I always use an electric starter these days, buried in the charcoal. I've forgotten about the starter many a time without destroying it, they're tough. I used to start lump fires with 99% rubbing alcohol. I loved the serious "womp" sound it made, as did the neighborhood dogs. The fumes from rubbing alcohol are equally dangerous before and after burning; ethanol (drinkin' alcohol) takes longer to kill you because it's so chemically simple, unburned there's no toxins down the reaction chain, unburned, and burned there's a huge difference between "H2O, CO2" and "H2O, CO". But if one can avoid the fumes from rubbing alcohol, absolutely no trace of the stuff once the fire reaches cruising altitude.

Yum! Look up recipes for "Cuban sandwiches" on the web, I'm quite fond of them from living part-time in NYC. You just made the key ingredient.

As it happens, I did take a picture. I forgot.

Actually, I was explicit that they weren't to trim it at all, and I didn't trim it at all. The 25% weight loss was dry aging. This is exactly what they predicted; they do this for a living. I was there, but don't take my word for this, try it! Next time I will trim some fat. I believe you could hang a picture of fat next to the cooker for the same protective effects; the moist / dry axis is determined by other factors.

Sorry, no pictures, it was a chaotic day and the brisket went quickly. I was busy making fresh pasta "from the grain" for the vegetarians, and so forth... No, the brisket was off the bone. It llooked pretty much like any other packer cut 12 lb brisket, before going into the dry aging room. It lost 25% of its weight but still barely fit into my #7 K. (I do explain to friends admiring my now-tileless K that Dennis has worked out the kinks in every respect, so buy a KK ...) Yes, a quick-grilled steak might benefit from weeks of dry aging, yet the effect of 8 days on a brisket was truly dramatic. I'm a broken record on this one, but cooking is only partly responsive to speculation and reasoning, "I'd think ..." is often wrong. All I'm suggesting is that dry-aging worked, and is worth further experimentation. I debated with the butchers whether this might be common practice in Texas, where I've had my best brisket. They thought not, that it instead came down to skill. On reflection, I'd say aging meat is something of a continuum, there's deliberate dry aging, deliberate wet aging, and simply "rotating stock" without calling undo attention to one's practices. Wet aging one can attempt easily at home. It sure seemed to me that the "pudding" consistency I obtained was an exaggeration of the Texas brisket consistency I'd never quite achieved before. (Not to be a troll, but most internet pictures of brisket look like shoe leather, compared to what I've eaten in Texas.) So I'm betting that some subtle "rotating stock" is at play here, and the deliberate sweet spot for dry aging is 4 or 5 days.

I made my first experiment with smoking a dry aged brisket: The Golden Gate Meat Company http://www.ferrybuildingmarketplace.com/golden_gate_meat_company.php will hold customer purchases in their dry aging room. I picked out a nice 12 lb packer cut brisket, left it 8 days with them, and picked it up at 9 lbs. I rubbed it with olive oil and a chile, salt, pepper mix overnight, then smoked it for 21 hours at 210 F or so. I let it take forever to melt its way across the crucial 170 to 180 F stretch, then let it creep to 197 F (by raising then lowering the pit temp to time this with our guests' arrival) before the foil and towels in a cooler bit, and serving. This was the second best brisket I've ever made, the idea is worth further experiments. The meat almost turned to pudding, the sweet spot might be 4 to 6 days dry aging. I'd be curious if anyone else gets a chance to try this...

I'm in! I'm in! My hoard of the "good" K extruded is dwindling, this is just in time.

I'm sometimes a fan of long recipes, but not for hash. Hash is the ultimate use of bbq leftovers, be it pulled pork, brisket, or house-cured ham (my favorite). Combine exactly one such meat with onions and potatoes, and a few carefully chosen spices. Salt and pepper works. It's "hash", not "mush", so do everything in one's power to keep the ingredients distinct. Fry the onions on their own. Steam the potatoes in advance and chill them (the usual "twice cooked" starch routine that makes french fries taste so good), then pan saute them on their own until you're tempted to serve them straight up. Finally, combine all the ingredients, but not into a mush. Hash is all technique and hunch, no recipe. If you're not thinking "That's all?" when you make it, you're using too many ingredients. It is great with fried eggs and hot sauce. The leftover barbecue is, however, what makes the hash.

Paella is best thin in the biggest pan you can manage. I own four pans, and only use the largest. My second largest fit with the lid down, handles and all. It took one cook with my largest to convince me to cut off the handles. No question, "open shut" case. Our favorite is chorizo and olives...

