tekobo

Ha ha. @Paul, didn't you know? Plating is so Americas 2017. We've moved on here.

I am sort of kinda hoping that the rest of the stretch stays unpredictable. Don't want what feels like the inevitable outcome of all of this. We have to stay up until about 3am to see the whole of the Superbowl so a bit of competition is needed to keep us awake. Oh yes, and good food!

Ha ha. I have not been to Franklins and so could not claim to be better but I have to say that standing in my kitchen with my husband eating home cooked brisket was a great experience. I have a rule that I don't eat out in places that don't give me a better experience than I get at home. The KKs might mean that I get to go out less and less.

@Bruce Pearson, none left! I yummed it all up! @MacKenzie, I used to snort at those pics where people would say "it looks dry but it isn't". Now I know they were telling the truth! @5698k, thanks for the referral to the Franklin video. Will try their simple approach to rub next. We were in Austin a few years ago and drove past the queue at Franklins. I remember they were handing out pink umbrellas because it was raining. We thought, "crazy Americans/tourists" and drove on. Thanks to the KK I can now get close to what I missed.

I am the start of my smoking journey. May end up with a cold smoker but am also wondering about going the other way - smoking without a pot. I may find I actually like the overpowering smoke flavours!

The Husband is compiling a list of things that you should be told when you leave home. It includes spending a bit more to buy commercial kitchen equipment - the kit is more efficient and lasts you forever. He added grilling sweetcorn in its skin to the list last year. He now has something new to add: eat slow cooked, smoked brisket, whenever and wherever you can. I have embarked on a journey to explore the American BBQ lexicon. We had pulled pork the other day. It was good, but it confirmed what I already knew. I don't like soft, slightly sweet meat. So I wasn't that excited about my brisket experiment. We don't do much with brisket here in the UK. It gets rolled into a joint and roasted slowly and that's about it. I normally get it to make salt beef and enjoy the novelty of a sandwich made with a thick warm slice of salt beef and pickles and things. My mouth is watering as I think about it. Anyway, this time, I got the butcher to leave the brisket flat so that I could try it on the KK. It came from a small breed of cow called a Dexter so it weighed in at just 2kg (approx 4.5lb). Here is the brisket with its beautiful yellow fat cap on. Trimmed up and ready to go. I followed instructions from the Meathead book for how it should look and House rub recipe from the UK Pitt Cue Co book. Here is the gorgeous baby after it had rested. You will have to take my word for it, I didn't remember to take a photo while it was in the KK. As you will see, there is no sign of the pointy end in this next photo. The Husband and I just stood at the counter and devoured it with our fingers. Awesome. We've checked in the freezer and we have one flat Dexter brisket and two rolled Longhorn briskets. We now know what their future holds!

Thanks for all the advice. I thought of buying chunks but I have eight packs of the small chips so I persevered and arranged the chips so that they would not block the holes. I then sealed the pot and heated it in one KK and then transferred it to the lower temp KK for smoking. That worked. The chips were burned and the meat came out nice. Don't think I will go to the trouble of lighting two KKs in the future unless I need to. Will try heating up with a torch next time.

I think they knew that already! Yeah, similar here, limited range of potatoes available to buy. I have to grow the different varieties of that I like. I have grown Yukon Gold before and they are different to the Mayan, latter cooks quicker and is generally smaller. You've reminded me that I liked the Yukon Gold for baking. Must try a baked potato in the KK next. Going to have to ramp up my exercise regime too...

I've not seen steak tips before. More surface area for crunchy goodness. Looks yummy!

Ha. Of course, I meant Jaguars-Steelers. What a weekend. @Tyrus, I have followed Philly since Randall Cunningham was QB and thought this was our year with Wentz doing so well. The team is holding up, you never know, we might just make it to the big game. Whoever wins, I'm loving the competitiveness of most of the games this post season. I wonder what a plot of where we all live would say about the distribution of "mad" in each of our countries? Yup, this post is in that sous vide section. I hadn't used my water bath in ages. The option to combine it with KK cooking should bring it back into use. I'd like to pretend that I know but the convention here is to use goose fat and so I've never seen or tried duck fat for potatoes. I can't imagine there is a huge difference. What makes the real difference is the type of potatoes that you use. The ones in the picture were called Apache (blotchy pink and yellow skin) and I have also found Mayan Gold (golden yellow) to be very good. We call them South American varieties here so, you never know, you might be able to get hold of them.

