Syzygies

Good luck, Whizzy! Yes, Good luck, Whyzygies!

I'm all for Dennis making the best charcoal he can, for critical low & slow cooks. I still have some of my hoard of 2004 K CEL charcoal. It was great stuff, apparently not to appear at that quality under that brand again. I fill my car with Lazzari oak lump from their SF factory for general use, but I'd pay whatever Dennis asked for something trumping 2004 CEL for critical uses. I'm really rather shy, it's just that I took typing lessons...

Synthetic 1000/4000 Combination Waterstone I have tried many sharpening systems, and I have a strong preference for waterstones. Starting with a usable kitchen knife, there is no point to starting coarser than 1000 grit. Alas, the finer natural grits can be too soft, gouging easily. Except in expert hands, grits 6000 and above generally do little beyond humiliating the good-intentioned user. Reading the PDF sharpening study made me cringe, because the grit sequences involved made no sense to me for kitchen knives, it was like reading about someone who stick shifts their car from reverse into third. I own many waterstones, but by far my favorite choice is this synthetic combo stone. It is the right two grits for casual use that will nevertheless outsharpen pretty much any other home method: 08M01.02 Norton 1000/4000 Combo $54.50 I haven't tried a Tormek Knife Sharpener, they do cost more and take up more space. I admire the obsessed who can nevertheless make room for a Tormek in their lives. I prefer hand tools, and I'm trying to help everyone else. I find it easiest to rest the stone on a Thai mortar in the sink, with the faucet dribbling onto the stone. Waterstones need to be flattened after extended use. I have tools for this exact purpose, but a piece of fine wet/dry sandpaper taped to a flat surface does the trick nicely. The biggest objection to waterstones is difficulty maintaining a proper angle. I find that the sound and the feel provides good feedback, like playing a musical instrument, and my knives get sharp. So I'd say this fear is generally overstated. It is a bit bizarre, the unquestioned ideal that everyone aims for in sharpening doesn't explain the bread knife, patron saint of all serrated knives sold on late-night TV. Yes, one always wants to remove the burr when sharpening. For push cuts like chopping, planing, or shaving, the unquestioned ideal is spot-on. (12,000 grit? Bring it on, baby!) For slicing, a bit of variation in the edge, serration at a small scale as obtained by sharpening just with a 1000 grit, is actually a good thing. Don't believe me? Try the experiment yourself, slicing tomatoes.

incredible Glenn !!! I don't remember Glenn having an aroma, but girl pheromones do it for me, I don't really notice guys!

Soapstone -vs- metal stoves I have a good buddy with a ski house in Vermont. The two Vigilant woodburning stoves are famously efficient, but alas, metal. They're known to be fragile in the face of extreme shocks, like finding them at - 20 F and getting an 800 F fire going. I'm keenly aware how heavy they are, as I helped move one he found sold used hours away at an absurdly low price. This guy is like "The dude" in The Big Lebowski, such road trips are always a joy. The seller had a forklift to get it onto our truck, but it took some serious imagination to get it off the truck and into place. I felt like we were building the pyramids. The main stove is monumental, cut from immense slabs of Vermont soapstone. It's indestructible, it seems the fire never goes completely out inside, and even when it does, the stove gives off heat for another day. For soapstone object lust, this stove rules!

Akiva Goldsman simplified Nash's post-illness mathematical career by having him concentrate on the Riemann Hypothesis. This is one of the biggest open problems in mathematics, it has some practical consequences e.g. for making and breaking codes, though one can often take advantage of these consequences by simply hoping that it is true, and praying that what one did turns out to be justified. The descriptions are generally very technical, but the RH relates prime numbers (places along the usual number line) to other places in a "complex plane" containing the number line. This complex plane is generally accepted now, but wasn't universally accepted a few centuries ago. What's worse, our typical "flashlight" (infinite sums) illuminates round disks, and can't even see the places in the complex plane that the RH discusses. Infinite divides (continued fractions) have a different shaped "flashlight" pattern, more like lighting a lantern in the woods, and shining light everywhere not blocked by trees. I had Nash playing with continued fractions related to primes, at this point in the film where he was just starting to recover from his illness. The complex plane is just the second in a sequence of harder, stranger spaces of numbers; the next is four dimensional. So is space-time. I had Nash equate these, looking to solve the RH in four dimensions, in his Harvard Lecture Hall talk where he cracks up and runs. I ran this line by my colleague Brian Greene and it completely cracked him up, so I had to use it. Others saw the film and were particularly scornful of this line, such is life. It was "in character" for Nash at this point in the film.