Actually, I did have SYZYGIES as my license plate in New York for quite a while. It was fun watching people's reactions. My favorite was a kid clearly heading for a career pumping gas, who looked and looked, then threw me a finger. I've been busy building and overclocking computers (it's like a bat flying around in a dozen-dimensional cage) but we're trying the Zuni Cafe chicken recipe in our cooker tomorrow night.

Re: 10-97

Re: Charcoal Questions Lazarri sells a much broader selection of products from their SF location than one sees in stores. Oak lump, chunks of smoking wood are the highlights for me. Lazzari Fuel Company http://www.lazzari.com/ Brisbane, South San Francisco 11 Industrial Way Brisbane, CA (415) 467 2970 Their driveway is only a few feet from the intersection, and doesn't look right. Trust me, this is the place. It looks from a distance like a movie set for an apocalypse movie, one could easily imagine filming a sequel to "28 Days Later" here. Park near the bombed out abandoned building, go in the opening, look for a stairs on your left to the upstairs level, enter the abandoned office gingerly, and make some noise. A very friendly local will appear and take your order. Lazzari Oak is much better that Lazzari Mesquite, by my lights. Sure, I'd use mesquite if there was no other choice, which was the historical situation in parts of the west. Doesn't mean it doesn't smell bad and leave sharp, off tastes in your food. Hey, I used to use it. Oak is better. I load 8 40 lb bags of Oak Lump into my VW GTI on each trip. While you're there the first time, grab bags of apple chips (no chunks available) and hickory chunks.

I won't do anything year after year for kicks, unless it comes out better than I can buy. I buy wine. I buy beer. I make limoncello. I make hot sauce. We experimented with "extracts" in the spirit of yours, although yours are more advanced. With the one exception of a cooked, Caribbean-style sauce from Fatali peppers (a yellow habanero only 4x as hot and great flavor) all of these sauces tasted raw, unfinished, nothing like the best examples of a Tabasco-style sauce. So we looked into Tabasco methods. Several years in a barrel, scrape off the black crud, hmm... These are methods from a different century. Translate old-school European wine-making in oak barrels to California steel-tank fermentation, somehow I came up with my procedure as the essence of the old-school Tabasco procedure. Yes, it is about the flavor! There may be a preservation aspect, as we don't cook the sauce afterward. It's live, or at least could be, if not for all that added vinegar. Classic mode of food preservation: Rather that cooking and adding chemicals to prevent any bugs, just pick a bug and let it win. We do add chemicals, if you count vinegar and sea salt, but if any bug has a chance, the bug we introduced in fermentation has a pretty strong foothold. Still, we couldn't sell the stuff without cooking it.

A few more notes on procedure (you may edit this and the previous into one post, if you like): I wash and stem the chiles, then blend them a small batch at a time in what my wife calls the "boy blender", a VitaMix VitaPrep. Pricey, but a killer appliance. Like all blenders, it takes more liquid than I want to make a loose enough mixture for the blender to work. I sieve the results into a bowl, reuse the liquid for the next blender batch, and move the blended solids into a bowl large enough to hold the entire load of chiles. This liquid should be spring water, or filtered water that has sat for a while; the chemicals in tap water could discourage the fermentation. The recycled liquid begins to resemble Dave's Insanity Sauce; one could save it for immediate use. It isn't representative of how the final hot sauce will come out. I dump it into the big bowl, then kimchee or sauerkraut juice (make sure it is active, not pasteurized) then enough water for a loose mixture. Now I adjust the pH. Various sources (confirm this yourself!) cite a pH of 4.4 to 4.5 as low enough to avoid a botulism risk. I aim for an initial pH of 4.2, which only takes a few tablespoons of white vinegar per gallon of pepper mash. This doesn't inhibit further acidic fermentation if the kimchee or sauerkraut juice is active. I sterilize my carboys (there's a great detergent sold specifically to prep carboys for making beer) but this may not be necessary. Now, move the slurry to a large carboy, leaving 1/4 to 1/3 space for worst case expansion if the fermentation takes off too fast, and move to a cool location for the best, slowest fermentation. (Pointers from your kimchee experience would be nice here.) Use a fermentation lock like one uses for beer, a hollow rubber cork with a plastic one-way doohickey water trap. Air gets out, air doesn't get in. A friend had one batch go seriously off after he overfilled the carboy, blamed the fermentation lock for being such a pain under this duress, and replaced it with cheesecloth. I have long been fearful e.g. of mold but it has never happened, using fermentation locks. Instead I often overfill my one gallon carboys, wanting any mold to be within easy reach. Next year I'm half-filling a 5 gallon carboy, the hell with worrying about overflows, clearly I don't have to worry about mold. After perhaps 6 weeks, I mix the mash 1:1 with white vinegar (commercial recipes would go 1:2) and blend it again into a finer puree. I let this sit for months, then bottle. It's easy to buy hot sauce bottles 144 at a time over the web, very cheaply. (My friends would love a carry-on legal sample size, one actually checks luggage just to travel with my sauce!) The choice here is to filter as finely as possible through cheesecloth before bottling (this came closest to replicating fabled, long-gone Ortego hot sauce) or through just an ordinary sieve to leave more body, our preference but a matter of taste. We make labels on laser paper that are sized nicely to apply using packing tape, and seal the caps with electrical heat shrink tubing and a heat gun. The ideal size just fits when fresh, but shrinks over time; wet the tubes for an easier time sliding them on. Oh, yeah, wear gloves when handling this many chiles.

