tekobo

Tee hee. I logged on to tell @RokDok just that. It is a tip that I learned from you Tony and it is great for monitoring without having to get up close and personal with your KK on a wet or cold day while you are waiting for it to heat up. Congratulations Dok! I am so happy that you and Mrs RD are happy. It is a mad and all consuming obsession but I am sure that you know that and are up for the journey.

Hi Tony, it is a riff on a bengal gram and gourd curry. Vegetarian and very tasty. It was a labour of love, prepared over two days starting with soaking and cooking the little brown chickpeas that form the basis of the dish. It is an annual tradition to use up the big winter squashes that I grow at the allotment. I normally cook it with a friend and found it much harder work on my own this year. The Husband joined in and made it a little easier but I did miss my friend. She will be picking up her portion in a day or so.

Wow! That's awesome. I am really looking forward to seeing how you get on. I have found it to be such an interesting exploration of how time changes the nature of meat and fish.

@tony bis this stuff the same do you think? If so, I shall have a good laugh with my best friend. She is Welsh and doesn't particularly like chillis but two weeks ago she sent me this photo and said, "Have you tried this stuff? Gosh its good." I thought a) it can't be better than the chilli oil with dried shrimp that I make from an A.Wong recipe and b) what do you know about chillis anyway? If it turns out that she was ahead of me on this one she will die laughing. Good thing is, she didn't die of COVID when she caught it and in fact just got better self-isolating at home. The side effect is that her temporary (?) loss of taste means that she is now up for eating more chilli!

I will respond as someone who recently received her 32. I have not cooked a pig on it yet but I went into a flat spin when I did this: Theoretically, this meant that I could only bake two loaves of bread on my new 32" KK! Should I have bought the 42? Aaaaargh! And then I realised that I was trying to use old tech to solve new problem. Super simple: using the single pizza stone and riser from my 23 KK I was easily able to fit three loaves into HALF of my 32 KK. So, if I buy the pizza stone for the 32 I should be able to fit at least six loaves on and, similarly, a good number of pizzas. Phew. In practice, the configuration below suits my needs because I use the pan on the right to generate steam by dropping ice onto it, as pioneered by @Syzygies on other threads. Entertaining for the masses should be a cinch with the 32. After baking bread and pizza last night I let the 32 cool down a little and then put this 17"/43cm pot in to cook overnight. Today's advice? Go for two 32's. V versatile.

This is a great view. All your fun stuff within easy reach. I like the way the KK sits right in, just like you always planned for it to be there. Congratulations! @BOC, don't sweat the ramp. If you end up with a double pallet I would abandon the ramp that comes with the KK and use a longer piece of ply, supported by planks or bricks along the slope, to create a longer gradient to roll it down. Says she who got other people to do that while she played with her new KKs as they rolled off the nice ramp that they built... Back to Mr and Mrs RD 🍻

Have fun!!!

0709 here in Southsea. I think RokDok was optimistic with his 0708 sunrise. Internet tells me we will get sunrise at 0738 here and that RokDok will see it in Dorset at 0743. That said, I bet you he is out there in the dark now.

Aussie made should make it easier and cheaper to maintain Basher. Looks good to me. If you did decide you were set on the German DryAger, it might be worth seeing if you can import direct. Suspect there won't be much in it and they may not want to do that in competition with their local distributor in any case.

Veeeery nice Jon. Much more sophisticated than Mac's!

One more sleep!!!

KK arrival day in December was super exciting. After all the excitement of uncrating was over, The Husband spent the next day breaking down the crates and saving the wood for different uses. This is where we have got to so far. The water collecting tank that we had rigged up on the allotment leaked and, over the years had destroyed a section of the shed wall. The Husband used the wood from the KK crates to fix up the side. He also offered one of the crates as a potential table for use on the allotment. I have found a better use for it. What is better than a free packing case as a table between two flashy new KKs?

I think you must! A new kitchen/pantry design is always great fun. I would go for a dry ager over a wine fridge any day. Looking forward to seeing what you end up with. The fun thing is that dry aging does become routine but never boring. You have this to look forward to. This is one of three fore ribs of beef on the bone that arrived two weeks ago After two weeks in the dry ager, the one that I kept looked like this. Anticipation.

Ha! You forgot the First Rule of Chile Club: Respect the heat, do NOT treat it like a rub. Good luck with that. Who is going to take you up on this offer when even you @tony b, couldn't take the heat?

Excellent. Do post! Looking forward to seeing how you get on. @Basher Most places I have been, restauranteurs or butchers use a cool room rather than a ready made fridge. One farmer friend did buy the commercial humidity controlled fridges for his charcuterie while another added in an extra ventilation unit into his cold room when he started to hang his whole carcasses for over 50 days. Happy to find out more from them if you decide this is the route for you.

