Again with the grilling

I know what you want. You crave grilling data. At least I hope you are or you might want to skip this post.

This weekend I got the Stoker working with the data logging software. I decided to slow roast a duck for its maiden run.


(Clicky for larger image)

I set the Stoker to 200°. You can see that at about 13:15 the grill temperature reached 200° and did a reasonably good job holding the temperature. I think it’s interesting to see the three humps over 200° where the fire overshot its mark then came back to its target temperature. Each hump gets progressively smaller until at around 15:00 the fire temperature stabilizes. I wonder if it normally takes about two hours for the grill's internal temperature to stabilize? There is a lot of mass in all that ceramic so it wouldn’t surprise me.

[It might be worth noting that the sun was beating down on the grill the entire time but it held the target temperature….I think it’s safe to assume that if the grill is started while the sun is warming it, then it’s able to compensate for the extra heat source. Now I need to start the grill the night before to see if my hunch last time was correct…]

At about 16:15 I opened the grill to put a piece of salmon in for Dawn. You can see how the temperature in the grill takes an immediate 30° dip but recovers quickly. Shortly after that I set the target temperature for 300° because I wanted to eat duck sometime that day.

It’s also kind of neat to see how smooth the curve is on the meat temperature. Dawn said that it looked “textbook” to her. She also claimed that she can per her degree to use and use data provided by the graph to work out all sorts of heat/mass transfer equations on our food. How exciting is that! Look forward to sometime in the future when Dawn works out the thermal conductivity of pork butt!

The duck came out great. This time I just rubbed some salt and pepper into the skin then smeared honey all over it….then some more black pepper for good measure. I was shooting for a smoked honey peppered duck. There wasn’t really a recipe; it’s just something I made up. I thought honey and duck sounded good. I was a little disappointed that the honey flavors weren’t really there at the end….but duck looked great. I guess most of the sugar in the honey caramelized.


We had some potato rolls sitting around so I cut the duck breast into slices and put it on the roll with some more honey and black pepper. Little honey black peppered roasted duck sandwiches are a good thing.

For an encore I took the carcass and threw it in a pot with some water and onions, carrots, celery to make a stock. The stock was just ok….I was hoping for a bit more depth of flavor. I used it last night to make some Italian wedding soup. With some spice adjustment (read: added lots more pepper) it came out down right tasty.

A Catch-22

Got a problem. Ants streaming into office. Make coffee and figure out solution. Coffee maker infested with ants. No coffee, no solution. No solution, no coffee.

Bad start to week.

Man Kitchen or Goth Kitchen?

I don’t know if you’re familiar with the work of the Porsche Design Group, they design all sorts of stuff (besides cars). Their designs always catch my eye in that they always standout and look slightly “different” but sometime they put form before function.

Recently Porsche and Poggenpohl (which appears to be a well established German furniture brand) have announced a “man kitchen.”

So this is what they came up for a kitchen “especially designed for men.” They haven’t released any real specifics yet except for the man-centric kitchen contains “no-handle cabinets, aluminum finishes, hi-tech A/V system.”

I like the use of lighting. In my opinion too many kitchens don’t pay enough attention to lighting. It’s the one room where you’re routinely going to be handling sharp objects and trying to ascertain how well something is cooked. Shadows are not invited; you want to be able to see what’s going on. Besides being utilitarian the lighting does well to accent the design.

I’m not sure that kitchen offers enough storage for my tastes. Doesn’t Porsche know that in addition to multiple sets of cookware (cast iron, nonstick, stainless steel) the modern man is going to want to have multiple sets of plates and glassware to best present the dish? I assume some of those bottom cabinets house a stove, oven, and dishwasher….so there isn’t a lot of storage there.

I’ll admit that I like the somewhat austere design, I don’t know if that has to do with being a man or just liking more contemporary design than the god-awful country kitchen that shoved into most of the houses I can afford.

Nightmare Fuel

The Bohnanza game in my dinning room.

My coffee continues to ripen. The plantation is looking healthy (I suppose Riblet is doing a good job.) I expect it won’t be long until I actually pick the coffee fruit…. which got me to wondering, what the hell do I do next?

