For the first time in umpteen years, I’m solidly below 230 lbs (I briefly dipped below 230 in 2007 or so, the last time).

I’m using the rather innovative and revolutionary diet of Eat Right and Exercise. Otherwise known as Consume Fewer Calories Than You Burn.

Namely, I’m biking to work every day it isn’t raining, cut out junk food, cut down on portions, and have focused on eating lots of veggies and fruits.

At right is my means of tracking weight, the Withings Wifi Body Scale.

The Withings scale is WiFi enabled. Thus, if you stand on the scale for about 5 seconds after your reading stabilizes, the scale will submit your weight to a central web site where a (rather bloated and slow) Flash app can be used to monitor your weight.

However, there is also a fairly nice iPhone app. The scale can also be configured to tweet your weight (my 174 lbs target is actually below what I’d consider success @ about 190), as well.

I also briefly used the Lose It! application. It is actually a very well designed, easy to use, application for tracking your caloric intake.

Beyond all the techno-goop, the Withings scale is simply very well engineered. It has a striking, minimal, design and feels quite solid. Setup was a breeze and use is quite intuitive. It can track multiple people’s weight and automatically identifies each user by their weight (though I have no idea how it would deal with two people who have similar weights).

A while ago, I took up bread making. The goal being to master turning out a consistently awesome loaf of your basic bread using a simple mix – knead – rise – knead – rise – bake recipe; standard fare directly from the first chapter in Rulhman’s Ratio.

From the first loaf, I was able to turn out a generally yummy hunk of bread, but the texture was just a bit dense.

At the moment, I bake all of my bread in a cast iron dutch oven; 30 minutes lid on, 40 or so minutes without the lid. This leads to a wonderful crisp crust and soft interior.

As it turns out, my bread was too dense simply because I wasn’t letting the dough rise long enough on the second rise! Extending the second rise not only fixed the density issue, but I’ve also now cut my ingredients by a third because my existing quantities would actually cause the bread to lift the lid on the cast iron dutch oven!

At right is proof! The dimples on that particular loaf (and weird ridge around the top) were created by the lid of the dutch oven which has little pointy bits from which condensation drips off during cooking.

Details

To fill the 7 qt cast iron dutch oven, I had starting with 833 grams of flour, 500 grams of water, and 17 grams of salt. Now that I have the rise figured out, I’m using 700 grams of flour, 420 grams of water, and 14 grams of salt. To this, I typically add some mix of rosemary, honey, sugar, and/or something citrusy, depending on mood.

Most recently, I have started substituting beer for almost all of the water. It adds a bit of richness to the bread, but otherwise doesn’t change the recipe.

Or, to be precise (literally, the order is the way it is on purpose!), the exact steps are as follows. Note that no amounts are given because this is a ratio based recipe. You can scale it up or down at will. The foundation is 5 parts flower to 3 parts water (or, more precisely, 50 parts flour to 30 parts water to 1 part salt, but salt isn’t that critical beyond not too much).

1. Start with the liquid — beer or water — and warm it up to about 105℉.
2. Add yeast (1 packet) and, maybe, some sugar.
3. Mix well to activate the yeast.
4. Add flour, then salt (prevents the salt from poisoning the yeastie-beasties).
5. Add honey/rosemary/olive oil/lemon zest/nothing, depending on flavorings you wish to add. If you add something that is very liquid in any significant quantity, consider adding more flour.
6. Throw the mix on your stand mixer and let it knead away on a relatively low setting for about 10 minutes (yes, 10 minutes). If you don’t have a stand mixer, get busy with your hands and enjoy the exercise.
7. Drop the dough on floured surface and knead it by hand. Punch it. Fold it. Pull it. Don’t be gentle.
8. Once kneaded for a bit, the dough should be fairly stretchy without breaking. If not, beat on it some more!
9. Lightly oil your mixing bowl, drop the dough into it and cover with a damp cloth. Let rise in a warm spot for a couple of hours. Actual rise times may vary — you are looking for an approximate doubling in size.
10. Drop the dough back on your floured surface and beat it up some more! Not too much. Enough to reduce the volume by about half again.
11. Oil your cast iron dutch oven and drop the dough in to rise a second time. Put the lid on and place the pot someplace warm. A sunbeam works very well.
12. Let the dough rise until it has at least doubled. Be patient. I wasn’t and that was my mistake.
13. Preheat oven to 450.
14. Lightly salt the surface of the dough, maybe drizzle some oil on it. I don’t slice the surface of the bread because it ends up deflating the bread too much.
15. Shove the cast iron pot, lid on, into the oven and bake for 30 minutes.
16. Turn the oven down to 400, remove the lid, and continue baking for another 40 minutes.
17. Pull from the oven, drop the loaf out of the pan, and let sit for at least 45 minutes or so.
18. Enjoy with butter or, frankly, just plain.

