tekobo

When you said you had bought a kamado bbq but it was not a KK I was curious as to why and what you thought about it. Thank you @Tyrus, for taking the time to explain. I know that white hot heat of passion for a new toy and reaching to find that extra thing that will make your set up just perfect. I will be interested to see what you think in 6 months to a year. I for one have been very happy with my pizza oven and KK purchases but I still have not been able to really get into my Argentinian aka Santa Maria grill. And I don't use my konro nearly enough. It will be interesting to see how you rank your toys after a while of using them all in rotation. Also keen to see the Italian job. Spoils from the you and the GOAT beating me and my Eagles. We shall fly again. In the meantime we look forward to seeing the Italian table cloth take pride of place in the pavilion!

That's really beautiful @Tucker

Waiting to hear more....

Thanks for the sous vide suggestion @Syzygies. I have three reasons against at the moment 1) my steaks are already frozen, 2) I don't necessarily want the change in texture that comes with sous vide cooking and 3) it is an extra process and time between me and eating my steak! That said, I am having to wait for my husband to go away for work next week before I try this out. He is less keen on blue steak and I want to enjoy the pure delight of pleasing myself with this cook.

That is beautiful and sturdy. Very well done, young man!

Did you get the basket splitter and half grate for your 32BB? Splitting the basket so that there is a cool zone under the half grate is one way to achieve indirect cooking. Or simply lighting your fire at the far end of the KK, away from the half grate is another. I never use the ceramic heat deflectors and am not sure what you mean by the "stainless drip pan". A stainless steel pan came with my KK as standard. I sometimes use that to catch drips. I also have a double bottomed pan for the 32 and the 23 and I use the pan from the 23 in the 32 when I want to cook something underneath the main grate, with the added benefit of tasty drippings from the food above.

Hi @Mcdddy. I almost always go with a full basket. I re-jig the coals before my next cook, usually moving the partly burned charcoal to the middle and top and surrounding with fresh charcoal. My lighting method varies and the only thing that remains constant is that I only light one location if I want to maintain low temperatures and 2 or 3 locations if I want a high temp cook.

Welcome back @Buzilo. That was a teaser video. I know that your 21 was a metallic bronze but I can't remember the colour of your 42. Which KK was that in cobalt blue pebble in the video?

Awww. That is making me sooo hungry. Going to put steak on the order for supper very very soon....

Yum @Troble. Your pork tenderloin looks perfectly moist. Here we are having a surfeit of asparagus. I planted 30 crowns five years ago and it means we have a steady stream of asparagus for about 8 weeks. Yummy but I am running out of recipes to try! A simple pan fry like yours is looking very attractive for yesterday's crop.

@Poochie, all of the above are good pieces (ha!) of advice. I found the blender the easiest way to process it all. I was a little worried that the blender might be permanently stained by the mix but it washed off no problem at all. @Troble this continues to be a winner with anyone who eats it. Here's the picture before I sliced it up to crisp up. The pineapple had cooked well and we sliced that up and included in the tacos as we ate. Yummmy. The other spike had six chicken thighs on it (just in case the new girlfriend didn't like pork). I marinaded that in the roadside chicken mix posted elsewhere on the forum. That was a winner too. Colourful sides. The crispy chicken skin was also a hit. The new girlfriend turned out to be a real foodie and told me not to bother with re-frying the beans as a Mexican friend's mother had just served them boiled and they were great. So I did as she said and she was right. I just seasoned with black salt and some Japanese pepper. Missing from the picture is the obligatory jug of green crack sauce from @Troble Peruvian pollo recipe. We finished with pink gooseberry clafoutis. I took my eye off the ball and they got a bit burned but the up side was that meant that the outer part of each "muffin" acted as a cup for the gooey contents. A good time was had by all. And Oli showed his love for his new girlfriend by sharing the last piece of crunchy chicken skin with her. References:

The chops were indeed tasty. I thought that two days marinading with papaya might turn them to mush but they still had good bite. @tony b, that pre-freezing trick is interesting. I am wondering whether to try it for when I want a truly black and blue steak so that the interior stays blue while the outside goes nice and crunchy.

Hey @jeffshoaf, I was relying on you to get folk to buy your ice-cream machine. I see it as the gateway drug for the Pacojet. I have only managed to get one KK'er, that I know of, to get a Pacojet so far. The KK shopping channel competition is on! (P.S. You did hook me on the Ninja. I didn't get the grill combi in the end, just the air fryer).

I'm glad I came back to find this thread. I had some slightly tough hogget chops and remembered the Indians' use of papaya and other ingredients to tenderise meat. It worked out really well and, not wanting to waste my papaya, I used it on a chicken drumsticks and hogget chops. Here are the chicken drumsticks on my 16KK. I used the recipe for chicken tikka from the Ranjit Rai book recommended by @Syzygies above. They have a neat trick, which is to freeze your chicken for 15 minutes before putting it on the grill. This is to stop the potentially sloppy cream and yogurt marinade from falling off before it gets a chance to cook. It worked a treat and the chicken was very tasty. I cooked the lamb chops a couple of days later and they were much more awkward to skewer. This is where the trompo king might come in handy. I don't have one so I threaded my chops onto this prongy piece of kit that I bought from a tandoor seller. At first it all looked very precarious but as the meat cooked and firmed up it all worked out just fine.