I turned to the all-knowing internet for help. It took me a little bit more time to find the information I needed then I would have guessed. So many websites are dedicated to what you do with the coffee once it’s already in bean form. Not many concentrate on what you do with the coffee cherries (cherry is what we coffee farmers call the coffee fruit….or so I just learned).

Fortunately howstuffworks came to my rescue with a helpful article on how coffee works. One of the things that kind of surprised me is that my coffee trees know where they are (hemispherically speaking.) According to the howstuff works:

"There is usually one coffee harvest per year. The time varies according to geographic zone, but generally, north of the Equator, harvest takes place between September and March, and south of the equator between April and May."

My coffee trees have never been outside; they live a very sheltered life (both literally and figuratively.) They’ve only had a crazy gray cat to tell them what’s right and wrong. I wonder how they figured out where they are and when to be harvested….I guess it has to be based off the sun, all other environmental triggers (temperature, amount of rain, weather, etc) are more or less controlled and never change. However, I like to imagine that living in a gadget rich environment they’ve manage to tap into GPS.

The website says that the actual fruit of the coffee cherry is “intensely sweet and has the texture of a grape.” From what I understand it is usually discarded because it perishes too quickly and isn’t where the money is. I suppose I have a chance to try a fruit that I’ll probably never see in the local grocery store.

The website also has a page dedicated to how cherries are processed, which is what I really wanted to learn about. Evidently there are two ways to go. There’s the old fashion traditional way called the dry method:

"Dry method - By the simplest and cheapest method, the harvested cherries are spread out to dry in sunlight. They are periodically raked and turned for seven to 10 days, until their moisture content has fallen to 11 percent. The outer shell of the cherries turns brown and the beans rattle around inside."

Then there is the fancy schmancy wet method:

"Wet method - The main difference between the wet and dry method is that in the wet method, the pulp of the coffee cherry is removed from the beans within 24 hours of harvesting. A pulping machine washes away the skin and pulp. The beans are put in fermentation tanks for 12 to 48 hours. Natural enzymes loosen the slimy parenchyma from the parchment covering. The beans are then dried, either by the sun or by mechanical dryers."

Since I don’t have a pulping machine or a coffee cherry fermentation tank handy it looks like the dry method is the one for me. Perhaps I can talk Riblet into batting them around the room in lieu of periodically raking them.

To Sleep, Perchance to Grill

I reached another precision grilling milestone this last weekend – the overnight cook. I prepped and started a pork butt at 10:00 pm on Saturday and pulled it off the grill a little after 1:30 Sunday afternoon. That’s fifteen and a half hours of low, slow, grilling. It was all very exciting.

For some reason setting up the grill at night, with the knowledge it will be running unattended, is a bit unnerving. I suppose it’s because I’m not normally firing up a grill at 10:00 pm in the dark, I won’t be around to notice a sudden shift in the weather and take counter-measure, and leaving a fire unattended goes against everything we were told about fire safety as a kid. What I was really afraid of is the morning dew. I kept having visions of the condensation forming on my electronics and frying the Stoker temperature controller unit. In the end I put everything in a Tupperware container that I had punched a small hole in for cables to run out of. Then I plugged the hole with some aluminum foil. Nothing got fried, so I guess it all worked out. Here’s a picture of the setup that I took the next morning. I apologize that I don’t have any fancy graphs of the cooking temperature to share. I’m still having troubles getting the data logging software working. I actually spent time to make sure it would work before I started the grill this time. I plugged the Stoker in and started up the data logging software. Everything was working fine! I would hold the pit temperature thermometer and I could see the temperature spike on the graph. Huzzah.

Once I had fire started, the grill going, and had all the probes configured I tried starting the data logging software again and… no dice. The software claimed it couldn’t find the Stoker. That’s the same problem I had last time I had a pork butt on the grill, but didn’t have earlier in the day when I tested the system. I’ve concluded that it might have something to do with my actual network. Earlier in the day I had the Stoker plugged into the same router as the computer running the data logger. When the Stoker is at the grill there is an additional hub between the data logger and the Stoker. I need to see if running the software on a computer that has to go through fewer network shenanigans might solve the problem.