Truly, nothing beats the smell and taste of a freshly baked loaf of simple bread from your own kitchen.

Now that I have this part figured out, my next step is to branch out from basic loaves to other shapes. As well, I’m going to start a wild sourdough culture in my backyard and see what kind of bread results.

I have always wanted to brew beer and have a number of friends that do. The results are almost always delicious and always interesting.

Having helped with the bottling process, I decided long ago that if I were to ever brew beer, I would not use bottles. Instead, I would rack into a keg and dispense from there.

Obviously, I needed a kegerator!

To force the issue, I brewed my first batch of beer a few months ago knowing that i would have to figure out a means of serving said beer from a corny keg before I could enjoy the fruits of my brewing labors. A 5 gallon “corny keg” is the standard vessel used in soda fountains and it has two “ball locks” on the top, one for the gas line and one for the liquid out line.

I actually looked into simply purchasing a kegerator outright, but they were expensive, generally inefficient, and often designed very poorly.

Thus, I decided to build my own.
In particular, I started with a 5 cubic foot GE chest freezer
($170 at Home Depot). Chest freezers are super efficient and a 5 cubic foot freezer can handle two kegs at once with room left over for more than a case of bottles and cans.

Obviously, a freezer is designed for freezing things and the thermostat can’t be set for the ideal keg temperature of 38 degrees. Thus, I added an external temperature controller.

The freezer plugs into the controller and the controller plugs into the wall. The controller has a probe at the end of a thin tube that goes inside the freezer. As seen at the left, I attached the probe to the freezer’s wall with a bit of gorilla tape. It is spaced off of the wall by styrofoam so that the probe is measuring the internal air temperature.

The tank is a 5 pound CO2 tank with a dual gauge pressure regulator and — very important — a shut-off valve with backflow prevention device. The backflow prevention device prevents liquid from entering, and ruining, the regulator.

An angle bracket supports the weight of the tank while the tiny bungie cords anchor the tank to the kegerator. It is critical that the tank remain upright or else you’ll end up with liquid CO2 in your regulator and gas lines, thus ruining the regulator and quite likely the gas lines, too!

A new tank runs around $60 and the regulator is typically less than $50. The CO2 tank will cost around $12-$20 to refill and it will last approximately forever before it needs refilling. I might need to refill it once a year. Maybe.

Ben Holt suggested a neat hack; stick a scale on the tank holder such that you know, by weight, when that 5# of CO2 is about gone. The high pressure gauge is close to useless in that it’ll read about 750-850PSI until almost all of the liquid CO2 is gone, then the pressure drops rather rapidly.

In the picture, you can see that there is a clear hose connected to the tank and then a red hose connected to that. The output port on the tank had a fairly small barbed connector so I needed a step-up adaptor to go from the 3/16″ interior diameter clear hose to the 5/16″ ID red gas hose.

The plumbing inside is pretty straightforward. The gas line comes in, is split and goes to the two kegs. The output of each keg is attached to one of the taps. As I go, I’ll be adding quick disconnects to the various lines such that I can swap different kinds of kegs with different couplers without having to re-plumb anything.

The wooden surround around the top serves a couple of purposes.

First, I can drill holes in it and mount stuff to it. While I could drill holes in the freezer door or walls, there is the risk of damaging the cooling mechanism and, in any case, drilling through the freezer would be a big pain to do cleanly. As well, by doing it this way, I can easily take off the wood and revert the freezer to a plain old chest freezer.

Secondly, the stacked two-by-fours add a considerable amount of height to the freezer. This makes it easier to plumb inside and allows me to use a wider range of kegs and couplers (the adaptor that goes between the keg and the rest of the system), including higher profile mechanisms.

The wooden surround is grossly overbuilt, as is typical of any project I take on. Not only are those solid 2x4s, but they are glued together and have dowels tying them together and have metal plates screwed to them.

Between fridge and surround is about an inch of insulation tape that is normally used to insulate the interface between a camper shell and pickup truck.

To attach the wooden surround to the top of the kegerator, I cut aluminum angle strips down to size and bolted them to the back of the freezer where the hinges originally attached. Since those bolts originally held the lid and were designed to withstand the leveraged forces of opening the lid, they are really strong and, again, I avoid drilling holes in the freezer itself.

The lid’s hinges are then screwed to the surround.

The weight of the lid, surround, and tank hanger is enough to press down the surround on the insulation material and provides a very good, airtight, seal.

Oh, and did I mention that the surround is way overbuit? Yeah. The bolts at the corner are actually about 4″ long.

