Syzygies

Wow. Old-timer here. I'm embarrassed that I never asked myself what that first position was for. Can one still extinguish a fire, saving remaining charcoal, in first position? I've actually never had my top damper get stuck, without knowing this. I have learned on this coast not to tighten jar lids too tight if I want to stay married; maybe my top damper habits are just my California mode. A friend once had an off-brand cooker (K5, for other old-timers) get its damper stuck after a winter of disuse. We needed to use some solvent that needed to be cooked off, and an improvised strap wrench. One needs leverage, or else one could get hurt, but not so much leverage that one destroys the cooker. For comparison, there's an old Pavoni Europiccola out there (we gave it to a friend) with a badly dinged main body from a misguided strap wrench episode. We ended up soaking the errant joint in acetone for an hour; that worked.

I'm trigger happy to start over given the slightest provocation if there's time. I'm reminded of Laurie and my stepdaughter: "No Mama! It's dead."

1) 23" or 32" 2) who cares! 3) some of us really like a good excuse for a road trip, the longer the better the stories... 4) is the kicker. If nothing turns up he just buys. One forgets the pain of purchase quickly. The joy of a good cooker is forever.

I want a Berkel! I would, except for storing and cleaning. Berkel Manual Fly Wheel Slicer (330M) Video

Music to decide by? Chicago - 25 Or 6 To 4

Yes. The forum search will find old threads on this. I like it. Pricey, more flavor than the very neutral KK extruded coconut. It reminds me of roadside barbecue in Thailand, which I miss. Definitely worth a try.

We just enjoyed Thanksgiving with the family of a mathematician friend and colleague. There was no apple pie. A Lamaze recommendation to bring apples to her delivery left an impression on their adult daughter. Of course I recommended Cien años de soledad. Great things can come from obsession. The waves are a gift. One needs to learn to surf. The Beatles couldn't read sheet music. Cooking is learning to see the simple.

As a Giants fan, ask me how I know!

Take into account how liquids take on smoke more quickly. If you like the effect but it's faint, you're on the right track. If the results are wretched, it could be either that you don't like smoked milk, or you used too much smoke. I prefer to have the chicken itself carry the smoke into the stew. In the late eighties I visited New Orleans on a soon-to-expire airline bump voucher, and ate over a dozen gumbos. Then I was visiting Nice, France with a friend, and had this idea of getting invited over to people's houses to cook dinner parties. Cooking French for the French didn't make sense, but I was impressed how Alice Waters had transported the idea of Provence to California, founding Chez Pannise. I thought, turn-around is fair play, I'll bring New Orleans to Nice and make a Mediterranean gumbo. My friend rolled his eyes at the implausibility of this fantasy, but humored me. A Chez Panisse connection? That's over-thinking things, like the LA Dodgers. A complication for my second host (a dear, now departed friend who made me feel French) was that they kept strict kosher. I wasn't allowed to make the stock. I spent what would be over $100 now on amazing vegetables at the farmers market. Soon we realized we were making an overhyped chicken soup, with twelve guests about to arrive. Jacques came up with the idea of smoking the chicken over vine cuttings. Back in the gumbo, the smoke came up like a house fire, then ... then ... stopped at just the right point. To my surprise, one of the coauthors of Chez Panisse Pasta, Pizza, & Calzone arrived, expresses her pleasure at an American who cooks. Then everyone is stunned, Jacques kindly (a clear lie) pronounces our gumbo the best meal served in his home. My friend and I get a return invitation a few nights later, learning to make pizza in the home and garden illustrated in the pizza book.

Yes, you don't need a ceramic cooker heat deflector, any more than you need a trombone mute. Nevertheless, people like to "shape" the fire in a cooker, just as they like to "shape" the sound from a trombone. In both cases there are long traditions of using found objects, such as terra cotta plant saucers and toilet plungers, respectively. Some people inexplicably have trouble reaching higher temperatures in a ceramic cooker. A heat deflector makes this harder, but with good technique one won't notice a difference. Be sure to leave an inch or more on all sides, and buy an unglazed plant saucer to minimize the risk of lead. (As an aside, galvanized metals off-gas toxins. Like choosing smoking woods, only use materials in a BBQ that have a long-standing tradition of tested historical use. Even here, one might question the choice of used oil drums by Texas oil workers for their BBQ rigs. Err on the side of caution, and be aware of what one does not know.) Terra cotta plant saucers are easily lined with foil, for easy mess disposal after a cook. They eventually crack. I went through a saucer every several years for a long time, before moving on.

