mguerra

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.

? So, for the forum members, how many people don't use the daisy wheel and just pull the whole door open?

ash By opening the entire door, ash can get in the mating surface and prevent the door closing. In order to snuff out the air and shut the fire down, you would need to remove the door completely after each cook, clean the ash out of the door opening, and replace the door. The door will be hot and burning embers could fall out during said maneuver. The daisy wheel requires no such shenanigans.

clarify Are you referencing the daisy wheel bottom damper? I think most of us are specifically referring to the daisy wheel when we mention the "bottom damper". Although sometimes some folks do actually pull the entire door open to one degree or another for a super hot fire. In particular when I said to open the bottom damper a coin width I meant the 3 daisy wheel slots should be about a coin width open.

ideas Once in a while I do a hot cook, but not over about 400 degrees. I do use plenty of mesquite. I use a basket full of lava rocks for a heat deflector and have never cleaned it nor changed the rocks. It is one scary looking hunk of black char! The grease has totally infiltrated all the rocks and solidified into one solid hunk. I just figure it burns off little by little each cook. However this may be part of the problem. Perhaps this massive accumulation of burned and non burned grease is vaporizing each cook and then condensing out on the relatively cool surfaces up top. So I took the lava rock diffuser out and replaced it with the stock heat deflector, which I keep cleaned. That may help. I have a spare top gasket but dread installing it because of having to clean thoroughly the mounting surface. That is going to be a chore! But the combo of keeping a clean heat deflector and opening the top a little wider might help the problem, plus whatever solution Dennis is sending me.

fuel I use Royal Oak lump and dry smoke woods. One time I tried to bang my lid open by beating on the metal tang with a hammer and a 2x4. Don't ever do that! Yes, nobody but me has this problem, I don't know what it is.