Honestly, not huge. They have special initial break-in instructions, basically soak for a day, rub with garlic to ward off evil spirits. Spaniards use them over direct flame. As not all nonstick surfaces are created equal, same with glazed surfaces. These work well. Cazuelas come in monumental sizes well suited to ceramic cooking. Spain is the country, after all, known for making paellas 10' across. It's hard to find these larger sizes in other cookware. I'm in a minority here (and elsewhere ) for not being overly concerned about my lost (2004 RJ) Kamado tiles; I like my black retexturing job. I don't really accept objects as mine till I've reworked them, this helped. But the Spanish authenticity of a cazuela means something priceless to me, it helps me feel like Concord, CA is my little corner of the Mediterranean. (Three half wine barrels growing Genovese basil also helps.) This thread is logging cravings for a stone pot that costs nearly $200. A cazuela is a cheap and useful fix for this object lust. I also fully appreciate the romance of appropriation, finding free or nearly free objects that simply work. In grad school we used to scour the rich neighborhoods of Cambridge MA on trash night, we came up with some amazing stuff. (Let's not forget that the classic shapes of Texas cookers originated as discarded oil industry metal.) Our best haul was lighting and electrical stuff that perfectly set up an indoor growing room (no, just to get a jump on our garden ).

Sounds like you're thinking more along the lines of a casting couch? Actually, my hand did get one love scene, pointing at stars with Jennifer Connolly's double. In classic Hollywood fashion, we got about two minutes to get comfortable with each other before they starting filming. Earlier, Russell Crowe got this idea that we should wear acrylic nails to make our hands look longer and more graceful, more like John Nash's hands. I ended up going to the same salon in New Jersey that did Edie Falco's nails for the Sopranos. (No, one can't make this stuff up.) The head of the salon was on a cell phone from a Caribbean cruise ship as she monitored her assistant on this crucial assignment. She asked if I was doing anything else on the film, and I promptly asserted that I was also Russell's love scene double. "Honey, will you be needing an extension for that, too?" Here's my favorite writeup, from The New Yorker: A Beautiful Hand

Yikes! You're 35 miles away from me. Want me to come by and take a look?

We're celebrating the solstice by having various solar contractors look at our roof. Christmas eve, we'll be at a family celebration hosted by vegetarians. (Last year, different hosts, I brought brisket.) Brings back memories of my mother's christmas eve tofu lasagna, that was the era when I learned the art of getting bumped from flights for free tickets. I remember rushing from grading exams to my flight home, with no time to chill, spotting a beautiful Brit at my gate, and actually getting up the nerve to talk with her. Turned out she'd been bumped three times already that day from People Express, she taught me the ropes and insured that we got bumped three more times that evening. We parted (alas!) and I gave one round trip ticket to my sister for Christmas. I still had one left as the next Christmas approached, so I went to New Orleans on a lark, and fell in love with gumbo. Oh yeah, changed flights on the way back, "yes sir, there's one seat left", rushed to the gate just as the request for volunteers went up, and got my free ticket back, getting home only an hour late. My game of "People Express pinball" thus extended well into the Continental era. Missing the tofu was a bonus.