Hey @tony b. Nothing makes me happier than sharing food experiences. When you said you had enjoyed the first lot of pepper soup mix that I sent you, I had to make sure you had enough supplies to keep you going. The only problem was that my supplies, brought to me by my father in Nigeria, were running low. I had never needed to go to a local African store before because my parents always supplied me with what I needed. Mr Google told me that I had at least three stores within five minutes' drive of my house. I called them up and they all had pepper soup mix. I made it to "Mama Lit" and found pepper soup and more. I have learned a lot and have been back since. She has plantain chips (delicious with or without chilli), palm wine (turns out you need that for making a favourite childhood roadside snack of mine, puff puff) and things I had never heard of - ogiri and iru. When I told my mother I had bought some melon seed for making Ijebu egusi she said I needed to find a fermented product called ogiri. Here I am in England, making Japanese inspired groundnut miso using a book written by some guy in the South and I never knew we had a culture of fermented foods in my own country. A whole new world of food has opened up and I am having fun. So, to your care package Tony: Northern Nigerian chilli mix - I have no idea what makes up this mix but it is good and hot and I like it. Makes me sneeze so I suspect it has a reasonable amount of black pepper in it. I use it for everything. Red pepper - go to heat amper for stews Pepper soup mix - ready mix for adding to stock and meat/chicken/prawns to make a tasty, super hot soup as you know. Our favourites are made with goat or chicken gizzards but you can use any mix of meats that you like. Ground hot pepper - you can never have enough Mystery packs are things I had never bought myself either. They are the makings of the pepper soup mix if you want to make it yourself. The lady in the shop gave me no idea what proportions to mix them in, just that that is what she uses. Noone measures stuff so I wasn't going to get any more help than that. I photographed here boxes so I would remember the names of each. The five ingredients you need are: 1. Wedeaba (calabash nutmeg) 2. Efom wisa (alligator pepper) 3. Hwenteaa 4. Esuru wisa (grains of paradise) 5. Cloves The first three are left to right in your picture. I didn't get you 4 and 5 because she said 4 were black peppercorns and I thought you could get both easily where you are. Over to you. I await the outcomes of your research and experimentation so that I can try this out myself once you have perfected the recipe. The jollof mix was new to me. I make jollof rice from scratch and there are recipes online. I usually make a stew using stock, water, bones, tomatoes and chillis to build a flavourful base for making the stew. That mix looks like a short cut. I bought some for me too. Will report back when I have tried it. Have fun!

I thought you were pushing it, getting your wife a konro for her Christmas present. You appear to have gotten away with that one but I am pretty sure she will notice someone building an observatory in your back garden. Is it your new home location that has brought all of this on or were you already into space photography before you moved? The whole idea of a time machine reminds me of how we represent the deep past in broken English in Nigeria: before-before. What could be older than before-before?

Really beautiful @Pequod. Thank you for sharing. That is, literally, a whole other world. And rabbithole.

Ha. I thought you had a cool room? You could work on getting the conditions right in there. Air circulation is key. So true. I wonder if any of the commercial offerings allow for that split. For avoidance of doubt, I am NOT buying a second one but I can vouch for the fact that making charcuterie is really satisfying. Just need to time getting the dry ager clear for charcuterie for a number of weeks at a time and make a decent sized batch when you do.

Phew! Mrs RD's response is typical. Just think yourself lucky that she said that AFTER it was a fait accompli. It is the right size to get. Very versatile. Now try to get some dreamless sleep in prep for the excitement next week.

What did you think of your KK when you saw it? Keen to get your first impressions @RokDok. Looking at the photo of your KK on the truck I got a sinking feeling. I might be partially responsible for your plight. When my KKs were being delivered I asked that the handler should not "double pallet" them i.e. not put a further pallet under the one that arrives with the KK from Indonesia. This was so that the integral ramp would work correctly. In practice they did double pallet it and we had to use our own ramp system instead to get the right slope to unmount the KK. I see that your KK was not double palleted. You are using the same forwarding company and, after my feedback, Dave will likely have told the delivery folk not to insert a second pallet underneath the KK. I think that if they had inserted the second pallet underneath it would have been a more standard UK pallet and their standard pallet truck would have worked. I explain all of this not as an act of self flagellation but so that others do not end up with the same issue. Let them put a second pallet under your KK and focus on getting it off using a ramp of your own construction. Here is to Monday!

I don't know what your other children will say about this.

A bit like cheese: late night forum reading and lack of your own KK leads to weird dreams. Soo looking forward to your KK arriving. I do hope you love it. I'll have it if you don't!!!

I agree, I wouldn't spend that much, particularly with all the relatively cheap commercial versions that I saw when I searched a couple of days ago. Worth having a look at them if you have the space. They may have additional features, particularly around food safety, that may be worth having.

!!!! you just sneaked that in, all casual like @Troble!!!! Tell us more. Now. Please.