Re: Hot Sauce, Home-Made and Tasty... Sure. Post a link here so the curious (e.g. me) can follow the discussion.

We've been fermenting our own hot sauce for years, in carboys and fermentation locks from a beer making store. Same process as making sauerkraut or kimchee, we use live juice from one or the other to start the fermentation. Main issue is to set the initial pH low enough to evade botulism risk (a standard way that homemade sauerkraut goes wrong) with a few TB of white vinegar per gallon mash, confirmed with a $100 pH meter. After a month or two we double the volume with white vinegar, and let rest for a few more months before bottling. My hot sauce fanatic friends prefer the best batches of this homemade to what they can buy. My wife only finds homemade acceptable; she won't use commercial at all. We find there are three components of flavor (to simplify) in variations on Tabasco. Some chiles (thai are the extreme case) come across as pure heat. Anything in the habanero category takes the blend in a second direction. And bizarre crosses (it's really hard to grow more than one variety of chile and keep the lines pure) from our favorite Farmers Markets lend a depth of flavor missing e.g. in the Thai chiles. We number our blends #1, #2, ... #7 and do reach for specific bottles all the time, but it's hard to explain any system we might have to this, except remembering the three modes above. Perhaps our label should include barycentric coordinates, via a dot in a triangle... Dave's Insanity is spiked with extract. Same idea as port -vs- wine, it's fortified and I don't count it as in the category.

The Elephant in the Room Hmm, the elephant in the room here is the smoke in the fire, not the sugar in the brine. I believe that that's ok, the way I use smoke isn't shortening my lifespan, but seriously, I wouldn't worry about the sugar in the brine. (I have used organic turbinado sugar to appease the gods, but it really doesn't matter...) If one wants to do the math, at worst the sugar equalizes in the water content of the brine bucket. So say there's 1/4 cup sugar in 9 lbs of water brining a 3 lb chicken. Even assuming the chicken is entirely water (it's not!) a quarter of the sugar, or 1 TB, ends up in a chicken that gets split several ways. Unless you're radically avoiding prepared foods (as we do for the simple reason that we're fussy eaters) you get more sugar than that in pretty much anything else you eat. I've only been a vegetarian when I was trying to sleep with one, so I can't claim to be an authority on politically correct eating habits. On the other hand, this is a ceramic cooker forum, I'm in good company here.

Re: Fun with tiles... Majestik, that's one truly beautiful restoration. It comes back to me, I also saw this tile adhesive at Home Depot, that must be the kind of goop RJ used in Sacramento, but a different brand. I was advised by my brickyard to stay clear of the stuff, setting into mortar is better. I assumed that this acrylic adhesive is all bad, because the stuff used on my K didn't work, or at a minimum that it is rather sensitive to technique. (Read the application temperature range on the label. Ever been to Sacramento or Mexico in the summer?) I'm happy for you that your re-application is stronger than the original.

Re: Komodo the plagiarist? NOT! As one whose tiles fell off my Kamado, without a word of apology from RJ, I sure hope that you also improved the tiles! My local brickyard thought I would be crazy to try reattaching tiles to a curved outdoor surface experiencing broad temperature swings, so I went textured. If you're not having tile issues, then you must know something few people know. I'm saving my pennies for a KK, in part I crave a better "fit" as my bands are also beyond adjustment, I need to make a seal so I can stop using masking tape on each low & slow. But the questions I'll have will be: 1. Why should I expect the tiles to stay on? 2. Half the time when I buy a product that doesn't need adjustment, I realize that the English-to-English translation is can't be adjusted. That said, the KK looks to be best-of-market, what I wish I'd been able to buy back in the day... Keep it up.

