tekobo

Well done! I think the 32 is a great choice @Dennis. Details please...what colour? Tiles, of course. When is it due to arrive? If you made a mistake and ordered pebbles 🤭, I am sure that there is time to make the change and cross over to the right side of the tracks.

What he said! Also love the idea of an al pastor pizza. Yum!

Funny you should ask that @Dennis All KKs come with deflectors as standard but no one that I know uses them for anything other than paving stones! @DennisLinkletter says he includes them because BGE users expect them. I have never used a BGE so I cannot say why they are needed in BGEs but I find that there is sufficient distance between the firebox and the main grate in the 23 and 32 KK not to need a deflector for low and slow cooks. A very small area of lit coal is able to keep the KK at a steady low temperature without burning your food. That said, the KK also comes with a robust stainless steel tray that I sometimes sit on the handles of the firebox to catch drips when I am grilling something particularly fatty. It is a very pretty tray and some people use it for serving. I line it with foil to make it easy to clean. P.S. Don't follow my example with KK purchases. I should have bought a 32 first time around and it took me a few years to come to the conclusion that I needed one. An expensive mistake given the cost of importing KKs from Indonesia into the UK. Less of a problem for you if you are based in the US.

Your cooks are looking great @MsTwiggy so you are certainly doing a lot of things right! I wouldn't sweat the charcoal issue, you will find your sweet spot over time. I close my lid straight away after lighting and remember dire warnings of messing up my gasket (or burning my hands) when I first joined the forum and was told not to leave the lid up with a fire going. We don't have access to Dennis' coffee lump or cocochar in the UK. I buy a commercial brand of cocoshell briquettes that has worked very well for me over the years. I smile when you US folk talk about pallet shares. I was once so desperate to try Dennis' fuel that I pestered him until he told me it made no sense unless I wanted to buy a whole container load. That would have been one hell of a "pallet" share! I have learned to be happy with what we have here and may one day find my way to into a US KK owner's house to see how the other half live.

@Dennis I own a 32, 23 and 16 and would say that, if two zone cooking is what you are looking for, the 32 is hands down the best grill to pick. The 23 does do two zone cooking and I sometimes do a reverse sear using the half main grate on the 23 but you don't have that much room if you want to cook a few steaks at one.

Yeah, it is great. Had some ice cream from it just this afternoon. That said, @jeffshoaf bought the ninja creami and was v happy with it. See here for his expose if you have not found it already!

That looks very professional @David Chang. Let's hope it turns out great!

Welcome @MsTwiggy. Great name. Wish I had thought of using MsPiggy when I first came on the forum! I live in UK near the sea and it can be pretty damp here. I buy pallet loads of charcoal and cocoshell briquettes and have kept both for years without any issues. The charcoal is in an open cellar with water dripping in (I catch it in a trug so it never hits the paper bags that the charcoal is in) and the briquettes are in boxes in a wooden shed. I have no issues with lighting either and no worries about damp lump. I have exactly the opposite lighting technique to you. I light the fuel at the top, making a small well in the middle to either receive isopropyl alchohol soaked lump or a wax lighter, and I close the lid. I keep both the top vent and the left bottom vent fully open during the initial lighting process but I never bother with the small holes on the right except when trying to maintain a low and slow temp. I am not sure about keeping the lid open for 15 minutes while lighting. My expectation is that the chimney effect created by having the lid shut is actually more efficient for lighting the lump and for building up the heat in your KK. It is worth experimenting with different methods to see what works best for different situations. Soooo much fun cooking over fire. Welcome again. P.S. Good to have reached out to @Pequod. I miss him!

Oh yeah...welcome to the tile side. You will surely find that they cook better. I did.

Congratulations! Can't wait to see the pics of your new KK. I love a 22TT. Beautiful piece of kit if you have the right spot for it.

I was too hungry. And greedy. Grilled the flat iron steak without turning it into a meatzza. Cooked it more than I would like but it was still moist and husband liked it.

Hey @Syzygies. I am only doing this because my husband dared me to. He asked if anyone would challenge you to tell the difference with an addition of 60 parts per million ascorbic acid. Have you tried with and without and can you genuinely tell the difference? 🫣

And I'll be stealing it back @C6Bill! I found out about meat pizza when I was searching online for how best to cook a matambre. I have tried it twice and both times the meat has not been as tender as I would have liked. Next try is going to be with a nice flat iron steak. Drooling at the thought.

Ha ha. That technology, a continuous glucose monitor, has saved me from a life time dependency on drugs. When I was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes a few years ago, a doctor friend sent me a monitor to try out. He was totally sure that I could not reverse my diabetes with diet and he sent me the tech to prove that my skin prick tests were not giving me the full picture. Instead of discouraging me, the tech helped me understand that the order in which I ate things mattered and it also helped me understand which things most affected my blood sugar. I was able to prove that my natural glucose control improved after 6 months of fasting three days a week and now, four years on, I am still not taking any drugs whereas my husband has had to "graduate" to injecting insulin. The drugs arms race is well documented in the book that helped me - The Diabetes Code - and I am so pleased to have avoided getting onto the treadmill.