Nice! We get their flyers but I didn't spot this; we use KA flour whenever we aren't grinding our own. I look forward to someone making a comparison. I have two data points: We've made nixtamal from Anson Mills Henry Moore Yellow Hominy Corn, and we've bought prepared artisanal masa from Primavera at the Sunday Ferry Plaza Farmers Market in San Francisco. Both are based on domestic US corn, and both masas were excellent; Primavera is my favorite Mexican restaurant in the Bay Area. However, we preferred masa made from corn grown in Oaxaca, Mexico, as sold by Masienda. Masienda sells masa harina (masa flour) in red, white, and blue. We use the white to dry out too-wet masa mixtures from our Indian wet grinder. I'd like to compare the Masienda white against the KA masa harina.

Shaken? Or stirred?

Galaxy Outdoor Kamado Rocket What I find most astonishing: They're priced comparable to a KK. At least Richard's K's were priced as starter marriages.

Typical Sunday at the ranch. I processed two 20 lb boxes of Santa Cruz dry farmed Early Girl tomatoes into Sicilian estrattu (paste) overnight, still working in the dehydrator I built. Shown is what's left of one box after 24 hours, more than it looks on a full sheet pan. This morning I picked up 15 lbs each of chicken bones and vegetables for stock, filling a 22 quart commercial pot to the brim. Oh, dinner, right. A pheasant in the KK.

Hi! You do realize your handle will be an inside joke, when you make your 1000th post as an expert in 10 years? You don't need a controller. I'm always amazed how I can hit a target temperature first time I check, after lots of experience. It can wait, and you'll never learn if you don't try not using one. But you want a controller. If you do something that found the money for a 42, your idea of recreation is probably also doing seven things at once. (Today I have estrattu working from 40 lbs of Santa Cruz dry farmed Early Girl tomatoes (in a dehydrator I build myself), and a 22 quart stock pot filled to the brim with chicken stock, and I should really be lighting a fire for pheasant rather than answering you.) When you're doing seven things at once, a controller is welcome.

Looks to me like a Richard K5, not a KK. Very different construction, perhaps $600 new. Has all it's tiles, so looks never used. I've made decent Q for a crowd on this, a friend bought a K5 when I bought a K7. My K7 fell apart, even my neighbor sent it to the dump as his tastes evolved. But let's remember, Texas Q started with metal worker off hours converting oil drums to offset cookers, with the right skills one can make great Q in a ditch. A KK is a Lear jet. This is not that.

Me too. I need to use my hands. For woodworking I'll draw plans in Adobe Illustrator, often computed from a spreadsheet. Then I'll scribble on several printouts while measuring again. Then my neighbor is a master woodworker with a shop and table saw I don't have the space for. He gets the best plywood in the SF Bay Area delivered, and cuts for me. I've been making wine racks from various sizes of metal lattice. Pictured is the installed rack (walnut) for 100 bottles, and plans to cut two 25 bottle "overflow campgrounds" that are alas still in use.

My hunch, based on decades of experiments, is that for low & slow this wouldn't get hot enough to produce reasonable smoke. However, the classic cast iron smoke pot has an effective range of 200 F to 275 F, depending on taste. At around 275 F, the smoke is too intense for some. One could try a smaller pot, though "underneath" becomes an interesting strategy. There will be a different effective range, making this interesting. Of course, the way to be free of "effective range" considerations is to buy the official KK Hot/Cold Smoke Generator. Newer KKs come with a port for this. I have the smoke generator, but it will require drilling my 2009 23" KK. I haven't found the time yet, or all the instructional material all in one place for how to do this. I'm very fussy, as in I still can't understand why university contractors didn't use backing boards when they drilled my kitchen cabinets for knobs. I want to figure out the "backing board" approach to this retrofit, how one would proceed if the KK cost $60,000. When I do, I'll fully document my procedure, as learned from whatever is scattered about here.

