tekobo

This is really funny. I have not used a Maggi cube in years. We got told at some point that they were full of MSG and so abandoned them. You may be on to something though. I have not managed to get my stews to taste like back home since I stopped using back home spices. I hope you find the missing taste. I will share what I know when my Mum arrives with the ingredients and I try making some myself.

Hurrah! The Husband and I, having often spent hours trailing round a new city trying to find some special item and then finally finding it just a few minutes from where we started, have a theory. It is: "Everything you could ever want is usually within 5 miles of where you are." You just have to look. Not always true of course but it works very well as a good starting assumption.

I had already accused @Aussie Ora of making up weird combinations elsewhere and didn't want to be rude and comment on his use of wing sauce on pig but hey, we must bow to the magic of Aussie O.

Belated Happy Bastille Day @Pequod. Your cook looks really good. Question for you. Your daughter loved the Milk Street version. Did she love these more "authentic" versions or does she prefer the modified recipe from Milk Street? I plan to try it myself sometime.

Tee hee I love the idea of Nigerian suya crossing the ocean from the USA to Oz. I would like to say that you are not allowed to try one of your mad combos, like pineapple rub over suya. But.... I know that you will come up with something that tastes fab that I'd never have thought of so experiment away....

@RobCordeau, I know that sinking feeling when you forget to trust the voice inside your head and then find out it was right all along. The good news is that there is always another brisket and the hope that the next one will be the best ever. (As @_Ed_ is going to find when he gets a taste of mine.) I don't use a controller and cook brisket very low. I start with a half turn of the top vent to get the fire going but settle at less than an 1/8th of a turn of the top vent and one of the smaller holes on the LH vent giving me about 115C. Works well and doesn't burn through very much lump at all. Good luck with your next try!

I am so glad you are not too far away from me @_Ed_. Once I have got my brisket cooking down pat I think I can get one in a cooler and on the train to stalk you in London to prove how good UK brisket can be. I am currently leaning towards Dexter beef being the best for this and that has just the best fat ever. More experimenting to do first.

Oooh. I was not expecting a return parcel. That will be fun. I don't want a replica though. Every suya spot has it's own secret rub. Need to be able to detect a @tony b signature.

This made me laugh. You are demonstrating just how obsessive us KK folk can be when it comes to getting the result we are looking for. I look forward to the results of your experiments. My mother is due here with recipe and ingredients next month. I suspect it will be for yet another variant on the same theme. All good fun.

Wow!

This week night cook turned out so well I thought I would share the pictures with you. I found a recipe for tea smoking rainbow trout. It was all complicated, with rice, jasmine tea leave, sugar, star anise etc all getting heated up in a wok. You then had to find a way to seal it all up and smoke for 60 minutes. Easy with a KK. Set up the basket splitter in the 23", put a pan with the smoking ingredients on the direct side and the fish on the indirect side. 60 minutes later, the fish was at 55C internal temperature and here is the gorgeous result. The husband lifted the skin and fillets and was impressed at how perfectly cooked it was. And I thoroughly enjoyed the eating. So happy to own a KK.

Woo hoo! Jealous that you are getting fresh corn so soon. Looks super tasty.

Thanks all. I think I am less worried about the brisket than you are. I made a fundamental mistake in changing the target internal temperature and can easily revert to my normal target next time. The real insight for me is in, finally, understanding that the briskets that I buy here are much smaller than the ones that you use in the US. I only buy beef from three sources and they all use particular rare breeds that don't get all that big. So I need less lead time in future so that I am not trying to hold the brisket for up to six hours before people are actually ready to eat it! The fun thing about my meat suppliers is that we are friends now and we have a two way conversation. The funky cow guy got in touch to say he thought 5 weeks aging on the brisket was about right but did I want him to go further? I said no, we would go with where he had got to and see what it tasted like. Unfortunately my mess up with temps means that the only useful feedback I have been able to give him so far is that the dairy cow may be too small for a brisket cook. The good news is that he is an aggregator for a number of local farms and so will tell me if he thinks there is a different breed I should try. And so it goes. Did I tell you I am obsessed with food? I went on a similar journey with my Longhorn beef supplier and he has settled on 75 day aging as his standard "premium" product. No problems with the taste or texture of his brisket and I am surprised that you saw such a marked difference between eight day and four day aging @Syzygies. It may be that that is where some significant change happens in that time window but it is much shorter aging than any beef I buy here.

Really pleased to hear that they are all out now. Fantastic effort by all involved and sad for the family of the rescuer who lost his life.

I got the bargain $249.50 box. Now, I'd better get back to work to earn that money back!

If one has the option, I agree that firing up 2 KK's is definitely the way to go. For the Sunday cook I finished off the brisket in the 23" and started the ribs on their way in the 21". Texan friend arrived early to help with sides and when we needed to blacken some green pepper for the succotash I was able to up the temperature in the KK vacated by the brisket and do the blackening direct on the coals. I then throttled the fire until shortly before I put the cow chops on. All sooo convenient and reduced competition and chaos in the IDK. I must say, her cornbread jalapeno muffins are to die for.

