mguerra

As soon as I start the fire I put the meat on. The meat is in there smoking and cooking while I am stabilizing the temp. And yes, it is in there during the heavy thick smoke phase if I am using smoke wood... Why do I do it? I can't stand the thought of "wasting" the heat and the smoke! It's not for everyone.

I have a fair number of cookware items that I reserve for use in the KK, so if they get crapped out, my wife doesn't care. I make no effort to get them cleaned up on the outside surfaces, just wipe the smoke goo off with a paper towel and let it go at that. Half sheets, baking pans, casserole dishes, dutch oven and so on.

I was needling Syz there. I got a paella pan from tienda.com Good resource. If you need to, you can always cut the handles off to fit a bigger pan in your KK.

I used to use my Guru or Stoker all the time and measured grate temp but I don't use them any more. Just using the KK dial gauge. Never even calibrated it. Which is consistent with my thought that precise temperature control is not necessary.

I'm not finding that Crock Pot brand Dutch oven on Amazon nor on the Crock Pot website.

Super.

I will check the price next time I go to the store.

What's worse is if this same thing happens with a rattlesnake, and you have 6 dogs. You DO NOT want to lose track of where that SOB is. It's big fun to have to crawl under your deck on your hands and knees with your shotgun to face down a hot buzzing Western Diamondback. Big fun...

The point is the best so I never cook a straight flat. At my grocery store they sell prime grade briskets and I did not used to use them but that's what I use now. They also cut them at my grocery store in what they call supertrim where they trim the fat cap down to about the thickness that Franklin recommends anyway. If you buy a regular packer with a big thick fat cap, then look at Franklins videos on YouTube and he has one there on how to trim it. Basically he trims that fat cap down to about a quarter inch because he wants to have a little bit of rendered fat left on the fat cap side of the brisket when it's finished.

All right Mac, if those are coffee cans I humbly suggest you need to reorient your thinking! Store bought coffee is absolute bilge. If you're a foodie you need to get into home roasting. Once you drink coffee that you've roasted yourself you will never buy store-bought again and you probably won't be able to drink coffee outside your home again either. At least not anywhere outside your home that is not a serious coffee specialty place.

I have done low and slow many times, and hot fast many times. My hot fast results beat my low and slow, by far. The first hot fast I did was purely out of curiosity, I had no preconceived notion of how it would come out. The Weber guys were talking about it so I tried it. The results sold me. Hot fast is a spectrum. 275-325 fire temp will get it. I settled on that range some time ago and what did I see yesterday? Franklin has a thermometer featured on some of his vids with this exact temp range marked as "BBQ"! This correlates with remarks I have made previously about temperature control and cooking on the KK. All I am looking for on my fire thermometer is that it is in that range somewhere. The brisket takes a bit longer down at 275 and goes quicker at 325. As long as I get it wrapped somewhere between 160 and 170, it's going to come out perfect. And paper beats foil, at least in my series of one paper wrapped... It won't be the last. If you like low and slow after having given hot fast a fair trial, by all means enjoy it! If you have not tried hot fast a few times, I suggest you give it a fair trial. You might be a convert like I was.

I cook fish high up in the dome on the grate with the legs on it placed on the main grate. Once I put a piece of salmon up there whilst cooking something else on the main, and it came out super. It cooks slow enough that you can get it done exactly how you wish. It doesn't blow through the cook so fast such that the difference between too raw and too done is mere moments.

I also use a Shopvac with drywall bag. Very fast, very clean.

Kit enroute, thanks for the tip wilbur.

I always clean my paella pan...

Indirect.

That product is called Granite Ware. We use it in solar ovens because it is dark, absorbs rays, and has a lid to prevent evaporation from fogging up the solar oven glass: http://sunoven.com/sun-cooking-usa/how-to-use/

Yes I do. My two hands and a rolling pin.

Ground meats and poultry are safe to eat at 165ºF. My grates always get hotter than that. I never taste any off flavors. I never clean my grates.

ck this is exactly the purpose of my post, to encourage people to cook briskets, it is simple and luscious.

I think it was about a 10-12 pounder. 5-1/2 hour cook, 2 hour rest. I rested it two hours because it was suppertime at that point! A one hour rest is sufficient. Half an hour if you really need to serve it NOW. You can absolutely count on being able to do this the morning of your party for an afternoon service. Every minute a piece of meat is in the cooker, the more moisture it loses. Hot fast is THE way to go.

If I hadn't done that durn brisket yesterday I'd be trying that fatty right now! Nice job.

Over the years, we have had a few people opine that briskets are just too difficult to get done right, so they avoid Q'ing them. It is not difficult to get spectacular results, and if you are not cooking them you are seriously under utilizing both your palette and your KK. A properly cooked point is the BEST meat on a cow! And you can get a far better result in a fast cook than you can in a low and slow. So you don't need a 12, or 14, or 16 hour ordeal. Which means a fantastic brisket can be on your table routinely, not just on special weekends. 4-6 hours will do it. If you get off work early, you could do that on a weekday. I did one yesterday in about 5-1/2 hours and here are the tricks that made this the best brisket I have ever cooked. I used two of Aaron Franklin's tips. When the meat temp hit 165, I wrapped it in butcher paper, (actually parchment), and put it back on the fire. Normally, the "Texas Crutch" is to wrap the brisket in foil at this point. And that works VERY well. But the paper wrap is even better. This was the moistest juiciest flat of any brisket I have done. And the paper wrap is not airtight so the bark was less mushy than with foil. The usual hot fast method is to feel for doneness, not to finish by temperature. But Franklin mentioned finishing the brisket at a temp of 203, so I tried that. Superb. Here is the process from yesterday. I used some Royal Oak lump, some coconut charcoal, and six big fist sized chunks of mesquite. I ran the fire at 325 for the duration. Franklin suggests a rub of nothing but salt and fresh cracked pepper, I will try that another time, I used my own concoction. When the internal temp hit 165 I wrapped it in the paper and retuned it to the fire until it hit 203. I rested it on the counter top under a beach towel for 2 hours. This was so fast, so easy, and by far my moistest and best brisket ever. Do it.

I never clean my grates. Unless there are great hunks of fish skin or big wads of fat cap, I will scrape those off.

OK, I am going to retract what I just said. I just made a batch of homemade flour tortillas and it really was not that time-consuming at all so it's definitely worth doing. I had smoked a pork butt on Saturday so I took some of that pork meat and sautéed it in a cast iron skillet with some butter and some rub and then use that to make tacos with the flour tortillas.