The unintended charcoal

[Jackie from Jersey]

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[DennisLinkletter]

Re: The unintended charcoal

Once the desired temp was attained, the temperature spiked & was more difficult to control with the dampers. Remember though, we are new to charcoal cooking, so this may not be related to the extruded charcoal.

Something that users new to ceramic cookers either don't know or forget is that during the first part of our cook the walls of the cooker are absorbing heat and the current airflow will be too much and cause a spike once the cooker reaches thermal mass and starts giving off heat. That's what caused your spike in temp. Only that or more oxygen getting to your fuel are going to cause a spike.

Often users get their cooker stabilized early into their cook and then the body heat starts kicking in.. temps spike, they close it down and start chasing the temps all over the place. Once you learn how open much the damper top and lower is set for a particular temp, just dial it in and wait for it to get there, it will give it time.

Remember airflow only sets your temp.

[Syzygies]

Yup. I remember watching the evening news as a kid; as I recall, Walter Cronkite was driving a car rigged to measure how many times one adjusted the steering wheel. Good drivers make few adjustments, and still guide the car as they intend. He was expressing audience-engaging frustration at his score.

Dennis is describing a physical system, to which I'd add, the frontier where the charcoal is burning is another variable. Lump charcoal is easily lit, and this frontier changes easily. Want to bring a too-hot fire back down to 225 F ? Reduce the oxygen, and the "boat will turn" as quickly as the cooker walls can cool off. This can still be surprisingly slowly, but remember, we want all this thermal mass.

With the greater density of extruded charcoal, the fire has more memory. Like a tree that keeps sending up shoots years after you cut it down, an oxygen-starved fire can hang in there longer, trying to create convection to get more air. Opening the lid gets it going again. Using a guru with the top damper not closed enough, it can pull the air it needs through the guru with the fan off (that's why the guru has a stepped shutoff slider).

For low & slow, I'm used to all this, and my old "other company" K is leaky enough to make this a bit challenging. Nevertheless, with KK extruded I can half-fill my firebox, with much of the space taken up by a two quart dutch oven holding my smoking wood, and I can easily go 24 hours for any cook I can imagine. Part of the charcoal will be left for the next cook.

I prefer to start slowly and well in advance with a very localized fire, and creep up to my target temperature without overshooting, then put in the meat. (BBQ competitors going for the deepest red smoke ring prefer to put cold meat into a cold cooker, as the window of ring formation is before the meat reaches 140 F or so.)

As an experiment, I tried pizza at 500 F. Steering the KK extruded at this temperature was more sluggish than steering lump. The results nevertheless had a nice clean "wood-fired bread oven" taste.

Does it taste neutral, or does it taste like coconut? When we first had our cooker, our oven failed, and we used the cooker for everything, including pies. I can't imagine a pie cooked over mesquite charcoal, which tastes somewhat like lighter fluid. Whatever fire taste coconut extruded charcoal contributed, it works. We think of it as neutral.

The "flavor" of this batch of KK extruded is in the same ballpark as my remaining hoard of 2003 K extruded. For planning a low & slow cook, I think of both of them as neutral, and add apple and/or hickory wood (in a sealed dutch oven "smoke pot" with a few tiny holes in the bottom) for the smoke flavor I want. My wife strongly prefers this setup to any alternative; low & slow cooking over ordinary lump and open chunks of wood is out of the question. (We use oak lump for high temp cooks.) So I'd say that she has a sensitive palate, and as far as flavor goes, this batch of KK extruded can do the job.