tekobo

Yet more great food @MacKenzie. I think I will avoid the forum first thing in the morning - making me too hungry!!!

Sooooo unfair! Today is one of my twice weekly fast days and your cook has got my taste buds going. Might have to "postpone" fast to tomorrow. Really good looking cook and, I imagine, really tasty too.

Thanks @MacKenzie. Worth a try. The micro greens look lovely and fresh against the rest of the dish. And really easy to eat at that size!

That looks like a beautiful setting you are leaving. I hope you have found a good place to settle in Scotland. (And some winter protection for the KK!!) Welcome back to the UK. Happy to share information about sources for charcoal and other things I have found over the last few months.

Wow, well done. It looks great. The best measure is in the eating and it sounds like that was a great success. Kudos.

I think it is utterly beautiful. I hope you had a good first cook. Welcome.

@MacKenzie, digging those micro greens. Cheering accompaniment at this lean time of year. Do you just use the same seeds as for big greens but just closer spaced and harvested (much) sooner? Can you cut and come again?

Tee hee. Maybe the Aussie cricket guys should have used one of those Tip-Piks on their balls. They could have claimed it was an official performance enhancing tool, as endorsed by Mr B!

Lovely pink lamb. And good sticky out bones for hanging on to. Yum!

Thanks all. I did look up @wilburpan and @tony b's posts about duck and saw that you worked hard for your great results. i worked a little less hard to make more time for dessert and drinking adult beverages. I am still not keen on trying to fry a whole/half bird in a wok or deep fat fryer. May adapt the standard recipe to tea smoke early on in the KK, steam in IDK and then finish in the KK at a high heat. The Chinese skin jabby thing is awesome. If used on pork skin it gives you wonderfully thin, crispy crackling. Go searching in a Chinese catering store near you. My first one was given to me by the chef in my local Chinese takeaway and my back up was bought in the Bowery in New York.

Gosh, they look good @tony b! Got to get that into my rotation too. Off to the shop to buy some 'taters!

Interesting. Will try this method and compare. Here to do roast potatoes we parboil for about 10 mins, drain water and then shake the potatoes around in the pot a little to fluff the outsides up a little then put them in a pan with hot fat, usually goose, before roasting at about 180-200C for up to an hour. Key features are crispy outside and fluffy inside. This sous vide method may well be completely different. Will have to buy some potatoes and give it a try.

And I'm lucky that you're mine! I was looking for a good recipe for Easter lunch and came across five different recipes in my books for tea smoked duck. The trad method required a 6 hour marinade, followed by a 6 hour air-dry, then 30 minutes smoking over tea leaves, then steaming for about an hour before leaving to cool prior to a deep frying the whole or half duck, depending on your capacity! In spite of my love of deep frying I didn't have the capacity or the inclination to be frying half a duck while my guests hung around so I opted for the Pitt Cue Co adaptation. Brined the birds in a tea brine overnight. I quadrupled these quantities for two birds: 1.5 litres water, 50g tea leaves, 2.5cm ginger, 1 bulb of garlic (just used one), 2 star anise, 100ml soy sauce, 60ml honey and 50g smoked Maldon salt. They only called for one hour of air drying but that just didn't seem like enough so Mr and Mrs Ducky got a blow dry for about 8 minutes each. This great Chinese implement is used to puncture pork skin to make it easier for the fat to leach out and become wonderfully crispy. I figured it couldn't do any harm with a duck so I used it, more gently, on these two. Rubbed with a home made rub, again from the Pitt Cue Co book, 100g Maldon sea salt, 38g maple sugar, 12g black peppercorns, 5 g toasted fennel seeds, 5g star anise, 5g stick cinnamon and zest of half an orange all blitzed in a blender. Then onto the KK to smoke over cherry for about an hour and a half at 170C (ish) until internal temp got to 78C. The drip tray was essential and I added a bit of water periodically to reduce the duck fat smoke. Finger licking good with a gravy made with chicken stock, duck giblets and finished with the pieces of foie gras that were too small to fry. Not the same as the traditional tea smoking but very good nonetheless. I am not really into dessert but we had some Maraschino cherries to get rid of so I looked up a clafoutis recipe. This one https://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/basic-clafoutis-51208430 was nice and simple and recommended using a cast iron pan. it was perfect for a KK and they tasted great. A lot of similarity with Yorkshire puddings and I will definitely try this again soon.

Hi @MacKenzie , do you guys have roast potatoes out there and if so, are they similar to these wedges? The look and sound similar. Really must get around to trying them myself. Grow, potatoes, grow!

