mguerra

Coffee Cardamom Brisket got me going I just rolled up a fatty, made with a mix of half venison hamburger and half free range pork breakfast sausage. You know I'm a freak for the fall spices on meat, so... I dosed the hell out it with cinnamon, some garlic powder and smoked paprika. Cooked it indirect at 300 til 165 plus. Cinnamon in a fatty; mmm, mmm, good!

sure There are literally hundreds of posts on the forums for KK and several other ceramic cookers that state that the new ceramic owners NEVER used their gasser again after getting their ceramic. And someone here on the KK forums has pictures of his KK custom made without legs and wheels and built it in to his outdoor island. Freakin awesome set up. Anybody remember that post?

jinx buy me a Coke That's so funny! At the exact moment you were posting your offer of the plate on this thread, I was unabashedly asking for it over on the Cooking Pics thread!!!

trust Send me the plate. I will hold it for you until such time as you wish to retrieve it.

Here's that nasty lava rock grease monster heat deflector! And this was 6 months ago. It is is now out of service...

presentation I like that plate!

vacumn I don't have the FoodSaver product, but my nurse just gave me something sold by Reynolds. "Reynolds Handi-Vac Vacumn Sealer" It's a handheld vacumn pump that connects to special proprietary zipper bags. You put the food in and zip shut, then there is a little port that the vacumn pump connects to to evacuate the air. Kind of like those one way valves on the coffee bags. It's about half way between a FoodSaver and the "suck the air out with a straw" trick. Perhaps later this week I'll try it. Any of ya'll tried this contraption?

For some reason Bronze Behemoth Game On! thread is locked. Anyhow here's something tasty. There is a local Mexican place we go to often for carnitas. These are some of the best I've ever had, until getting the KK... Now I make my own. Do a pork butt per usual and pull it. Don't shred it, pull it so it's chunky. Try to make your chunks about bite sized. Take the pulled chunks and saute 'em up in a cast iron skillet with a little pork fat til they get a crusty, crispy skin on them. Now you kind of have a luscious porky version of burnt ends. There's your carnitas. You can do anything with them, turn them in with some pasta, make tacos, pork stroganoff, put them on pizza, use your imagination! We made a burrito bowl like they serve at Chipotle. It's a bowl of rice, black beans, corn, chipotle peppers, carnitas and some guacamole if you like. Durn good eats.

roast /smoke/ grease Try roasting the brussel sprouts in your KK in a shallow pan or foil boat with a little bacon grease, or other source of pork fat. Oh baby!

boil flavor Here's a shrimp tip I posted once before: Soak some shrimp in a pot of cold water with some pretty concentrated crab boil, for 30 to 60 minutes. If you want you could put a little ice in there, I don't. Put the shrimp in a bbq wok, one of those square slope sided things. Here's where I do things a little different. Usually you cook shrimp pretty fast and get them off the fire. I want them to stay on there just a bit longer to soak up some smoke and BBQ flavor. So get a pretty hot fire going but cook them indirect. You can easily stretch out the cooking time to 15 minutes or more this way, without overcooking them. I cook them with the lid closed and check at the 6 or 7 minute mark, then guesstimate how much longer they need. I'm trying to balance opening the lid to check on them as infrequently as possible against overcooking them. Once you get a feel for it, you will probably only open the cooker twice or thrice. The blend of the boil flavor combined with the charcoal cooking is awesome!!!

? Recipe?

Lodge Logic Got my Lodge pizza pan out there coking some bacon to finish off the seasoning. Apparently the Lodge Logic pre-seasoned items are actually about 2/3 seasoned and need one greasy cook to finish it off. Plus it's my pastured hog bacon! This pan is just the right size to also act as a perfect heat deflector.

Where is it? I could not find anything like that on ebay. Where?

what? So how exactly does one go "prawning"?

mysterious What are those?

P14P3 Now I have the pizza stone from Lodge, I should do some high temp pizzas and maybe clear out some of that tar!! You should go over to Amazon and read some of those reviews on this thing, people think it is the best dang pizza "stone" they have ever used. Can't wait to try it.

La Brea KK The walls are pretty tarry! I should take a little piece of wire and stick it in there as a depth gauge. Yes, there is so much play in the damper threads that the top sits partly on the gasket when just cracked, I have sure noticed that.

Hey T Rex! If the KK has only one use on this planet, it's for pork butts! Just sent two over to a meeting tonight of the Financial Women of Texas. Tonight was my wife's turn to host. They went absolutely ape shit over the pulled pork. Got some more good tar up there in my top vent, too. I don't exactly remember how to get your avatar attached , but one thing I do remember is you have to limit the pixel count. Anybody out there can tell T how to do it?

monster Yes, I remember your reaction to that photo! And I have recently removed that lava rock grease monster from my KK. Now I'm using the stock heat deflector. My guess is that the problem is multifactorial; a barely cracked open top damper, a LOT of low and slow pork butts, the grease monster, a fair bit of mesquite, and almost no really hot fires. I did two pork butts last night and tried to control the temp with a more open top damper and a more closed bottom damper, but that did not work; it couldn't keep the temp down. The top of my KK is even thicker and greasier with tar than the photos from a few days ago!!! Anyway once I install a new gasket and stop using the grease monster lava rock rig, we'll see what happens.

green cleansers I thought I would use a Magic Eraser with a slurry of gasoline, DDT, Freon, and some secondhand smoke to scrub it clean!

explain Surface reducer. What is it?

replace Yes, I'll just do the R and R, start with a nice fresh clean gasket. I'll have to rig a way to keep all the cleaning chemicals from running down the inside of the cooker. From cleaning the top damper surface I have found that a paint scraper removes almost all of the build up. But to secure the new gasket I want the mounting surface spotless clean ceramic. Probably after I remove the gasket, I will scrape first, torch a little, and then finish off with a chemical cleaner like Easy Off or similar. But I need to plug that opening to keep the chemicals out of the cooker.

WSM I would definitely use a WSM, and plenty of folks get great results with it. Even competition wins. But the insulating properties of the ceramic make it so much more versatile and useful. And we can get really long cooks with less fuel. Especially in the cold and the wind. The WSM folks have to cook up all kinds of wind deflectors and insulating blankets that we just don't need. I had a Brinkmann Gourmet Charcoal Smoker, but it was impossible to control the air flow. It has a loose fitting lid (on purpose) and the lid and the cooker are not perfectly round. So it was impossible to fit a gasket to make it air tight. Before I got my KK I tried like hell to mod that thing to get it air tight, and then add a daisy wheel top vent from the WSM. Could not get it to work. In fact, I just gave it to a local humane society resale shop yesterday. But, if someone could get it airtight, it's only about $50.00; so a lot cheaper than a WSM. It has a great charcoal basket, and the bottom vent can be readily adapted for a Guru or Stoker. I just got tired of fooling with it.

fix Unfortunately, there is no way I can burn the grease/ tar out of the top gasket. It's totally embedded and infiltrated in the weave. So I'll replace it after cleaning the top of the cooker thoroughly. Then I'll start cooking with the top a little wider open, clean the heat deflector after each cook, and do a few hotter cooks now and then. That will probably get it.

Weber Smoky Mountain No, not a steelie lover, but I DO read their forums, full of great info and recipes.