Getting set here. I made up a new batch of marinade yesterday. I previously tried to "whisk" the achiote and made a huge mess of myself and the kitchen. This time I chopped it up and stuck it in the blender with the rest of the sauce. The blender had to work hard to process it all but it did a good job and the marinaded meat is now waiting in the fridge. Hope to get it on in about an hour and a half. When I told our friends that I would be making al pastor they were very pleased. They said their son's girlfriend would be impressed with his "connections". Not sure how cooking al pastor gets you up the social ladder but I'm not complaining!

Hi Randy. By the time I received my KK I had read the manual five times over. I took the note to "light a grapefruit volume of charcoal" to mean literally that. I only "loaded" my KK with that grapefruit volume of charcoal and then wondered why my first cook, chicken wings, didn't go well due to a distinct lack of heat! I think that beats forgetting to click the second latch on your KK so don't feel so bad. On your first question, my answer would be: it depends. I don't bother to wait for heat soaking on hot and fast cooks. I get the fire going, and, usually after half an hour max I am ready to grill a steak. Heat soaking for a roast chicken might take an hour and I judge that by the fact that the temperature on the dome thermometer rises rapidly when I first start the fire, drops as the initial flame subsides and rises again until it reaches my target temperature. Heat soaking for a pizza, to make sure that the dome reflects as much heat as possible, usually takes at least 1.5 hours. I'm not sure about the answer to your second question. I expect my KK to hold a fixed temperature once I have set the upper damper at a particular number of turns and the lower damper open to a particular setting. Did you fiddle with either after you put the chicken in? Others may chime in with a more informed view on this one but I have not noticed the temperature dropping and then staying low for say, more than 10 minutes after putting the food in.

It is still unseasonably cold here in England but @Troble's avocados and @tony b's corn are beacons of hope. Roll on summer! Lovely cooks all round. I think I will finally give in and start on my late breakfast.

A friend's son is coming home on holiday from his job in Spain and made sure my husband and I would invite them for an evening of cocktails and food before he chose his dates and booked his flight. Flattering but that also came with the burden of figuring out what to cook. I have always loved the intensity of flavour that the Spanish manage to extract from minimal ingredients and wasn't sure what would impress her. That was until I came back to the forum and saw this thread. The die is cast - the princess will dine on tacos al pastor!

All this roti talk is making me hungry! Those pics of yours are great @C6Bill.

That looks really good David. Food tastes so much better when you start with a good base like this. The Husband does the stocks here but he has never gone the full demi-glace. Might have to persuade him that it is not as difficult as it looks!

I bought a whole ex-dairy nanny goat and it arrived beautifully cut and just as I had asked. Most of it is in the freezer but I had a load of cubed shoulder (bone-in) and cubed leg to turn into curries. Had fun yesterday cooking four separate recipes. First I started by browning the meat for my Nigerian goat stew in the KK. Came out very well and with much less mess than browning in a pan in the kitchen. I missed a trick though. I should have put a touch of smoke on the meat at the same time to create the "authentic", cooked over wood smell from party food back home. I bought the Grill Rescue grate cleaner a while ago, as recommended by the KK shopping channel. I have not been hugely impressed in the past but it did work well for cleaning off the grates before the next stage of cooking. This is the Nigerian tomato and scotch bonnet based stew, cooked in a tall pot in the IDK. All the big bones are the stock bones that I left in to add flavour. Fished them out before packing into freezer containers. And three tasty dishes, cooked over 2-3 hours in the KK. Top left in the blue cast iron Le Creuset is the sauce for a goat biryani, to be layered in with rice and crispy brown fried onions. Bottom left in the green cast iron Le Creuset is an Indian goat curry with spinach added at the very end. To the right in the La Chamba pot is a deeply flavoursome West Indian goat curry. I normally avoid putting my Le Creuset stuff in the KK for fear of getting the exteriors blackened but using the KK as a large oven with a steady heat but no flames meant no blackening to worry about. And yes - all four dishes are super tasty. Most packed away in the freezer now, waiting to dispense joy at a moment's notice!

Welcome. As others have said, I am looking forward to learning from you once you get your hands on your KK. You won't be disappointed!

The concept that it is possible to max out a 42 is mind boggling. Well done Johnny. Sounds like a mountain of work. I hope your guests appreciate it!

Hi Paul. I don't like bitterness at all but I do not find this marinade or achiote at all bitter. I always do the recipe as per @Troble's video and as I noted in an earlier post here. The overall amount of marinade is significant and I find that I use what I need and then freeze the rest for using another time. Works really well that way as it saves the effort and mess of making this up each time you want to do a cook.

Yes, black pudding is what blood pudding gets called in the UK. There is a corresponding white pudding which is traditionally made with “lights” (pig lungs and other offal), groats and a nice touch of white pepper and spices like nutmeg. Both delicious. P.S. I like ketchup but it would be sacrilege to mask the taste of the black or white pudding with that strong taste!