As I wrote last week, I'm starting to experiment with expanding what I can do on my Kamado #9 that I've had nearly 15 years. I'm especially interested in getting it to the extremely high temperatures it is supposed to be capable of. I got a Lodge 14 inch cast iron pizza pan and today was the day to try that out.
For dough, I used the Baking Steel 72 hour recipe. I made a sauce from scratch with some fresh tomatoes, canned crushed tomatoes, onion, garlic, jalapeno, basil, oregano, chicken stock and salt and pepper. After simmering a while, I hit it with the immersion blender and simmered a bit more.
I rolled the dough out on a floured bamboo cutting board that's big enough to use as a peel. I topped with sauce, little balls of fresh mozzarella, slices of stick Boar's Head pepperoni with natural casing (since it should cup), onion, garlic, basil, jalapeno and sweet pepper:
​
Bottom line is that I never achieved temperatures as high as I wanted. It's possible I was too impatient. About 20 minutes after closing the lid, the temperature in the dome thermometer was at about 575 and stopped rising, even going down a little. I had the upper vent open about ten full rotations from where it closes down into contact and the lower vent drawer open about an inch and a half. This should have been in the range for maximum temperature according to original instructions with the cooker. Since the temp was dropping a bit, I decided to open up and check the pan temp with my IR gun. I got 585 on it and decided to put the pizza on, hoping the fire would flare up even more from the lid being opened.
Of course, the step I was most worried about, transferring the pie from the peel to the hot pan, went much better than could have been expected for a first try. I must have had the angle just a bit high, as the leading edge folded back just a bit, but the majority of pie landed fine and I adjusted that fold a bit with a spatula.
Having no good reference for cooking time, I opened to look at 4 minutes into the cook and again after 8. I finally removed it with a metal peel at ten minutes of cook time. The dome thermometer read only in the 400 to 450 range most of this time. At a proper 700 degree plus temp, this pie probably should have cooked in 2-4 minutes if not less.
Here is the cooked pizza back inside on a cold pizza pan:
​
You can see the remains of that folding event on the top right, but the pie came out really well. It tasted good and the bottom crust was crisp:
I didn't realize when taking this pic that it showed the fold, but you can still see a very nice underside of the crust. The darker stuff at the top here is from a little sauce hitting the hot pan after the fold.
The real problem though is that the temperature dropped each time I opened the lid and recovered more slowly each time. The top of the pie didn't get the really nice char you want in a high temperature wood fire cook.
Complicating matters here is that in doing further research on options for hanging different foods for very high temperature tandoori-style cooks, I ran into more information than I had seen before about the demise of the original Kamado Company. I knew that it had gone out of business, but it turns out that the major cause of it dying was huge problems with product quality and customer service. There even came to be websites dedicated "Kamado Fraud". So far, I haven’t encountered any of the quality issues others have seen.
It turns out that just a few months before I joined AR, @Attjack had asked about a used Kamado he found and Max Good chimed into that thread with a review warning against these cookers. I just found the link to the Attjack thread here today when I was looking at some of the sordid past of the company.
So now I'm questioning whether this cooker actually is capable of the 700 degree-plus range touted for it. I know that BGE's and other Kamado-style cookers can do that, so this is confusing for me. I will check to make sure tomorrow, but I'm 95% sure that airflow at the intake is not inhibited by ash buildup. Also , somehow I now have a stainless steel fire basket even though it came with a thick ceramic one. I'm thinking I may have scored with customer service with the old company and they provided the wire upgrade when the ceramic basket cracked but I really don't remember. Maybe the unit came with both fire baskets even though the packing slip doesn’t mention the stainless one.
Before giving up entirely on the cooker going to high temps, I want to play with temps a few more times. Next time I'll leave the cooker lid open while the fire gets really roaring through most of the basket. I used two Tumbleweeds to start today and closed the lid shortly after the weeds were gone but with only those two areas having small amounts of flame and more red glow. My understanding is that we want glowing lump everywhere more than we want big flames, I'll try widespread big flames next.
The other thing I want to try is to get the temp even into this 575 range and use the IR gun on the inside walls immediately after opening the lid. I'm starting to suspect that whatever material was used to build this thing doesn't really have the thermal properties it was advertised to have. The walls should be radiating heat to the point that the temperature on the dome thermometer doesn't drop as much as I saw today with these multiple openings of the lid or at least the temp should rebound quickly. I fully anticipated that the cooker would stay really hot long enough for me to cook several pies tonight. I get the feeling the wall material is a good insulator (I did think to use the IR gun on the outside walls and they only got to about 160 near the end of the cook time for the pie) but it just doesn't absorb and re-radiate heat.
I'm open to suggestions on things to try, both in terms of trying to get this beast to higher temps and for tests to do to check out my suspicions on the walls not radiating. For those of you with BGE's, Primo's, Kamado Joes, Kamado Komodo or any other similar cookers, I'm especially interested in any observations you might have on what is going on here and if I can get this thing to do what I want. If any of you have taken an IR temp of an inside wall during a high temp cook, that would be very interesting, along with your observations on temperature recovery time on the lid thermometer.