Yes, starting at 13:48 and ending at 14:13 with "and Bob's your uncle." Bob's Your Uncle 2019 Rehearsal Tapes - Chicken In The Oven

IMG_9243.MOV So I had high hopes for the MSR Alpine Stowaway Pot. Such high hopes that I bought two sizes and drilled both of them at once, protecting my time over my return privileges. I was thrilled that @jeffshoaf had found this pot and tried it. Truth be told, I had been aware of this pot, planning to try it, for many years. I had however been so disappointed by every stainless steel experiment I'd made, and my cast iron smoke pot worked. There aren't enough hours in the day for every rabbit hole I want to go down. I pruned, in an uncharacteristic display of self-control. My first try reminds me of every other stainless steel experiment before I settled onto a cast iron smoke pot, sealed with flour paste. The MSR lid leaks. I didn't like the looks or the scent of the smoke at all, so I pulled the pot out (as I had every stainless steel predecessor). The gas plume out the holes kept burning, like a horse castrated too late in life to forget what life was supposed to be about. With focus, the flour paste bit this time was easy, setting up the spurned cast iron pot to go in as relief pitcher. Nevertheless, I'd love to figure out how to make a paste that keeps months in the fridge. Artists buy empty paint tubes, for custom gesso mixes and such. That would make the flour paste bit easy. To be honest, I love the romance of the flour paste, it recalls Morocco. The smoke from a cast iron smoke pot in my opinion is cleaner than an MSR pot. I encourage others to make the comparison. A comparison requires trying both methods.

Here's a California source I stumbled on at a local farmers market: Encina Farms What I tried was pricey and spectacular.

I'm reasonably certain that you plan to thaw and unwrap it before the cook. Nevertheless, this reminds me of a great trail meal, as a kid. I was a junior counselor on a series of weeklong summer camp backpacking trip in the Adirondack high peaks. Freeze dried dinners were too new and unaffordable, but we had a decent series of conventionally dried stews one simmered for dinner. What do they say? Exercise is the best seasoning. We were particularly excited about making dinner one night, because we remembered that meal tasting better than anything else last trip. Dumping the contents of the pouch in question into the simmering water, this time we noticed a flavor pouch floating in the stew. Spices. In thick plastic. "Do you remember this pouch from last trip?"

Any comments on his take on Jealous Devil taste? He's become a paid ambassador for JD (and notes end of the other video that Fogo has a fail-to-disclose zombie army of "ambassadors"). He still says here that chicken at 300 F, JD is off. He prefers Kamado Big Block. I use Fogo to protect my KK Coffee Lump (only 260 lbs left!), but I'm open minded.

Facebook reminds me that twelve years ago I still had an off-brand cooker, repaired as best I could.

I'm on my second decade with a 23" KK. I often use the 23" ULTIMATE DOUBLE BOTTOM DRIP PAN as a heat deflector. My primary motivation for using a heat deflector is that a ceramic cooker heats from the bottom, and I often want my food exposed uniformly to heat. This happens naturally for low & slow cooks, where the generous insulation of the KK encourages a uniform equilibrium. For hotter cooks, the "heat from the bottom" effect is pronounced in every ceramic cooker, and the KK's build quality can only partially mitigate this. With a perfect understanding of one's fire and perfect control of one's schedule, one can cook at high heats on a KK after the fire has died down, cooking on uniform radiant heat that the KK does a better job of preserving. At this stage, it's much harder to taste the choice of charcoal. It's much easier to use good charcoal and a heat deflector, and to cook as convenient after the cooker temperature stabilizes. I make pizza and Focaccia di Recco on my KK. My neighbor makes pizza in his wood-fired pizza oven. We both screw up sometimes, but his wood-fired fire control is another level of complexity. Of course one can learn, but an honest appraisal beyond bravado would warn others that it takes attention and practice. At its best the wood-fired pizza looks more authentic than any picture I've seen here in decades. No surprise, that's what they do in Napoli. Anyone who thinks they can simulate a restaurant Salamander with their $5,000 home oven's broiler is delusional. One should still learn how to make the best of one's home broiler, or ceramic cooker. We can reliably make pizza we're very happy with, in our KK. The crux issue is getting the KK hot enough without burning the damn crust. There's an easy fix for when this goes wrong: Move the pizza onto a round pizza screen, so it can finish without direct contact with the pizza stone. Some people may have figured out pizza without a heat deflector. Can they explain what they're doing right? Remember that we regularly see posts from people who still struggle to just get their KK to pizza temperature, even as others can't imagine having this issue. Having a gift is useless unless one can understand it and explain it to others. I'm eager to put away my heat deflector for pizza, if someone can clearly teach me what to do.