I initially used the screw style hose clamps. They suck. I have since moved to nylon clamps, as seen on either side of the quick disconnect on the gas line.

The coupler in the picture is a Sankey, the most common keg coupler used. Note that Anchorsteam’s full sized kegs actually use a different coupler. It seems that most brewers use the more common Sankey — D system coupler, as it is otherwise known — for their 5 gallon kegs specifically because said kegs are often used in home kegerators of which most come with that particular coupler!

The 5 gallon kegs run around $50-$100, depending on the beer within. That is about 40 16 ounce pours or slightly more than 2 cases of beer. Thus, really, buying the 5 gallon kegs isn’t really much cheaper than buying a a couple of cases of bottles. However, the quality is much better and, obviously, returning an empty keg is a hell of a lot more environmentally friendly than recycling 2 cases of empty bottles!

At the moment, my taps have undecorated plain black levers. I’ll have to get some stylish handles at some point but this will do for now!

When tuned properly, the kegerator delivers beautiful pours of ice cold beer. Nothing like having fresh beer on tap in your garage! And, yes, beer on tap really does taste better than anything from a bottle!

The system isn’t quite perfect yet; like any good hack, it’ll be refined over time.

• I need to insulate the inside of the wood surround. While the wood doesn’t conduct that much heat, there is a noticeable temperature gradient within the unit and I both want to maximize efficiency and I might actually add a small fan to stir the air to ensure a universally even temperature. As well, the first pour tends to be foamy because the beer in the tube is actually warmed a bit!

• Need a bottle cap catcher.

• Need something better than towels on the floor to catch drips off the taps.

All in all, though, the kegerator works quite well and a number of my friend’s spouses are mad at me because they know such a hack will soon be taking up space in their house!

Not bad for about $400!

I picked up all the beer-specific parts from Micro Matic. They have a wonderful catalog. If I didn’t already have the tank from my forced carbonation adventures, I would have started with a two-tap kegerator conversion kit, though that does come with 2 D system (Sankey) couplers which may be overkill if you plan on keeping a keg of homebrew on tap most of the time.

Update: As per a suggestion in the comments, I moved from the 8″ or so beer line on the coupler to a 5′ 3/16″ ID line. Vast and huge foam reduction. Big improvement. Thank you!! I’m still running a short line on the homebrew keg as foamage on that particular keg is not a problem. In the end, I might end up with several different length tubes with quick disconnects in the middle to enable fine tuning without ripping everything apart.

If you are lucky enough to have a gas range, you already know the joys of a dead even heat source that can range from medium-low to blowtorch. None of that cyclic all-on/all-off nonsense of the typical electric range, for example.

However, “low heat” is not something in the typical gas range’s vocabulary. On our Viking, the lowest setting on the smallest burner will keep a small pot of water at a rolling boil and will consistently cause a cup of rice to boil over. And it is a really low flame!

Enter the heat diffuser. A heat diffuser sits between burner and your pan or pot. It effectively acts as a heat buffer and, as the name implies, diffuser.

On a gas range like mine, it allows one to achieve the lowest simmer/heat you might want. On an electric range, a cast iron heat diffuser — you want thermal mass — will nicely even on the all-on/all-off behavior of most ranges.

At ~$20, it is a worthy tool to add to your cooking arsenal!

I have long wanted a really good toaster oven. One that had decent capacity, was versatile, and insulated such that it doesn’t lose a ton of heat when sticking food into it. As well, I can’t deal with poorly designed products and will often choose dead simple over a full featured item simply because simple is harder to screw up.

After 8 months of research and comparisons, I finally settled on the Breville BOV800XL Smart Oven. It isn’t simple and it certainly isn’t cheap, but the Breville is really quite an excellent piece of technology.

The Breville’s controls are straightforward. You select the mode first, then there are two additional dials that configure, effectively, temperature and time. For toasting, the two additional buttons select slices and darkness; seemingly silly, but it actually works quite well!

As well, the toaster oven has a convection setting and a “frozen” setting that automatically adjusts the cooking times to account for cooking frozen foods. The “frozen” button is the one feature that borders on frivolous gadgetry. Then again, cooking random frozen foods really isn’t a part of our diet. If it was, the adjustment it makes actually does make sense.

The interior capacity is large enough to bake a 13″ pizza or roast a whole chicken (though you might have to cut it into two halves). Combining decent insulation with high wattage, the Breville both heats relatively quickly, holds heat well, and the outside does get warm, but not terribly hot.

When the internal rack is in toasting position, opening the door magnetically slides the rack out a few inches. Very convenient.

