tekobo

Thank you for this detailed description @Troble. I am all set, ready to do a copy cat cook tonight. I have 16 boneless thighs marinading in the fridge. Any tips about packing them onto to rotisserie rod? Do you thread each thigh on whole? My mouth is watering already!

Hey there Paul. Great to hear that someone else uses these cuts for burgers. What proportion of each do you use and how much fat do you cut out? I left most of the fat from the short ribs and brisket in and kept the chuck as lean as possible. It becomes a two person job when you make a burger this way - one to stuff the meat in at the top and the other to catch and lay out the strands on the clingfilm. So....this morning I decided to have a burger for breakfast. I bought slider size brioche buns and blue cheese slices from my local supermarket. I was a bit apprehensive when I sliced a couple of burgers off the roll. They looked more like a pork sausage than anything else. Sorry, no photos, I was too busy being worried/disgusted at that stage. Fried in a pan with no added fat, heated the buns, added fresh shallots on the bottom and melted cheese and hot sauce on top and ate them. Wow. I think it was worth the effort so far. Soft and juicy burger. None of the resistance you might normally get when you come to tug your mouthful of burger away from the rest of the burger but still a good chew in the mouth i.e. not pappy and soft. I now realise that this isn't Heston's perfect burger. It's my burger to play with. I think the brioche slider that I chose is a bit sweet for me and also I want to find out how the burgers taste when cooked over charcoal. I do like the slider size. You can eat a good, thick burger without all the extra stodge/carb from a bigger burger bun. I might also go for more chuck ground with the 8mm plate next time, to get a little more chew. Lots to try but I would definitely recommend these cuts of meat and this method of grinding and assembling your patty.

@basher that is helpful to know. I think that even if I don't choose to go for this particular mix of cuts in future, the idea of laying out the strands and rolling them up like this could be a keeper. The proof will be in the eating!

Hey there @PaulW. I would definitely get the smoke generator and the rotisserie. They will expand your options considerably. I don't have a second basket and this brings me to an important point - storage. You really need somewhere to store all the extra grates and other kit when not in use. If you don't have other arrangements I would consider buying a cabinet from Dennis. I have not seen the need for a spare basket and you will need it less when you get your second KK and can have one in one configuration and the other in another.

So far so good. The interesting thing about the burger recipe is the fact that you need to get the strands of minced meat aligned. That means you don't mince the meat and then mix it up. Instead you lay it out in strands and then roll up in cling film to maintain the orientation of the strands. The idea is that this gives a more open texture to your burger. This is what ours looked like when we laid it out as it came out of the mincer. I ended up following the recipe with 2kg chuck added in to the minced 2kg brisket and 4kg short rib meat. With an 8mm hole grinder plate, you end up with some chuck meat to chew within the matrix of meat and fat from the brisket and the short rib. We then rolled each batch of mince up to get something that looks more like a meatloaf than a burger. All three rolls are sitting the the dry ager to cool before getting sliced into individual patties. The rest of Heston's recipe sees you making your own burger buns, ketchup and cheese slices. That will take the rest of the week! In the meantime I think I will buy some burger buns and will try out my first Heston burgers tomorrow. The chilli recipe has been a bit of a headache. Heston specifies a list of chilli powders that are not available to buy in the UK. I was straining to be faithful to the recipe and even contemplated ordering a load of spices from the US. Then I reminded myself of what someone said recently. Recipes are a source of great waste. You buy a bunch of things to cook a particular recipe and then never use them again. And here I was, looking to buy this very specific list of chilli powders and get them shipped from the US. Err....no. I will go round my local shops to see what they have tomorrow and will raid my cupboards for the rest. All good fun. And all because I decided to give my Heston "perfect" recipe books a try rather than give them away. I hope I don't regret that decision.

Welcome @PaulW. I think the 22TT is gorgeous. Have you decided on the colour and tile? And accessories? Looking forward to seeing it in place. No more May winters for you!

Awww yes! KK food envy. Today I think I'd like to go with Troble's chicken schwarma and Mac's rhubarb gallete. Yummy! Instead I will have to settle for leftovers from last night's cook. This baked ham was originally smoked in the KK many months ago and then frozen. Soaked, then simmered and then glazed with sugar, rum, English mustard and baked in the KK. Turned out nice with boiled potatoes and a very old fashioned but tasty parsley sauce (no pix, in my tummy!).

First things first: Dennis, look away from this post for awhile. No cooked meat and no KK action until I finally get through these hellishly complicated recipes from Heston. His perfect burger is a 1:1:2 mix of chuck, brisket and aged short rib. I have started my journey with 4kg of short rib meat cut off the bone. It had been dry aging for 31 days and needed a good strong knife to get through it. Given the meat next to the bone is often the tastiest, I worked away to scrape the meat out from between and on top of the short rib bones It broke my heart to cut up a brisket but this is what 2kg of chopped brisket looks like Twice through a 3mm grinder plate with the brisket and short rib meat. I know, that looks fatty and not at all appetising. The next stage is to cool the mince. Separately I have 4kg of chuck, cubed and salted, sitting in the fridge for six hours. I doubled the amount of chuck in the recipe because I was worried about the fattiness of the brisket and short rib. All three meats will be put through an 8mm grinder plate later today and there is an interesting technique that I am looking forward to trying. I will be back with pix later. In parallel I am using the rest of the short ribs to make his perfect chilli. The ribs on a long horn cow are massive so I had to quadruple the quantity of brine in his recipe. Beautiful short ribs Sitting in brine in the Kong cooler for the next 12 hours. Off to do something other than cooking for a while...

Really beautiful @Basher. Worth waiting for. Clock will go right on ticking - you now need the time to enjoy every little bit of your new space.