That's a big piece of meat! I've had that much meat cooking, but never in one piece. My fantasy cut is beef shoulder clod (as in the whole shoulder), comes in pieces that might not even fit my cooker. If you aim to finish in 20 hours, you're cooking no differently than every pulled pork ever made. Even if you're in technical violation of the danger zone guidelines, they're just guidelines*, and they don't factor in unbroken flesh being safer than e.g. ground meat. There were a slew of graphs of cooking times for butt on the web a few years ago, perhaps seeing one will set your mind a bit at ease. I used to get spirited debates from experts by advocating variable temperature cooks. There's a tension between the useful and detrimental effects of long cooking times, even without considering your concerns. On one hand, long cooking dries out meat. This is a relative thing, we all know that the advantage of a ceramic cooker is that the meat doesn't dry out, right? Well, it dries out less, and shorter cooking times mean even less. Even this is not necessarily a good thing, as we're concentrating flavors by reducing the meat. See, one can get tied in knots thinking about this, right? Reason can only take you so far in cooking, I prefer to cook various ways and see what I like. I've found that I like shorter cooks, as long as I accomplish the same things that a longer cook would have done for me. 1. Smoke penetration People debate the exact temperature, but a competition-grade smoke ring forms only at surface temperatures that one has passed long before the center has entered the danger zone. Some people put in cold meat into a cold cooker, hoping to prolong this period. I prefer my cooker and smoke to stabilize, but I still cook as low as I dare at first (200 to 220 F) initially. 2. Collagen breakdown On the other hand, a primary benefit of long cooks is breaking down the collagen in these monumental cuts of meat. This happens at 160 F to 170 F, well after the danger zone. Those same graphs show stalls and actual dips in this temperature range, as this process sucks up energy. This too has been discussed endlessly on the web, it throws people to see that stall or dip when company is coming. But it's a good thing. I "drive" by watching my probes, I'd want this to take 20 to 24 hours. Read how long it takes to roast a fresh ham "normally", you can always revert to this strategy as serving time becomes hours away, jacking up the fire. So my strategy? Slow for smoke penetration. Hotter to get quickly through the danger zone to collagen breakdown. Slow for collagen breakdown. Hotter still, to race to the finish once I break out of this range. Then, foil and towel the meat into a cooler (used here as a warmer) to rest and transport the meat, possibly for hours. *These guidelines are based on classic exponential growth, and estimates as to how much bacteria might be initially present. Bacteria starts out mostly as a surface effect on meat, but grinding distributes evenly any present. Bacteria levels are far lower inches into unbroken meat, where it could take a "danger zone" duration for levels to climb to the starting levels that concern health experts. But I'm not a health expert, and salmonella is not a typical bacteria, this is just my amateur attempt to explain why no one gets sick eating pulled pork.

Creole Gumbo I've posted the gumbo recipe in question here: Creole Gumbo I have 2 quart and 3 quart soapstone pots for indoor use, and either a 6 or 8 quart pot dedicated to outdoor use. (I'm away from it, I can't go measure...) Much cheaper, and far more all-around useful, is a large Spanish cazuela, like sold by The Spanish Table. One of our single favorite dishes is to brine some wild salmon four hours or so in 1/2 cup sea salt, 1/4 cup sugar per gallon water, then lay it on a bed of supermarket basil in a cazuela. Cook at 225 F over apple smoke till just done to taste. One really wants to use supermarket basil here. Yes, the weedy stuff about four times too large and gone-to-seed to make decent pesto. It infuses a flavor that goes great with salmon and apple smoke.