Sanny, if you ever make it up to NYC, do stop at Bangkok Center Grocery on 102 Mosco St, in Manhattan's Chinatown. Their fridge has fresh pastes of every description, from Bangkok. They freeze well, but not rock solid, and one can then pull off lumps as needed. I've taken a month of lessons in Oakland, CA from Kasma Loha-unchit, and I also spent a month on a food tour of Thailand with her. Sure many people use mixes. Many people also find the nearest outdoor market, and buy fresh coconut milk, freshly pounded curry pastes, etc. from various stalls. We have it harder, replicating these flavors in the states. Kasma's recipes for freshly pounded pastes do taste better than any prepared paste. Her panaeng curry paste calls for red chillies, white peppercorns, coriander seeds, cumin seeds, nutmeg, lemon grass, kaffir lime peel, galanga, cilantro roots, roasted garlic, roasted shallots, shrimp paste, paprika. I brought back a 55 lb, one gallon Thai mortar and pestle from the trip. It makes pounding pastes like this much easier. So does a Vita-Max Vita-Prep, if one is willing to add some coconut cream to loosen the mixture. I find this cheat acceptable, because the first thing that happens to said paste is that it gets fried in more coconut cream. I highly recommend Kasma's classes. Her weekly lessons work well for locals. Her week-long intensives draw many out-of-towners, who take a week's vacation in San Francisco in order to attend these classes.

Yes, Brazilians use these for everything, and as long as they don't go from freezer to high flame, they don't crack. (Being a natural material, there can always be surprises, and anyone who sells them warns against direct flame. Yeah, and you'll go to jail if you take the tag off a pillow...) One needs to distinguish here between the romance of such a pot (I use one when I can), and its technical strengths. As fancy restaurants know well, most people need to be told that what they're eating is special, and soapstone does that job nicely; this theatre even works on the cook. I think of soapstone as having sluggish thermal properties, but it transfers heat too rapidly to make a suitable material for the floor of a pizza oven; synthetic pizza stones are tuned to transfer heat more slowly. Nevertheless, I view soapstone as often my best choice for going into the oven or a ceramic cooker. I don't own a slow cooker, I improvise one as needed by putting a soapstone pot on a high quality electric hot plate, and I view this "component stereo" combination as vastly superior. For actual frying surfaces, one can saute first in a soapstone pot, and it will do a decent job and save cleaning a pot. For e.g. softening onions, no need to read on. Nevertheless, this is nearly always a technical missed opportunity. For frying, I decide between a nonstick pot (Look Cookware is nice but no longer made; other expensive European options perform well and dodge the chemical safety issues of overheating cheap nonstick pans), and a surface optimized for browning, then making a sauce from the film stuck to the pan. Paul Bertolli has an outstanding discussion of this process in Cooking by Hand; his chicken is one of the best indoors versions I know. His recipe is pure technique: Chicken, salt, pepper, a bit of water to deglaze the pan, and a cook that is buck-naked totally on the spot. (This is my favorite kind of recipe; our favorite spareribs are salt, pepper, apple smoke, no foiling in mid-cook, and it has taken me years to get the hang of them.) I like the matte black surface of Staub cookware (think Le Creuset, but with a surface optimized for frying rather than just protecting the cast iron interior) and their paella pan makes a nice pan for Bertolli's chicken. The Calphalon One Infused Anodized surface is the best I know for this particular technique. Several of their pans are roughly half-priced as introductory offers. I own these, now roughly $100 each, or $80 at Bedmo with their ubiquitous 20% off coupon. 7qt. Sauteuse 8.5 qt. Dutch Oven The former presents such a large surface area, it can literally save you time, e.g. sauteing a slew of chopped veggies in one batch without steaming them. Any stew that says "brown meat in two batches" then make a sauce for the stew, can be done in one batch in this pan. The latter is a compromise that can go on to make a large quantity of stew in the same pot. It's my indoor gumbo pot; it can make a flawless roux, brown the veggies, then simmer the stew all in one pot.

fried egg luge Hash rocks, for using up many kinds of barbecue. I like a plain, discrete hash, look in "Joy" for the gloppy kind: Dice yellow potatoes, steam 4 minutes or so till firm but done. Either chill many hours in fridge (best) or immerse in cold water, spin dry using salad spinner (expedient). Pan fry in ghee or preferred oil till brown, set aside. Saute onions, carrots, celery or fennel, bell pepper to taste in olive oil or preferred oil. Add diced meat (trimmed of excess fat) and heat through. Combine with potatoes. Season with salt, pepper as needed. I like reheating hash for breakfast with a fried egg and a generous slathering of home-fermented hot sauce. I discovered this morning fried egg luge, get a frying pan as hot as possible, free the fried egg, and with a rapid wrist motion, get the fried egg to do very fast laps around the inside rim of the pan. If there isn't a significant risk of the egg flying across the room, you're doing it wrong; remember the real reason people watch races. This gets a very nicely crisped exterior without overcooking the yolk, and it's so much fun that one can almost forget one is only having one egg.