Thanks! I am happy to report that, in spite of gorging on two whole slices of the einkorn bread with marmalade, my glucose levels spiked much less than they have done recently and were better than shop bought rye. Hurrah.

By coincidence, last night I made the first loaf of bread that I have baked in ages. I had been meaning to try some einkorn bread to see what impact it would have on my blood sugar. It was roughly 50% whole grain einkorn flour and 50% all purpose einkorn flour (sifted 30% out of the whole grain by weight). Used fresh yeast and it took about 2 hours from start to finish plus 2 hours waiting for it to cool down. It was moist and deeelicious! Blood glucose test inconclusive because I had eaten other carb beforehand but will try a "control" test this lunch time. Flat top because I used a sandwich loaf tin with a lid. Wrapped in the cloth to avoid a crust forming. Much more successful than my attempts at sourdough.

When we see the Kansas City Chiefs playing in freezing weather we forget that they just have a few hours of work in the snow. People like @jonj have to live with it day in day out. Brrrrrrr. Good luck tonight in Baltimore! Cooked mackerel on the 23 for lunch yesterday. Indonesian spicing, including coconut paste. It stuck at first but I left it for 3 minutes before moving and all was good. I then cooked this matambre (piece of veal skirt) low and slow on the KK before smothering it in sauce and cheese and putting it under the grill to make a Meatzza. No carb yumminess!

Great! I knew I could rely on you to have tested this piece of kit to breaking point @Syzygies. I will send you my email address via private message and if you could send me your file for the handle I will see what can be manufactured here in the UK. In the meantime it sounds like it wouldn't do me any harm to start practising with different flours and dough "recipes" to get to one I like before embarking on my bigolaro journey. We return to Italy in March and I hope to try out the bigolaro then. Lots of helpful tips above thank you. Hope to be able to return the favour once I have got going. Apologies to @David Chang for hijacking his dough sheeter thread!

I would try using spacers to experiment @David Chang but my end game is a less fiddly solution. Spacers will take up real estate on what is already a relatively small grate and there is a good chance they will need cleaning depending on how they are positioned relative to the food.

I'm hoping @Syzygies will turn up to tell me how he uses his and what consistency of pasta dough is required to get it to work well. I am keen to make wholewheat pasta as the normal white pasta sends my glucose levels soaring.

Thanks David. This does look interesting as an option. My only question is whether the rotating top rack would hit the open KK lid very early in its rotation. One to pass to the Big D to consider methinks! Dennis did try to stop selling the 16 but there was enough demand to get him keep it. Now we have got to convince him that we like it enough for him to tinker with it some more. I of course love my 32 best but the 16 brings the quality experience of cooking on a KK to very small spaces and that is a massive bonus.

The 16 doesn't really have a separate upper grate. Others turn the lower grate upside down on top of the main grate. It's not a very stable arrangement and it's pretty confined. I was going to bug Dennis about making something but there is not much point if others don't see the point, hence my question. I am back in the UK now and so can't pop out to take a photo to illustrate the problem. I'm not sad about that, given how cold it's been out!

It was freezing cold in Italy this last week but I hadn't used my 16 since November and thought I ought to heat it through. I didn't have high hopes for being able to fit our dinner on it in one go but it cooked all 20 wings or so in a one'er. Brawny Bambino indeed! I have been meaning to ask Dennis if he can make a better/more stable top rack. Do others who own a 16 think that could work or is there just too little space to be worth it?

Look what you made me do @Syzygies! I now have my very own bigolaro. Now this isn't just any old acquisitive KK shopping channel purchase. No. Our place in Italy is in a town called Padova and one of their specialities is ragu di corte with bigoli. I make that ragu very well, to the extent that Italians ask me for my recipe. The bigolaro is named for the pasta, bigoli, that goes with ragu di corte. It is an extruded pasta, slightly thicker than spaghetti. And the best bit of all? The factory is less than an hour's drive away so we made the trip to Marano Vicentino to pick up this beauty. I hope to have time to try it out on our next trip. I just bought two dies but look what there was to choose from. Wasn't I good to be so restrained?

It is a lovely peaceful spot next to Langstone Harbour in Portsmouth, Hampshire @alimac23 @Tyrus it is salt water. In the spring and summer I never water my asparagus and rhubarb and they grow just fine reaching their roots down into the water table. In the winter the water table rises and I don’t need to water my winter crops either! Bonus. My neighbour on the adjacent allotment dug a big trench to drain his plot and it helpfully keeps my plot dry, otherwise I would be wading through squishy mud. One winter there were birds (geese I think) swimming in his ditch! I took this photo on the same day as the one above. There is his ditch on the right and my broad beans growing on the left. White sprouting broccoli just a bit further along. They grow slower in the winter but you get an early spring crop from both.