Gumbo is an improvisational dish which never comes out the same twice, and is traditionally made without a fixed recipe. Adapted to modern technique it bears an uncanny resemblance to Bouillabaisse, one of its ancestor dishes. For either, one 1. Makes the best stock one can. 2. Turns this stock into a rich soup. 3. Adds the featured ingredients, precooked or timed so they each cook exactly as needed before serving. It's pretty hard to miss if one respects these rules, making any stew. To make gumbo in a six quart pot, think two quarts of stock, three pounds of vegetables, and three or more pounds of meat and seafood. The chopped vegetables will disappear into the soup, while the quantity of meat and seafood will determine the "generosity" of the gumbo, without significantly affecting the thickness of the soup. A gumbo features two distinctive ingredients: a deeply browned flour and butter roux, and okra. Not everyone thinks they like okra, or for that matter the quantity of butter needed for the easily burned roux, so both require special attention. These directions are optimized for making a gumbo in a Komodo Kamado, in either a dutch oven or a soapstone pot. There are several advantages to making gumbo this way: The gumbo can collect meat drippings (it will need later degreasing) and take on a smoky flavor. Smoked meats can be added to the gumbo a short time before serving, with a better taste and texture than meats cooked directly in the gumbo. One needs careful smoke control, to avoid overwhelming the gumbo. I recommend using a smoke pot. 1. Stock Ideally, a meat and seafood gumbo is based on a meat and seafood stock. A shellfish stock in particular adds a rich sweetness to gumbo. One should think of making the stock as the critical but easy half of the work. A gumbo is only as good as its stock. The techniques for making meat and seafood stocks are different; meats and bones need many hours to release their flavors, while a seafood stock can simmer for at most half an hour before taking on odd flavors. One thinly slices the vegetables for a seafood stock, worrying less for a meat stock. Stocks should only briefly ever come to a boil; the widespread culinary practice of reducing a completed stock by boiling is an expedient mistake. Think how distilling fine liquor works: a tremendous amount of flavor passes through the still before the boiling point of water. The same happens while reducing a stock; the result is unquestionably rich, but much has been lost. It is far better to make one stock on top of another, as was routinely done centuries ago in French court cooking. This technique is ideally suited to the different requirements of our meat and seafood stocks. To make a poultry stock, cut up a duck and a chicken, setting aside boneless duck breasts with fat intact to barbecue later for the gumbo. Cover with water, bring just to a boil, strain or lift out the meat, and discard the water. Clean the pot, and return the meat to the pot. Add a similar quantity of chopped onions, carrots, tomatoes, fennel or celery, and parsley, and other ingredients as you see fit. Cover again with water, and bring to a simmer for several hours to overnight. Do not salt. Strain through a course sieve. The chicken adds a roundness to the duck stock, and the vegetables add a sweetness. The poultry stock will need degreasing, as it simmers and after straining. It is easiest to use a pint beer glass or similar mug, and a gravy spoon or similar ladle. Ladle liquid from the surface of the stock to fill the the beer glass, and let it sit for a moment. The fat will rise to the top; ladle it off and return the stock to the pot. (This also works for the gumbo itself, if needed.) To make a shellfish stock, briefly blanch one's shellfish of choice, such as lobster, blue crabs, head-on shrimp, or crayfish, to the point where the meat can be shelled in a nearly raw state. Setting aside the meat, take the shellfish remains and cover them with two quarts of the poultry stock made earlier. Bring to a simmer, cooking at most half an hour, and strain through course and fine sieves. Do not degrease; refrigerate until needed. It is a nice idea to "quote" the stock ingredients by featuring the same ingredients in the gumbo, e.g. duck meat with duck stock, crawfish tails with crawfish stock. Moreover, some people have severe shellfish allergies. If using a shellfish stock, it is imperative that shellfish also be visible in the gumbo. 