_Ed_

I tend to go for 200-203F, but I have seen decent results from 195 upwards, depending on the butt. Have you read this? http://amazingribs.com/recipes/porknography/perfect_pulled_pork.html - one of the best primers I have seen.

Nice work! those ribs look amazing.

that's excellent! I'll show the photo to him tomorrow - he'll love it!

Thanks! The flamingo glass belongs to the little man! his favourite, currently.

Recipe is pretty simple, tbh, but a bit time consuming. Cut a small chicken (c. 850g / 1.75lb) into quarters, remove skin, and slash surface of each piece to let marinades penetrate. Then 2 marinades:

1. Marinade 1: 6 cloves garlic, equal amount ginger, 1tsp kashmiri chilli powder, salt to 1.5% of weight of chicken. Whizzed up into a paste. Add some vegetable oil if too thick, and then rub into the chicken pieces. Leave this for a couple of hours. It's both flavouring and a brine.

2. Marinade 2: 1 bay leaf, 2 cloves, 4 green cardamom pods, 1/4 tsp nutmeg, pinch of salt, 1 tbsp black peppercorns, 2 dried red chillies, 150g natural yoghurt, juice of a lemon. [optional: 1/2 tsp caraway seeds, 1/2tsp mace]. Grind dry spices to a powder, then add the yoghurt and lemon juice and whizz up. Add Marinade 2 to the chicken (don't take off marinade one) and leave it for 4-6 hours (not too much longer as the yoghurt can make the chicken sort of chalky if over marinated).

Preheat the KK to 250C.

Thread the chicken onto the skewers - long flat skewers are best. Rest for five mins to allow excess marinade to drip off. Then place over the fire for five minutes, then turn and cook for another five minutes. Take off the fire for 5 mins to rest and allow temp to cool down a bit, and then baste with butter or oil, and add back to the fire for another 5 mins on either side, or until singed in places. Because of the brine and the yoghurt, it's quite difficult to dry this out, and it is worth taking it a bit higher than you might usually (I normally take chicken breast to 62C or so, but with this one I am ok at 68C, as the char adds great flavour). Rest for five mins, then serve with wedges of lemon...

Of course, you can always do this on the grates if the skewer route does not appeal. Oil them well, though.

Day 2 of KK cooking - thought we'd try some tandoori to take advantage of all the space available in the KK relative to other cookers. Turned out very nicely - the skewers sat nicely above the fire, all contained, temperature rock solid at 250C. Served with naan, kachumber, tandoori mushrooms and mint raita.

Really interesting to see a no-thermometer challenge. Maybe sometimes we do rely too much on our tools & toys and not enough on our own expertise. Looking forward to seeing more pictures and hearing how it went...

@Aussie Ora - no worries! not much to do with me, tbh - it's the kindness and expertise of our fellow forum members that make it useful!

I'd definitely advocate the cover, though. It's a typical summer here in London (rain, rain, grey, thanks) and the cover is brilliant - water just slides off it. The one accessory I'm not so sure of is the roti basket - I much prefer a 'naked' spit rather than all the metal around the bird. Also, the unscrewing issue is... perplexing, but Dennis already has a new design to take care of that. I understand he's also working on the naked spit model, so it might be worth chatting the whole thing through with him.

Well, I thought since we're going to be moving through the temps, we could have some fun with it. So I picked up a couple of racks of babybacks (start them for the 2 hrs at 225 and then finish them at 350). After those are done, probably time for a chicken between the 350-400 stages. Finally a loaf or two of bread for the 500-550 stage. That doesn't sound too ambitious, right? right?

Thanks guys. Setting up for burn in on Saturday, as my wife is out all day and it's just me and my four year old, who is obsessed with barbecue.

The Egg is going to my parents - in their mid-70s, they are beginning to get interested in this whole thing, so I thought the Egg would suit them. I must say moving the Egg was much easier than lifting the KK.

