tekobo

Hi Paul. Here is my solution:

Most of us have dishwashers for this...

Sounds perfect Tony. You are really showing me the way with some of your riffs on our traditional food.

Congratulations! Beautiful cobalt blue tile. Great combination, your food will taste extra good. I am looking forward to hearing how you find cooking on a KK compared to a BGE. Here's to your first cook.

Wow! That was fast! My box from @Troble, overflowing with goodies, arrived today. I can't wait to try them out. Thank you soooo much.

Se no, @tony b parla Google Translate. La lingua universale.

Awesome @BOC. It's Official - Welcome to the KK Club!

Tee hee @Tyrus. Tell us more! I've run out of space for new cookers and need to live vicariously through others.

I love Thai beef salad. Another nice thing to make is a dipping sauce with chillies, sugar, lime and fish sauce. Delish.

Those tacos and bao buns look super delicious. Just perfect for a morning when I decided to resume my fast until lunchtime regime...

Ooh. Thank you very much! Looking forward to some authentic goodies!

@Basher, @Bruine and @Troble, really lovely looking cooks all. And such beautiful cuts of beef. Yum!

7:30am here and VERY hungry now. Not sure where I am going to find a combo platter of lamb, ribs and chicken though!

Oooh. That looks awesome @Basher. I had not heard of the concept of "wet aging" before but it sounds like you lose less weight and surface area using this method. And it tastes good. Win win win.

Hi Tony. First, apologies for patronising you with respect to the use of dried chillies. The chilli king himself? What was I thinking of?! So, annatto paste is the same as the achiote paste that @Troble recommends for the recipe that started this chain of posts. I have not tried the authentic recipe yet but will do so soon, having scored some of the paste here in the UK. I also went onto eatmybooks and found a number of recipes in my books that use the paste. I think you can search through the public elements of eatmybooks to find recipes that might be in any Mexican books that you may have. Drop me an email if you want me to check this out via my subscription if you can't do the search yourself.

That looks great @tony b. I am liking your African journeys.

Looks great @Troble. Yet another dish to copy from you. So far it's been a 100% hit rate on deliciousness so I have no hestitation in committing the time and chicken to this cause.

Hi @GrillnBrew, when I chose the colours for my KK Dennis had a number of batches of different autumn nebula tiles for me to choose from. I spent hours poring over them and made a careful and deliberate choice for my 16 and my 23. The truth is, now that they are here, I cannot really tell the difference between the two or between any other options that I may have chosen. The colour is gorgeous and fits right in with the rest of the garden. I also think that the benefit of a tile colour like this is that you won't need to match it exactly when you get your second KK. So, in short: go for it!

Hopefully this means that you won't have to put up with crappy knives in holiday homes anymore.

well? Has the snow melted yet? Have you sneaked in a cook yet? Tell all!

Find a salsa recipe and make it. Dried chillies are a great way to explore sauces, particularly in the winter when the fresh stuff is less available.

So, thank you for all of this @Syzygies. I am already partway down this rabbit hole but have a look out on the outside, ready to pull me out if I look like getting stuck down a side burrow. All roads appear to lead to Masienda. My tacos inspiration is coming from this awesome book, Tacos by Alex Stupak: https://read.amazon.co.uk/kp/embed?asin=B00TCI2A3Q&preview=newtab&linkCode=kpe&ref_=cm_sw_r_kb_dp_4NRTZSQKNF2TREX70V7G I don't think I will find another book to top this one for its sheer inventiveness and range. The author recommends Masienda. I reached out to @Braai-Q for Mexican cook book recommendations and he came up with Breddos, the same Tacos book by Alex Stupack as above, Mexico the cookbook and the same Oaxaca book that @Syzygies recommends. Interestingly Breddos also shop with Masienda even though their restaurant is in the UK. So, Masienda is a common thread. I have had a fair bit of correspondence with them, poor things, and have ordered their nixtamatal starter kit (excluding the tortilla press) and white and blue masa harina so that I have something to compare to my fresh masa efforts. They do not have stock of the black beans that I also want and I have decided to wait until the end of March when they are available. Shipping is not cheap and I need to maximise what I get in my package. No new tortilla press. My husband laughed at me when I gave away what was then our "second best" tortilla press last summer. How many UK households have one tortilla press, let alone two? Well, having bought the Netherton Foundry tortilla press over Christmas I now have two again and I am happy with both. Will see what Sy thinks of the Netherton tortilla press when he finally gets his hands on one. I am sure he won't be able to resist. On to grinding the masa. The guy at Masienda wanted to know what I would be grinding the corn with. A perfectly good question given the challenge of doing this well. I took Sy's lead and looked into the Premier stone wet grinders. I looked at the 2 litre version - takes up too much space on the countertop. The tilting version looked attractive but it didn't have good reviews. So, I ended up where I started, with Sy's recommendation of the 1.5 litre version. My dad gave me £100 for my birthday present and that was the trigger to place my order. Waiting for it to arrive. Sometime in April I will report back on whether this was all worth it. In the meantime, I am enjoying upping my flour tortilla game will be dabbling in the corn tortilla space, using "inferior" cheap masa harina with flavourings to test the boundaries of what is good and what is not .

I have played with this. My half main grate seems to only fit on the left hand side of my 32 KK. For bread making I have settled on having the fire under the half main grate with the bread directly above and my steam generator sitting over to the right on the non-fire side. I don't generally do the reverse or forward sear thing on my steaks because I like them blue in any case but if I did I would swap sides i.e. no fire under the half grate on the LHS and I would put the lower grate in to cook over the hot fire on the RHS. Others who have actually done this may have a different view. Keen to hear.

Tee hee. Happy to help. I have had a total of 5 KKs and currently have 3. I cannot wait for the summer. Cooking and eating outdoors with the various means of cooking available to us is going to be such fun. Whether cooking on a Solo stove, an Argentinian barbecue or an over engineered KK, cooking over live fire is unpredictable and brings joy when you get it right.

When the summer comes I will get back to experimenting with cooking tacos on a plancha outdoors. For now I am experimenting indoors. I have eaten a lot of tacos over the last few weeks. I had some left over brisket in the fridge. Burnt ends were an option but instead I tried out this brisket and foie gras taco. Delish. The flour tortillas were made with goose fat. I like the fact that the starting point for a taco meal is a table that looks like this: With the tortillas for the last night I tried what I thought was a bit gimmicky and risky: corn tortillas made with beetroot juice. My hands were bright red after rolling these. So beautiful to look at And really delicious to eat. Rubbish photo but I was too excited to move to a room with better lighting. Fish tacos. The fish was brill, fried in panko breadcrumbs.