2. Soup Have ready two or more pounds of chopped vegetables: Onions, fennel or celery, red peppers, a seeded chile pepper or two. Reserve for later addition chopped green onions and garlic, and some cubed tasso, capicola, proscuito or other intense ham. Melt a stick or more of butter in a nonstick pot or the final gumbo pot, and add flour until the mixture forms a thick but liquid slurry. Stirring with a heatproof spatula over a medium heat, cook until the roux reaches a deep caramel color. Depending on the pot, one doesn't need to give this constant attention at first, but the color change takes place rapidly at the end. Traditionally, one prepares a darker roux for seafood, a lighter roux for poultry or pork, splitting the difference for a mixed gumbo. In any case, the thickening power of a roux decreases as it browns, which is a good thing because we're using so much. When the roux reaches the desired color, but before it burns or turns bitter, add the first batch of chopped vegetables. Add more butter or oil at this point, if needed. Saute at a fairly high heat to soften with a hint of browning, then add the second batch of chopped ham and vegetables. When this is most intensely aromatic, transfer to a six quart gumbo pot if a different pot was used to make the roux. Add peeled, seeded, coarsely chopped tomatoes. Add two quarts of stock, and bring to a simmer. Season with garden herbs, two bay leaves, freshly ground black pepper, and a tablespoon or more each of tabasco and Worcestershire sauce. One could add a smoked ham hock now. Set the uncovered pot on the main grill of Komodo Kamado set up for indirect slow cooking at 210 F to 225 F; with luck, an upper grill or rib rack fits over the gumbo pot, making room to barbeque various meats. Cook for many hours, monitoring the gumbo temperature and consistency. Add a bit of water as needed; the gumbo should never actually come to a boil. In practice, if the gumbo goes into a 220 F Komodo Kamado at a temperature of 180 F, it will take many hours to reach 200 F. To cook an open stew in a Komodo Kamado requires careful smoke control. Taste regularly, adjusting the seasoning as desired, and cover the gumbo if it risks becoming too smoky. If various meats are cooked directly over the gumbo pot, they should be simply prepared, without the use of rubs that would compete with the gumbo seasonings. The gumbo will then need careful degreasing, but may have benefitted from the flavorful meat juices it collects. Add salt as needed, taste for seasonings, and serve. 3. Featured ingredients A typical gumbo could feature okra, ham, pork loin, duck, andouille sausage, shrimp and crayfish, each in bite-sized portions. While each of these ingredients can be added directly to the gumbo at an appropriate stage, many can be improved by preparing separately and adding near the end. For example, many meats benefit from light brining, followed by traditional slow cooking in a Komodo Kamado. One wants to give each ingredient some time to mingle flavors with the gumbo, without stewing it long enough to lose the special qualities obtained by cooking separately. Meats that require long braises, such as ham hocks, can be added to a gumbo with the stock. Fish them out later, to clean up and dice back into the gumbo. Otherwise, most meats suffer if added too soon to a gumbo, and are generally tastier if barbecued low and slow separately, and added shortly before serving. Nearly all seafood requires a short cooking time, and should be added shortly before serving. The shellfish meat reserved from making the stock can be handled in one of two ways. Either add it directly to the gumbo, or poach it until just cooked in butter with a bit of water added, serving it over the gumbo. This poaching could take place on a burner, or in the Komodo Kamado, where the butter could take on smoke. Butter-poached lobster is a signature dish at the French Laundry; if you can score a pile of "cull" lobsters (sold cheap because they're missing claws), they beg to be made into a gumbo this way. Restaurants that use this technique routinely face returns from customers who believe the seafood is undercooked, so perhaps err on the side of fully cooked. This technique is a particularly good way to precook shellfish, if preparing the stock in advance; raw shellfish is notoriously perishable. Sliced okra is traditionally added directly to the gumbo pot, early in cooking, and helps to thicken the soup. However, many people don't like okra for exactly this property. Some cooks pan roast the okra before adding it to the gumbo. One actually doesn't want too thick a gumbo; thick stews are never as good as the sum of their parts. In contrast, thin soups carry flavors with much greater clarity, but are somehow psychologically less satisfying. The trick is to navigate between these two extremes, making a very generous soup that seems to be a stew. If there seems to be too much liquid just before serving, ladle some out and drink it.