Yes the garden did explode! We loved having a mad, overflowing garden. The only trouble was that you ended up pushing through wet vegetation in your nice work suit and fighting to get to the car. Dan the Man (who also helped uncrate and place our KKs when they arrived) did all the digging with his trusty side kick, Rusty. He laid out the original garden ten years ago and came back to do the re-model. I never intended to go that far back with this post but it does illustrate the point that we let ourselves be limited by two little walls when so much else had happened to make the garden space in the first place. Ha. With four cats prowling, birds know not to visit our garden. We have an area out front that the cats can't get to and have set up a bird feeder and bird bath there since lockdown started. Great bird TV channel for us and our frustrated hunter cats.

Our ten year anniversary of moving into the house will be in a week's time. I have just spent an enjoyable half hour looking at photos that show the evolution of the garden over the years. We built it up, enjoyed its vigour and then tore it down. If the weather brightens up tomorrow I will take pictures of what it all looks like now. We start with the demolition of the 1930s extension, show you what life was like indoors while chaos reigned outside and the beauty of our mad garden before we decided we needed a little more ease.

So you should be! Gorgeous looking picanha.

Your new space looks lovely Tyrus and it sounded like your wife had solved your problem but you go on to say... You still in up, down, up, down questioning mode or staying put on lower level? @tony b, your deck looks purdy. Do you come straight out from your kitchen onto the deck? We have curvy stairs to navigate here.

That's the nice thing about fixing up one's outdoor space @Basher. There is a lot more scope for hanging around. 🤗 Here great progress was made today with tiling. It was a blank wall this morning and is now practically complete. This is where we were at lunchtime. Finishing and grouting tomorrow. As the man said - nothing happens for a long time with tiling and then, it's done. Luckily we know our tiler well and don't worry when he appears to be spending a whole day communing with the space. He says he has to know where he will be putting the last tile before he lays the first tile. His work is all the more beautiful for his attention to detail.

Speaking of blue... The Husband and I were watching a food programme in France. I think it was one of Rick Stein's. We saw some lovely French tiling and decided that would be great for our BBQ area. We asked our tiler what he thought. He is in his seventies and has spent the last fifty years visiting France regularly. He showed us this pretty panel. And then he hauled out his treasure trove of reclaimed tiles. We fell in love with these ones. Everything has been measured up and the wall has been prepared so we are looking forward to a rhapsody in blue, coming to a chimney near us very soon.

Photos to follow soon. Some fun work happening next week if all goes to plan. Renovating old houses is fun. The main house was built in 1850. We would have been having a party in a week or two to celebrate ten years since we moved in. Instead I have spent the afternoon looking at pictures from the renovation. I don't know how we lived through all that mess! It would be good to see some pics of the work on your barn.

Go girl!!

I have become a meat pusher during lockdown. I buy my meat from farms that supply restaurants. They are having a hard time in the current climate and so I have been buying half and whole animals, explaining which bits are which to friends and sharing them out, at cost, to them. It has been such fun. In between teams calls, writing contracts and baking bread I have been passing on recipes and falling about laughing at the size of the osso bucco you get when they are cut from the shin of a huge cow. The side benefit for me is that I can sneak in extra meat to try at home. One farmer normally sells all of his short ribs to restaurant in Knightsbridge. I managed to snag some and now I have a dry ager full of short ribs and other nice things. Much anticipation here.

We bought a four storey solicitor's office ten years ago and had a lot of work done to turn it into a home again. Part of those works involved demolishing a 900 square foot extension, that was built in the 1930s, to reclaim some space for the garden. We had the compartment in the picture above built to encompass the remains of what was an internal fireplace so that it could house our Argentinian BBQ and take fumes up the chimney flue via the hole in the top right hand corner of the picture. When we came to replace the Argentinian BBQ with KKs our choice of KKs was defined by these two walls. We could either fit two 23s or a 23 and a 21 or a 32 and a 16. I went for the 23 and 21 and am very happy with that choice. On reflection I realise that we did not have to be bounded by these two walls. We had lived through a major demolition and rebuild but couldn't imagine our way to thinking about moving these two walls. A lesson for others. Our excuse would have been that we had no idea how much we would love our KKs. That is not an excuse if you read this forum. You WILL love your KK. You WILL likely want more than one and you should let your imagination run wild. Even if you don't buy them all at once assume you will be hooked and plan for that eventuality. We are coming to the end of our ODK remodelling here. Nothing major but it has been fun. More pics soon.

Boy! Lockdown is producing some really good cooking from youse. I've been away (from the forum - not my house obviously!) for a few days and I gave up trying to "like" all the great dishes that have been produced in the time. Inspiring. Here is my copy cat version of @tony b's "pork wings". I was impatient and ate the first when it still needed slicing. The second one I cooked for longer and it made for a nice portion of pulled pork for one with a flavour top up using home made Kansas City rub.

That's a job for a two KK owner!

Welcome @AJR and an extra special welcome to the cobalt blue club. As you have probably gathered, we relive our experience of receiving our KKs by following your journey. Don't forget to update us on the wait, arrival, uncrating and, of course, your first cook!

I was challenged by a Jewish friend as to why I was getting two KKs. I said one for meat and one for milk. They naturally adopted their names - Meat and Milk.

Seriously yummy looking cooks all. And no, I am not buying one of these. A KK with a goat is a higher priority and even that is unlikely to happen any time soon.

The bikes sound like fun! And if you decide on the ground level, ferrying the food up and down will keep you fit too. Just so long as you no longer have to do the funny dance through the rest of your house. And, best of all, you have not ruled out another KK.