I'm sure I'll write a lot more about my first impressions of the KK over the next while, once I have played with it a bit. But the overwhelming impression is just how incredibly well built it is, and how much thought has gone into it. It's one of those cases where one starts to think 'wouldn't it be nice if...' and you look at the KK and, voila, Dennis had already thought of that and implemented it. And whoever it was who told be that these were even better in person that in the photos... I can only say you were understating the case massively. A genuine thing of beauty.

Today was delivery day! All very exciting, and now my new KK (as yet unnamed, although my wife has taken to referring to it as the 'disco grill') is sitting out back, where the Egg used to be. I have to say that uncrating and moving the KK on my own was really quite challenging, but ended up being a lot of fun. Just one picture, with more to come at a future point.

Congrats Dennis!

Kenji over at Serious Eats did a CP recipe the other day which is pretty stellar. I did it as one of the final sayonara cooks on my egg, and it is going to be one of the first things I do on my new KK (which arrives WEDNESDAY. So excited.)

http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2016/05/cochinita-pibil-yucatan-barbecue-mexican-smoked-pork-recipe.html

one very good technique with squid is to open them out after you have cleaned / deskinned them, and then very lightly crosshatch the inside face at half-centimetre intervals. This allows the squid to curl beautifully on the grill, also keeping them tender and avoiding any buildup of 'fishy' juice on the inside. It also allows any marinade or seasoning to cling better to the squid. The other thing I like doing with squid is dressing them aggressively with lime / chilli / cilantro and treating it like a salad...

Great looking cook!

yes, agree entirely. that's why you'd have to set the notional experimental temps within 'accepted' bbq ranges for it to be meaningful. And, as we always say, we're cooking to doneness, not to time - and the variances in the meat itself will cause significant noise in the data with such a limited sample size. 

so the art would be to establish the correct baseline temperature, no? And that could only really be done as a practical, with three identical pieces of meat cooked at, say, 225, 250, 275, and pulled at optimum doneness (which is not necessarily a constant, but rather subjective).  This gives you your 'time to doneness' and allows you to establish your baseline temp, which in turn allows you to extrapolate timings to other temps.

What a beautiful spread for first time out! Congrats.

Top quality dessert.

Mac, did you grill the lobster? Looks a beauty.

275 for both for me. I used to use 225, but find on a Kamado you don't need to stay that low. 275 to the colour I like, then wrap to punch through the stall if I feel like it, then naked* to reset any bark loss.

* the meat, obviously.

I hear you. Maybe I'm just looking for a level of expertise than I'm not seeing. You're absolutely right, though - an hour spent w Aaron Franklin's Youtube channel gave me much more to work with than the entire first season of Project Smoke. Oh well. I've just lit the BBQ for tonight's grilled chicken, so I'm in a pretty relaxed mood here. Roll on 9th June, when the KK hits these shores...

@CeramicChef there's definitely some great food posted here - and as I have said before, that was one of my main reasons for actually buying a KK. If I might be permitted a small disagreement, though, I have seen APL cook many times in a live kitchen, and the man has MOVES. Seriously. There is no comparison between him and SR.

It's funny, but I don't get the SR love at all. Given the geography differences, I obviously came to him pretty late (I think the first time I saw him was when I streamed one of the original Project Smoke episodes early this year), so I'm not sure if there is a familiarity factor I am missing, but he just doesn't seem like a very good cook for someone who is supposed to be professionally trained. I've spent my fair share of time in professional kitchens, and compared with anybody there, his technique looks really amateur, and even clumsy occasionally. Obviously the man can grill, but the grace notes you'd expect from a pro don't seem to be there. OK, I'll turn off the snobbery now, and I'm really pleased that KK is getting more exposure from his show, but... I won't be watching it.

On a far more cheerful note, my KK is less than three weeks away now...

Fine flours like cornflour are really difficult to brown without the help of either fat to help, or a very high temperature. When dry, they just... sit there. It's the same with using 00 for a pizza base - you have to go up to something like 650-700 dome in my experience to brown the cornicione rather than just the bottom, which benefits from the stone, obviously. Agree with @dstr8 - the Judy Rodgers bird is the way to go.

@dstr8 thanks! the steel top is an extra - I thought it would be easier cleanup than the bare wood, and I loved the look of it.