Glenn's at it again! Not sure why, the image didn't show for me either until I tried its URL in a new window: (Don't get Glenn and me started )

My source was TemperatureWare. It does look like they went up in price. One of the smaller pots on a good hotplate makes a slowcooker of the gods. Here's the gumbo Glenn was talking about, made in a K. I smoked the meats over the pot, then diced them into the gumbo and degreased a bit. (The soapstone darkens immediately on contact with oil for seasoning, and stays the new, darker color.)

NIMBY I have no idea why this topic goes so well with barbecue. I was somehow explaining at a barbecue dinner how my college has a "Not In My Back Yard" policy prohibiting sexual relations between students and teachers, and the women at the other end of the picnic table started busting up laughing. It took a while for the rest of us to catch on...

In Glenn's honor, here's a brining mini-thesis: I'm a huge fan of making "house-cured ham" out of any part of a pig. As Glenn points out, it's tricky achieving penetration on the bigger pieces of meat. (I find that pictures of great 'cue helps, YMMV.) A farm supply store sells syringes meant for injecting livestock, they work better than any BBQ-specific supply, for injecting brine. Cheaper, too. "House-cured ham" need not be as salty or vile as commercial ham, and need not include preservatives if it will be eaten or frozen quickly. It's the happy medium between ham and not-ham, and it's my favorite cooked meat these days. The two books that have the best information on this are "Cooking by Hand" by Paul Bertolli, and "The Zuni Cafe Cookbook" by Judy Rodgers. They differ, but a mix of their opinions works great. I can summarize their advice as follows: Paul Bertolli urges one to compute the salt in a brine, taking the meat into account. It's far easier than it sounds: Count the weight of the meat as 60% to 80% water, depending on bones and fat, include this as part of the total water, and add to the total water 3% sea salt, 1-2% by taste sugar. One can go nuts googling various conversions between quarts, liters, pounds, grams (a spreadsheet does help if you must go this route) or one can simply use a digital scale. Choose the largest brining vessel that fits in the fridge (I favor a square plastic Cambro from a commercial cooking supply store, the measurements on the side can help for quicky 1/2 cup per gallon brines), put it on the scale and true the scale to zero. Now add the meat and weigh, true again, cover with water and weigh again. You've got the meat and water separately in grams now, computing the grams needed of salt is easy on any calculator with no conversions required: salt = 0.03 * (water + 0.7 * meat) Now, Paul Bertolli gives various recipes for adding allspice, peppercorns, cloves, juniper berries (pounded from whole spices), onions, carrots, celery, parsley, thyme, bay leaves to the salt/sugar brine, and bringing to 160 F before cooling. One can wing these proportions, go very easy on the spices until one knows, e.g. a gram or two of each per pound of meat is a lot. Paul Bertolli is fearful of the meat going bad, and wants the brine in the 30's F before the meat sees the brine. I accomplish this by using way too little water, cooling, and adding ice to get the weight right. Alas, sometimes my ice doesn't all melt, making the brine too salty at first. The Catch-22 here is this method requires the meat on the premises, to be weighed and to see how much water will then fit, so it's aging while it waits for the brine to chill. And who plans far enough in advance to lose this day? It takes one day to 4-6 days to make ham, depending on the size of the piece of meat. Judy Rodgers is of the opposite opinion, the brine should be nearly at room temperature to speed penetration. Paul's "cold shower" is not for her! (Do put the brine in the fridge at this point, or the meat will indeed spoil.) My single favorite cut is a bone-in loin roast, with apple wood smoke. Judy Rodgers also suggests cutting the bones away from the loin except for a strip at the bottom, so the roast opens like a book. This helps in both brining and cooking. After trying this, I'd take the suggestion further, as the slowing cooking part of the roast is the "hinge". I'd take off the bones completely to form a very generous country rib rack, and brine and cook it separated from the loin. The rib rack won't cook as far as one would like for ribs in the time the loin gets, but it's awesome cooked further in a pot of beans. After the loin roast reaches 140 F to 160 F to taste, I finish it over a hot fire. An old Weber is useful here, unless you're Glenn and can simply apply a flame thrower swiped from the set of Arnie's film "Commando" to the charcoal in a spare ceramic cooker. (If you think I'm kidding, you've never seen Glenn in action.) Judy Rodgers makes another crucial observation: Pull the meat out of the brine 12-24 hours before cooking, so the salt can equalize throughout the meat. Otherwise, one gets a salty "shock wave" near the surface. Obvious in hindsight, and I can taste the difference, but I didn't think of this before reading it in her words.

Glenn! Why didn't you tell me where the party was?!?!

Ahh, I see where the love of ceramic cooking has moved. Beautiful cookers, I'm very impressed with the design.