jacklondon

Re: Jubilee slow roast pork shoulder its a wet rub, olive oil, salt, crushed fennel seeds and garlic. it needs to be "liquid" enough to be brushed on, make sure you get it into the scored skin.... the result was mega - sweet, melting pork, the aniseed of the fennel, i didn't uses any smoke chips, but we got a pretty good barbecue flavour in there too. I'll get you some pickies uploaded shortly... and yes - Victoria is the only longer serving monarch in British History. A very proud day for us Royalists!

And a good day to you all - I trust you're all celebrating 60 glorious years of reign by Queen Elizabeth II? To celebrate this momentous occasion (Only one other monarch has reigned for longer..... ten points for correct guesses) i have an 11lb bone in pork shoulder with a fennel and garlic rub..... 250 for 6 hours..... eye watering. I've started to lean more toward the cooler rubs and marinades in favour of the traditional smokey/hot/chilli rubs which can over power the meat - this effort is moving toward a porchetta, a marvellous preparation indeed! God save the queen!

Re: you've seen a lamb shank, now look at my beef shank! i have this mega cookery book, imaginatively called "tandoor" its out of print, and cost a couple of hundred dollars but has abut 100 variations on chicken tikka and pretty much any other idea you can imagine.... the best so far has been venison, my local butcher - Glen Thomas in Lindfield - supplied some amazingly gorgeous and lean tikka (tikka refers to the bite size morsel of food, not the marinade or the cooking style).... the recipe was primarily natural yoghurt and chilli as a second marinade, the first being ginger, garlic and vinegar.... never any oil in these marinades. i put them on skewers and balanced them over the firebox (didn't want grill contact - this is what i want dennis to design...). really, really good.

Re: you've seen a lamb shank, now look at my beef shank! I'm a braise kind of guy too, so familiar with the various "favourable" cuts you cat get and what to expect. truth be known, i was pretty confident that it would behave rather like a slow roast pork shoulder..... alas no! anyway - it doesn't matter, its in the past! and now you can all save yourselves the expense, disappointment and indignity of trying this approach!! I'm going to start using more tandoor type recipes this summer - might ask clever dennis if he could design a little insert to help! JB

Re: you've seen a lamb shank, now look at my beef shank! massive, massive disappointment. We followed the recipe to the line. I was suspicious that it didn't seem to be "softening" as the cooking went on, i was right to be suspicious - it was as tough as old boots. the theory was that all the sinews would melt into a gooey mushy meaty mess - but no.... however - Chelsea won the cup which made up for it! JL

Re: you've seen a lamb shank, now look at my beef shank! 135 degrees - 235 for you guys. it takes a 4 hour blast then it gets wrapped in foil with a load of other ingredients (honey amongst them) to keep it moist. It gets another 2 hours wrapped, then a rest for an hour, then another 30 mins at the end to get some "burnt" qualities. sounds like training for the olympics!!! its a pretty involved process, but I'm pretty optimistic that the quality of the meat, the quality of the recipe and the quality of the equipment will disguise any of my own shortcomings. I've done a few APL (Adam Perry Lang) recipes recently, the fajita skirt steak is enough to make a grown man cry - the book "serious barbecue" is one of the few books out there with instructions for ceramic BBQ's, so worth a look. On another note, I've been playing around with other "smokes" - green tea, rice, sugar, cinnamon and star anise specifically - amazing results, but only for small cuts of meat, fish fillets and poultry.... I feel like heston blumenthal but instead of the sous vide i've got a KK!!

Hey - Its been raining since october last year in London, and i've been long waiting for some KK favourable weather to come along.... but Ive given up waiting! So for the inaugural burn of the season I wanted to go big - I couldn't fit the pyrenean mountain lamb in the cage (they suffer from rigamortis, so you can't bend them around like a little piggy), and then I saw the Adam Perry Lang recipe for a beef shank. He rather eloquently describes it as "something you might see Fred Flintstone feeding Captain Caveman". he's right - its massive, i put the can of tomatoes there to give you some scale..... So, what you've got here is the bare meat, before marinade. I've got to take the silverskin off otherwise the marinade won't penetrate, worse, apparently the joint will loose its shape if you don't take it off - rather like monkfish membrane I guess. The marinade will be deployed this evening, it will be going on for 7 to 8 hours at midday tomorrow so that we can serve as Chelsea start the deconstruction of Bayern Munich in the Champions League final... I'll keep you updated with progress

yeah - i guess so, but the lions share of the fee was duty. I have to tell you though, it took four of us to move it on a pallet trolley to keep it stable, it weighs an astonishing amount.... you really need a delivery truck with a drop tail or crane to drop it of the truck.... if you pick it up yourself in a hired van and drop it on the kerb trying to get it out of the van with the wrong equipment, you're gonna be upset to say the least!