Yeah, me too @Bruce Pearson, I thought of titling the post, "ad for flat basket". I plan to use to for lots else. Red mullet is really delicious. I live near the sea and clear out our local fish market whenever they have some in.

Lots to respond to. Will do so tomorrow. In the meantime, am watching recording of the Titans-Steelers game. "Any given Sunday". I love it when the pundits, and I, get it wrong. Let's see if the Titans hold on!

I have not rigged up my rotisserie yet but have been dying to use the flat rotisserie basket that I bought from @Keith OctoForks. The basket depth is adjustable and so could imagine using it to hold and flip fiddly chipolata sausages and small, delicate fish like these red mullet. Here they are, ready to go and in the basket. At the end of the cooking period I lowered them down directly above the coals to get a bit of blistering on the skin. These peppers got a little bit closer earlier - they were actually cooked on the coals for ten minutes to get the skin black and ready to peal off. Delicious Sunday lunch! Did I say I was loving my KKs?

When you all were giving me advice about my KK purchase, a few of you said you mainly use your ODK and not your IDK and so needed more than one KK to deliver a total meal. I'd read your posts out to The Husband and we'd tut about the mad Americans. I now know you are not all Americans but you are certainly mad and I seem to have joined your number. Here I am, in an English winter, cooking most of my meals outdoors! On to the business at hand. When I was googling to find out about the relative collagen content of different types of meat a couple of weeks ago I came across this recipe for 48 hour cooked beef https://www.washingtonpost.com/recipes/48-hour-beef-ribs/11890/?utm_term=.28849b63b32b. I was willing to devote my oven to this experiment for two days but wondered if I ought to try it out in the KK. And then I remembered that this sort of cooking is what the water bath does best and so I googled further and found this sous vide recipe: http://www.instructables.com/id/Beef-Ribs-Cooked-En-Sous-Vide-135-F-for-48-Hours/. It was easy to do - file the short ribs in your water bath and forget for two days. I didn't have the opportunity to eat them straight away so I kept them in the fridge, still vac packed, for a few days. I thought it would be fun to cook a "typical" English roast dinner in the KK and so started with some veg in a Chinese clay pot and potatoes rolled in goose fat. Here they are part way through cooking. While they were cooking, I warmed up the vac pack with the ribs in warm water. Here they are in their "boil in the bag" format. I cranked up the KK to about 350 degrees C to brown the ribs quickly - approx 3 mins in total. They came out nice The cabbage with red onion was good too A very brown but very satisfying meal. The sauce was made with home made veal stock and the juices from the sous vide bag - very rich. And just perfect for watching the Philadelphia Eagles, against all the pundits' predictions, beat the Atlanta Falcons. Hurrah!

Really? That's not what I've heard. Only teasing. I don't actually drink beer. Just use it for cooking. Beef cooked with Guinness and mushrooms is another great recipe. I do like to drink what you guys call hard cider though. Oh yes, I also like champagne but I have to ration that!

Tee hee. it is actually a mash up of a US recipe for buffalo wings and a Vietnamese recipe for grilled wings. But don't use any of your weak beers! A good brown ale in the brine gives the chicken a really nice flavour and, if you weren't greedy, you could eat them plain. Hard to forgo the sticky sauce though. Nice one @MacKenzie

Yum. I think it is chicken for dinner tonight, again! I think I see the nice honey, chilli and oyster sauce glaze on the last picture. @MacKenzie did you put that on after you took the chicken off the KK? I add it on in the last couple of minutes of grilling - to get an extra, slightly burnt crunch. Yum, might have to bring chicken forward to lunch

I'll try it out. And this time I will hang around to watch for the smoke!