Yet more funky cow in my life. A week ago two briskets (aged 5 weeks) and one rib of beef (aged 9 weeks) arrived. The scene was set for impressing my Texan friend with an awesome brisket cook. Beautiful rib of beef cut into individual cow chops. Don't be put off by the mould. He sent me the end pieces so I could see what the outside of the joint looked like at the end of the aging process. Here is a nice clean "chop" from the middle of the joint. I was a little worried when I came to cook the brisket on Sunday morning. It was only 3.8kg and small compared to the Longhorn brisket (to the right in the photo) that I have cooked in the past. Decided there was no point into separating into tip and flat in this case. Heated my smoke pot up on the stove in the IDK. I have found this works and doesn't require me to light an extra fire outdoors. Carefully trimmed the brisket and did the Franklin salt and pepper treatment. Screwed up the cook by making a change. I normally cook to 88C internal temp. When this little baby looked like it was going to cook far too quickly, I throttled the fire AND decided to go up to the 95C internal recommended for "smoking" brisket. Big mistake. It looked more like a piece of leather at the end than a juicy brisket. I panicked and hauled out a couple of cow chops from the freezer. Cooked them when the guests arrived. Most said they wanted medium but ended up clearing me out of the rare chop because they loved it so much. It turned out to be the star of the show, particularly as one of the couples had lived in France for a while and were happy to be having "cote de boeuf" again. The brisket didn't turn out too bad either. They all liked it but I know the next one will be so much better.

@Pequod, I have some binchotan briquettes that I bought last year. Have not used them yet, waiting for the konro due September at the earliest. Along with the konro I ordered a box of Kamitosa White Binchotan (Maru). I read a number of sites before placing the order and this sounded like good stuff. I also asked the Korin customer service people for more info and this is what they came back with a couple of months ago: "The Kamitosa white binchotan for both items you have listed have the same weight and are both from Japan but the Komaru type have thinner pieces than the Maru. Unfortunately, due to high demand for the kishu binchotan, the manufacturer has reached its capacity and we do not have an ETA for this item at the moment." Keen to hear if you find out anything more/interesting about the different types of Binchotan as there is plenty of time to change my order if I need to. I don't expect to be buying this more than this once and I am looking forward to the experience of trying it out. I also did a quick search on the internet and found a number of sites that talk about quenching the binchotan either using water or in a cast iron pot. I am hoping this will indeed turn out to be an economical choice if I can eke out my supply by re-using the logs a few times. Who am I kidding? Binchotan, economical??

@tony b, I've been meaning to comment on your use of the yakitori grill for suya. Great idea. The KK does the job well with the lower grate in but, when you have a lot of skewers to serve and distance between the KK and the eating location, you can end up with cold meat very quickly. That is where the cut and wrap in newspaper method from back home would come in handy! Looking forward to receiving my konro grill eventually. Getting the meat from grill to mouth should be much quicker. To your other point about putting out your Japanese charcoal: I thought I read somewhere that you can quench binchotan in cold water and re-use it. That is one of the factors that convinced me to add a bag of binchotan to my konro order.

Nice looking pizzas @MacKenzie. You didn't have to be purist about it. We sneaked a bit of lardo onto our seventh pizza once we were satisfied we had assessed all three doughs fairly.

I am glad that you have extended this conversation. I had some "stupid" questions saved up that I now feel able to ask, using your various points as triggers: Given a KK can go up to 700F I wasn't sure why everyone recommended cooking pizza at around the 550F mark when real pizza ovens are run at higher temperatures. Is it because we are using recipes adapted for the "home" oven? What temperature and dough combination do you use for the Neopolitan pizza @Syzygies? Does "hottest oven one can arrange"=highest temperature or best heat saturation? What do you use as a heat deflector and do you do this because the temperature of the pizza stone continues to rise uncontrollably without one? Why do you stabilise the KK temp before putting the pizza stone in @ckreef? Wouldn't it work to have the stone and the KK come up to temperature over the same period? Or might the stone, for some reason, get too hot if left to heat up for the same length of time as the KK? All out of questions, stupid or otherwise. Happy to be directed to other posts if all of this has already been explained elsewhere.

That looks great @tony b. I would love to try your rub recipe when you have finished refining it.

Nowt wrong with Americanization. It drew you lot in didn't it? It will be interesting to see how you find the original and what tweaks you choose to make.

Cool. Will try that too. Your Chicago Southside Thin is still one of my best pizza successes.

Helpful explanation about the role of the diastatic malt, @Pequod. The Pizza Bible Neopolitan recipe does call for 00 flour + the malt so I will try that combo next. The browning effect is interesting but potentially more impactful will be the effect on how the yeast behaves. The Pizza Bible balls rose the least out of the three recipes tried. Not a bad thing necessarily but it will be good to see what they do when I actually follow that part of the recipe. My experience with dough to date has been with bread and, looking at @ckreef's dough tutorial and the YouTube videos I have watched, I see that pizza dough needs a different type of handling. Less heavy handed and more purposeful. Learning that difference will help. I was afraid that the Neopolitan Pizza book by Paolo Masi would be as @Syzygies described the first 100 pages i.e. dry and technical. I am sooo tempted by the pretty pictures and explanations in the latter part of the book. There was a lot of uninformed theory flying about last weekend when I was trying to get critical feedback from The Husband and our friends. It would be good to have the definitive text. At £40 that is only the cost of 3-4 pizzas from our local pizzeria. It is in my Amazon basket. I will meditate on it overnight and will likely then push the "buy" button.