At least for me, this is still an outstanding, reliable cooker even if it can’t do the high temp stuff.
For dough, I used the Baking Steel 72 hour recipe. I made a sauce from scratch with some fresh tomatoes, canned crushed tomatoes, onion, garlic, jalapeno, basil, oregano, chicken stock and salt and pepper. After simmering a while, I hit it with the immersion blender and simmered a bit more.
I rolled the dough out on a floured bamboo cutting board that's big enough to use as a peel. I topped with sauce, little balls of fresh mozzarella, slices of stick Boar's Head pepperoni with natural casing (since it should cup), onion, garlic, basil, jalapeno and sweet pepper:
​
Bottom line is that I never achieved temperatures as high as I wanted. It's possible I was too impatient. About 20 minutes after closing the lid, the temperature in the dome thermometer was at about 575 and stopped rising, even going down a little. I had the upper vent open about ten full rotations from where it closes down into contact and the lower vent drawer open about an inch and a half. This should have been in the range for maximum temperature according to original instructions with the cooker. Since the temp was dropping a bit, I decided to open up and check the pan temp with my IR gun. I got 585 on it and decided to put the pizza on, hoping the fire would flare up even more from the lid being opened.
Of course, the step I was most worried about, transferring the pie from the peel to the hot pan, went much better than could have been expected for a first try. I must have had the angle just a bit high, as the leading edge folded back just a bit, but the majority of pie landed fine and I adjusted that fold a bit with a spatula.
Having no good reference for cooking time, I opened to look at 4 minutes into the cook and again after 8. I finally removed it with a metal peel at ten minutes of cook time. The dome thermometer read only in the 400 to 450 range most of this time. At a proper 700 degree plus temp, this pie probably should have cooked in 2-4 minutes if not less.
Here is the cooked pizza back inside on a cold pizza pan:
​
You can see the remains of that folding event on the top right, but the pie came out really well. It tasted good and the bottom crust was crisp:
I didn't realize when taking this pic that it showed the fold, but you can still see a very nice underside of the crust. The darker stuff at the top here is from a little sauce hitting the hot pan after the fold.
The real problem though is that the temperature dropped each time I opened the lid and recovered more slowly each time. The top of the pie didn't get the really nice char you want in a high temperature wood fire cook.
Complicating matters here is that in doing further research on options for hanging different foods for very high temperature tandoori-style cooks, I ran into more information than I had seen before about the demise of the original Kamado Company. I knew that it had gone out of business, but it turns out that the major cause of it dying was huge problems with product quality and customer service. There even came to be websites dedicated "Kamado Fraud". So far, I haven’t encountered any of the quality issues others have seen.
It turns out that just a few months before I joined AR, @Attjack had asked about a used Kamado he found and Max Good chimed into that thread with a review warning against these cookers. I just found the link to the Attjack thread here today when I was looking at some of the sordid past of the company.
So now I'm questioning whether this cooker actually is capable of the 700 degree-plus range touted for it. I know that BGE's and other Kamado-style cookers can do that, so this is confusing for me. I will check to make sure tomorrow, but I'm 95% sure that airflow at the intake is not inhibited by ash buildup. Also , somehow I now have a stainless steel fire basket even though it came with a thick ceramic one. I'm thinking I may have scored with customer service with the old company and they provided the wire upgrade when the ceramic basket cracked but I really don't remember. Maybe the unit came with both fire baskets even though the packing slip doesn’t mention the stainless one.
Before giving up entirely on the cooker going to high temps, I want to play with temps a few more times. Next time I'll leave the cooker lid open while the fire gets really roaring through most of the basket. I used two Tumbleweeds to start today and closed the lid shortly after the weeds were gone but with only those two areas having small amounts of flame and more red glow. My understanding is that we want glowing lump everywhere more than we want big flames, I'll try widespread big flames next.
The other thing I want to try is to get the temp even into this 575 range and use the IR gun on the inside walls immediately after opening the lid. I'm starting to suspect that whatever material was used to build this thing doesn't really have the thermal properties it was advertised to have. The walls should be radiating heat to the point that the temperature on the dome thermometer doesn't drop as much as I saw today with these multiple openings of the lid or at least the temp should rebound quickly. I fully anticipated that the cooker would stay really hot long enough for me to cook several pies tonight. I get the feeling the wall material is a good insulator (I did think to use the IR gun on the outside walls and they only got to about 160 near the end of the cook time for the pie) but it just doesn't absorb and re-radiate heat.
I'm open to suggestions on things to try, both in terms of trying to get this beast to higher temps and for tests to do to check out my suspicions on the walls not radiating. For those of you with BGE's, Primo's, Kamado Joes, Kamado Komodo or any other similar cookers, I'm especially interested in any observations you might have on what is going on here and if I can get this thing to do what I want. If any of you have taken an IR temp of an inside wall during a high temp cook, that would be very interesting, along with your observations on temperature recovery time on the lid thermometer.
At least for me, this is still an outstanding, reliable cooker even if it can’t do the high temp stuff.
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