My target temp was 105C which Google tells me is 221F. I was above this for most of the time but not far off. Sounds like you need a little more to get and keep the smoke going. Options are to get chunks to avoid blockages, put in some sort of a mesh to avoid blockages and increase the heat. I haven't seen anything that says I can't stick a couple of pieces of char IN the smoke pot. That could solve my blockage and heat problem. Given I'd never cooked low and slow in a BBQ before I am pleased with this first go and look forward to more pot smoking.

Hmmm. I did wonder about the chips blocking the holes. And whether they got hot enough, given I didn't pre-heat the pot. I have a few sample sized bags of these small chips and so will need to find a way to make them work. Will try pre-heating next time but not sure how to avoid blockage. Tasted good though, just a little smoky and tender without being mushy.

Hi Robert. I've just been on cleaning duty and, happily, the top of the smoke pot cleaned up nicely. Do you use a drip pan, even when you are cooking a steak? Or just when smoking or doing other cooks that just need indirect heat? I did a thick fore rib steak with the top grate sitting on the fire basket and I found that cooked well but there was some smoke from the dripping fat. The Husband warned me that the holes would be bigger than originally planned. The larger drill bits were on offer at our local DIY store. I knocked the flour ring into the pan when I finished so there is only a pile of mush in our bin - not a pretty picture. About half the chips were black and the rest were dark brown. What would you expect to see?

This newbie tried out the smoke pot for the first time yesterday. I hadn't been planning to post anything because so much has been said on the subject to date but I feel compelled to do so. First, because it may be worth summarising all the stuff that you guys have learned and second, because the results were so good! Here goes. This is what I learned: 1. Buy a beat up, second hand pot from eBay. You don't feel anywhere near as bad when you drill through it. 2. If at first you find you can't drill through your cast iron pot, get someone with a drill press to do it for you. 3. Drill max three holes to focus the smoke output. 4. Choose how you seal the top. I used a dough ring. Won't win any baking competitions, but it works and knocks off easily at the end. 5. Put the pot in directly over your hot coals. If you can, pre-heat the pot. Things I still have to learn: a. Look out for the blue smoke - I went indoors and didn't see if this was produced. b. Find out if I should have used a drip pan above the smoke pot. c. Find out what size smoking lump to use. I used chips and some may have blocked the holes. Now for some pics. Here is the underside of the pot, with the initial hole The Husband tried to drill in the middle. He said that is as far as he got, with a new bit, after 3 minutes. He got our carpenter friend to use his drill press yesterday and it apparently took seconds to drill the other holes. Carpenter friend happy because he has been promised the left over hardwood from breaking down the KK delivery crates. He is delighted to have some undefined, foreign wood to play with. ( Note for non US folk: a Le Creuset #18 is the equivalent of a US 2qt pot) The small smoking chips that I used. The outcome after over 5 hours. It was a 1.8kg piece of pig. Shoulder I think, but I'd lost the label. A delight to smell and behold. And eat. The MEATER readings of the cook. The big dip in the middle was when I was fiddling with the two racks of ribs I included with the shoulder. Other than that, I still marvel at how easy it has been to set and control the temps. I noticed that someone, Ceramic Chef I think, uses the small vent holes in the second lower damper to manage/set the temp. I did the same, keeping the main lower damper shut, and found it very easy to reach and hold the temperature. (Temps in Centigrade) I took the ribs out after 4 hours and they made a lovely snack while we were waiting for the pulled pork. A fat 2018 awaits I think. And my poor dirty smoke pot. Should clean up OK but wonder if I should have used a drip pan.

The MEATER customer service seems to be good so far. They swapped out the defective unit within a couple of weeks. It arrived yesterday and I used it on a cook last night. Having had all the connection problems previously, it seemed like a miracle when the unit popped up on Bluetooth with no problems once I had charged it! I think I will set up a spare iPad with the app so that I don't have to leave my phone directly in range.

Guessing you think "tara" might be a better name for my girl KK. Context is all, folks here would think I was saying a cheerful goodbye to my KK. Not happening, they are here to stay!

Of course. And because I spend a fair bit of my time in the north of England, I will say "tara" back.