Dennis introduced me to the concept of smash burgers while we were discussing what accessories to get. When he realised I was completely ignorant of the subject he sent me this link: https://www.bonappetit.com/recipe/the-ba-smash-burger My KKs arrived and I forgot all about smash burgers until, by chance, I came across this short but fabulous post on the forum: I have now had smash burgers two weekends running and they are great. Still working on getting those edges super crispy but The Husband and I are happy with the results so far. Introducing the burgers to the KK. First batch done Topped with pan fried foie gras Second batch topped with bacon and cheese. In honour of @Aussie Ora's Wagyu fries and Dennis' foie gras fat popcorn, we fried the bacon in the foie gras fat and dribbled some on the buns for good measure. Yummy!

As I fell asleep last night I thought, surely Dennis wouldn't have bothered to design a different pizza stone arrangement for the 21" if the 23" one would fit? Well, this morning we have swapped cold and dark for cold and wet but I braved the elements for this experiment anyway. No, the 23" upper grate does not fit in the 21", mainly because of the handles on the main grate as you can see in the photo below. I guess the question to ask @DennisLinkletter is whether it is possible to make the pizza stone in the 21" bigger to better fill the area of the upper grate? Knowing the cleaning comments will come up, here are my answers: Sorry @MacKenzie, haven't got around to Kurly Kate'ing my grate, I am a disgrace to the sisterhood. @All, I tried out @Syzygies' trick for keeping the interior clean by ramping up the temp at the end of a particularly messy cook to burn off the residue. It appears to have worked so still nice and white(ish).

You are probably right. It is dark and cold here at the moment so I will wait until the morning to test that out. Will report back.

Oops, sorry @Bruce Pearson! @tony b, no guilt here and @MacKenzie, the first crop of potatoes should be ready in a couple of months and I am going to need all the potato recipes I can find. Oh yes, and a lot of exercise!

Going to have to try this. I love the idea of pan frying with attitude. And ghee. Or goose fat. And no, @MacKenzie and the legion of people on this site who appear to have bought an air fryer (and not used it @Bruce Pearson?), you can't persuade me that an air fryer is ever going to cut it. I'd rather have fewer, deep fried chips.

Having waited five years to pull the trigger, I now realise that the biggest tragedy is the amount of my life that I spent not owning a KK. So my advice is that you need to rectify that deficit, and soon. Given all KKs are built to amazing standards, it is just a question of money, size and your needs. I think the 21" would do pretty much everything that I need if it was the only KK that I had. The three layers give you so much more capacity than you get with any other single layer cooker and I use my 21" in preference over the 23" for low and slow. I can't say that I have noticed any difference in fuel usage or in time to heat up between the two but I have not paid much attention to that. The only issue is your pizza requirement. I suspect a 32" would be better if you want to do two at a time but I can't see that the 23" gives you much advantage over the 21" unless you are into giant single pizzas. Happy to take measurements if that would help/if they are not on Dennis' site. In the meantime, here is a photo of the pizza stones with the 21" on the left.

Don't wait! I am a big proponent of deep fat frying. Having the oil at the right temperature means you get the good crunch with (a little) less fat and maximum pleasure. I too love my French fry press. Here are some photos I took last year. The easiest, and tastiest, way to process my excess of home grown potatoes was to chip them with the manual press (my Kenwood attachment didn't do anything like as good a job as doing it the old fashioned way). I then did double frying the easy way. Did the first low temp fry, laid the chips out on a tray to freeze them and then vac packed them loosely in bags so they were available for the second fry whenever I was ready. I was so ready that they are all gone now! Nothing beats home made double fried chips. And yes, I am mixing terminology - you say fries and I say chips. Table mounted fry press. This year's planned over supply of chips, sorry potato seeds, going in last weekend.

There should be a new symbol for KK-induced-happiness. Looking forward to seeing Her Blueness.

I'm pretty sure today is Wednesday. Is it here yet??

I love the idea of loading a KK into a van and driving it home! Looks like a no stress homecoming for your new best friend. Congratulations.

The great thing about this site is the wealth of information available, buried in the archives. Before my KKs arrived, @MacKenzie initiated me in the ways of the Curly Kate. I thought it was an exotic new tool and was almost disappointed when I found out how mundane it is. But it works. I did try the wrench but I am too impatient to work each bar individually. Instead I have one curly kate near the BBQ which I use immediately post cook and then, if I want to get things super clean, I soak my (cooled) grates in a water heater base. All down the power of the internet. I couldn't find the water heater base in the UK so ordered one from the US on eBay and there was a video on the Guru site showing how to block the hole off. Easy peasy.