Re: Anyone own a KK in the UK? Gents - I'm in south west london and have a all singing all dancing KK OTB in my garden. I'd be happy to give you a walkthrough if you like... if the weather holds, its nearly october afterall. delivery wise - duty and delivery from the port was about £600 - but when you try to move it yourself, you'll understand why its an expensive thing to move around. apologies for not responding sooner, its been cooking up a storm all summer. JB

Re: Fathers day piglet...... Conodo - I've been watching these pages for about 5 years before I finally took the plunge to buy a KK and more recently to share my experiences, so i'd not seen a piglet either! would i change anything for the next time - I don't think so, no. If you're buying a piglet (they're about £80 here in the UK ready to go on the grill, so its a treat) then it seems a waste to try to "over-complexificate" something which is in its own right so delicious. the meat was amazingly tender and tasty really "porky", so to try and dilute that would seem nuts. I considered putting some hickory in there but decided against it for the reasons above. Only thing I would do next time is not eat so much of the starter and try to pick a day without rain. tough call in london this summer! Alpine lamb legs go on the KK tonight before I travel to Boston on business tomorrow - any recommendations for lifechanging restaurants in Boston anyone, its my first time there (I've been cooking from Ming Tsia's blue ginger book for a while, how good is the restaurant?). JB

Re: Fathers day piglet...... A good point - but the join needs to be watertight right - my needlework was pretty poor with material, let alone flesh, skin and bone!! the alternative would be to stuff it to retain the juices - but at that point you end up with a sausage dressed up as a piglet!

Re: Fathers day piglet...... four turns rather than constant rotation - a great question. the simple answer is this - when you put a chicken in the rotisserie, the "holes" are at each end, so the cooking juices remain, for the most part, inside the carcass as the bird turns which is one of the reasons why they remain so juicy. because of the slaughtering process for the piglet, the stomach cavity is split wide open.... so, if piggy was turned around every 30 seconds for 2 hours, all of the juices from the meat (that you'd like ideally to retain to keep the animal juicy) would drain out. You get two side effects - it puts the coals out as the amount of liquid is substantial and you end up, as a result (even in a KK i would imagine) with a dryer than necessary meal. so to avoid this issue, you cook the underside (where the split stomach is) first, so that the juices created for the rest of the cooking process dont drain out as you turn the animal.... the next logical question here is "thats not the way they do a hog roast"... the hog roast is an 8 to 10 hour roast over direct heat, less "oven" like than a KK. An animal big enough for a hog roast has so much more fat content in the meat and the skin so much thicker that moisture retention is much less of a problem than with the wee piggy we see here........ i'm investigating getting a lamb for the same process, although may have the head removed to reduce the "shock" for the kids. we'll keep you posted.... if you're interested in the suckling pig idea, do a google on "segovia suckling pig" - the tradition is that the animal is so tender you can carve it with a plate!

evening all..... This is the first season using the KK, the first piglet I've put on there, and this is the first post this evening. This is a suckling piglet - I was in my local butcher shop yesterday when i spotted her on a tray behind the counter. I'd long wanted to cook one of these guys but had never really got around to planning. I also got some Alpine lamb for tomorrow which is pretty exciting - the whole leg is about the size of a typical lambshank.... its marinading now.... anyway - the piggy - stuffed with a whole head of garlic, rosemary, thyme, oregano and a load of salt/pepper. olive oil, salt pepper mix on the outside..... steady heat at 230 and 30 mins per turn, 4 turns later she was ready..... this is an awesome thing to cook - the results were eye watering. clearly, the ingredients were pretty darn good in the first place, but the reason the KK rotisserie method beats the oven is..... no contact with a pan means ALL of the skin crisps. the legs were awesome, the shoulders even more so. but the crackling, oh the crackling. there are some more grisly photos for the prep, thought we'd spare you that! Jack - London.