It’s a real shame I don’t have the graph too. I made and observation during this cook and would really like to see if the data supports my hunch. This time it appeared to me that the Stoker was doing a better job at holding the grill exactly at the temperature I set it to (220°)…until the next morning. Then the temperature seemed to hover at around ten to sixteen degrees higher than what I had set the grill to. I think it has to do with the sun. The grill is painted black and I think the sun is acting as a secondary radiant heat source that the Stoker can’t control. It can try and lower the temperature of the grill’s internal fire to compensate but the Evil Egg’s ceramic holds the heat too well and the grill’s temperature heads north with the intensity of the sun.

In the future, once I get the data logger working, it will be interesting to see if the temperature tracking plays out like I suspect. It will also be interesting to see if cooks started while the sun is beating down on the grill track better because the Stoker can compensate for the sun from the get go…

Some of you might be wondering how’d the fifteen and a half hour pork butt came out….. like only a piece of pork imbued with fifteen plus hours of smoke can…..delicious. I also made a white barbeque sauce from scratch. The ones I’ve tried from the bottle weren’t very good. I’m very happy with my version. (Hint: the pre-bottled ones don’t use enough vinegar and pepper.) Dawn remarked that she liked that we had reduced making pulled pork to something so simple we can do it on our sleep.

There’s always room for ghetto

It feels like Dawn and I fit a lot of stuff into this weekend. It would have been a perfect weekend if I had not marred it with studying.

The big story was roof and gutter area around our bay window. A week or so ago we noticed that we could see into our attic from the outside. I am not a home maintenance guru, but I believe that is usually an undesirable housing attribute. It appears as if the gutter and attached fascia and soffit are drooping which in turn leaves a gaping hole into our attic. Dawn had mentioned our predicament at work and a couple of her coworkers offered to come out a look at it. Actually they assumed it was just a gutter problem and they offered to come out and fix the situation on Saturday morning in exchange for a meal.

They showed up Saturday morning and looked at the problem, gave me a crash course on what a fascia and soffit is, and declared that the situation is much more serious than they had initially imagined.

My favorite part of the morning was when everyone took turns looking in the hole in our house. I wish I had thought to take a picture of it. Before, when I had looked into the hole, I thought: “Whoa, a hole. I bet this doesn’t belong here...[end thought].” The two of them would alternate climbing up on the ladder and peering into the hole; each time they would start exposing revelations on what the interior construction of our house was. It made me jealous, was all that stuff written on an index card up there that I had missed? There’s not search engine in the attic, where was this plethora of information coming from?

Eventually I settled on the thought that I wished construction objects had metadata associated with them. Wouldn’t that be great? I would have been able to look at the lumber around the hole and look at when it had been constructed, who did the work, and what it thought it was supped to be doing. That would have given the situation some context. If nothing else I would have known who was responsible for the work and I could have dragged them back and asked what the hell was going on with my soffit area? (I bet nobody likes to a get a call where someone demands “what the hell is going on with my soffit area!?!”)

Dawn’s coworkers spent a goodly amount of time up on the ladder evaluating the problem. In between the “they were crazy if they ever thought this would actually work” and “why the hell would anyone building something like that” they pointed out the problem was that really there wasn’t anything attaching the soffit to the roof…so our problem was just a matter of time. Most likely the other corner will soon follow suit (oh boy!)

Their opinion was that it would probably be best to repair the situation from above…where the roof is. Meaning that part of the roof would have to be temporarily removed. They recommended having a hail storm and fixing this problem while the roof was being replaced. The possibilities of fixing it from below were a bit more dodgy, there isn’t a lot of space to work in and it will involved dismantling the often talked about soffits and such. Either way they said it was out of their league and something we should get an honest to god contractor to look at. Now we just need to find an honest contractor.

In the meantime we’ve propped up the soffit on the corner that is falling. Bricks and a 2x4 holding up your house….how ghetto is that?