All in all, the Breville is a well engineered kitchen tool. It can easily replace your toaster and can often fill in for your full sized oven while both pre-heating more quickly and using less electricity overall. And, of course, the Breville can act as a secondary oven for those times when you need two ovens.

Since the addition of the Breville to our cooking toolset, it sees daily use.

In particular, we use the Breville for:

Toast & Hot Sandwiches

Well, it is a toaster oven after all! And toast it does!

One advantage over a regular toaster is that you can toast bread of any thickness, including bagels, muffins, and the like.

Better yet, it is possible to make a delicious hot sandwich in the toaster oven without frying in a pan in butter or oil. It is just a matter of layering the meat on top of one piece of bread and the cheese on the other. Mayo, mustard, and the like can go between bread and meat/cheese, shielding it from direct heat.

Once done, slap the two halves together and your delicious sandwich is done.

Pizza

It is quite easy to throw together a quick dough, slather on some sauce, spread on some cheese and bake up a delicious pizza in the Breville. Or most grocery stores have a pre-made dough that is pretty cheap.

One of the joys of making your own pizza is that you can put whatever toppings you want on it. You would be surprised at just how delicious, say, a pear, duck breast salami, and cabernet goat cheese pizza is!

Roasting

Whether it be fingerling potatoes drizzled in olive oil and rosemary or a lemon-honey game hen, the Breville does a great job of roasting foods. It pre-heats more quickly than a regular oven and, with the insulation, holds heat well and is fairly efficient.

The Breville also does a fantastic job of cooking fish. Sole drizzled with balsamic, olive oil, and truffle salt is just wonderful.

One of the advantages of a toaster oven with a decent seal is that it holds more moisture in as there is simply less volume for the humidity to spread across. Roasted foods turn out quite deliciously juicy!

Dinner Biscuits or Bread

Often, a touch of fresh baked bread or biscuits makes a meal. The Breville does a fine job baking up a quick batch of biscuits or a freeform loaf of bread. It will do so faster than a regular oven and if you are using your oven for other purposes, the Breville can backfill to bake bread, biscuits or — even — a pie.

All in all, a great tool. I’m sure I’ll continue to use it regularly and I’m sure I’ll discover more uses over time!

For Christmas Eve, our tradition is to serve the Feast of the Seven Fishes.

This year, my parents and one of my sisters are in town. We were joined by our neighbor Ron.

As the name implies, the meal is composed of at least seven seafood dishes. Thus, a great excuse to pull out the full china settings and go for fancy table supreme!

Since my father is allergic to soft shelled seafood, this year’s feast included oysters, squid salad, clams, mussels, scallops, sole, and freshwater bass.

The first course was oysters on the half shell. More specifically, we picked up a dozen Kumamoto oysters as the fishmonger indicated they were the best of the three available oysters.

Now, I had no idea we were having oysters until I was handed an oyster knife and told that I would need to shuck the oysters! I’ve never shucked an oyster in my life. Beyond being very tasty, the Kumamoto oysters are apparently one of the more difficult to open (some of the damned things have a remarkable resemblance to a rock).

So, a challenge and a learning experience. By the end of it, I was starting to actually gain some competence. And, more importantly, I didn’t stab myself once! No blood, even!

And, yes, they were truly a delicious oyster!

For the first course of the actual sit-down meal, Christine made a scungilli salad.

We didn’t have scungilli (sliced conch), so Christine made it with squid instead.

Lightly blanched squid served with mint, italian parsley, lemon juice, minced garlic and a touch of parmesan cheese.

Next were steamed mussels and clams.

I minced a bunch of garlic and scallions which were then sauteed in rice oil with a touch of olive oil. To this I added chopped basil and thyme. In went about a cup of white wine and, once at a boil, the mussels and clams were added.

The lot was left at a rolling boil for about 5 minutes.

Served with a crusty sour dough bread for mopping up the delicious liquid.

For the next dish, I pan seared scallops.

I basically did the same recipe I have used before.

Additionally, though, I deglazed the pan with white wine and then drizzled the boiling hot result over the scallops covered in freshly grated parmesan cheese. This melted the cheese and added a bit of a delicious gravy to the dish.

For the main course, we served two different styles of fish.

This is stuffed sole that my mom made. It contained finely minced red pepper, green pepper, scallions (including tops), garlic, and celery that was sauteed in butter. That was then thickened with butter, flour, and white wine. To this Mom added heavy cream just prior to pulling off the stove. Once off the stove, Mom added finely chopped parsely and bread crumbs. An egg, worcestesire, paprika and some salt were then stirred in.

This was then wrapped in sole, tied with a scallion top, and baked at 400 degrees for about 20 minutes or so.

The results were every bit as good as it looks. The sole was moist and tender with delicious veggies inside.

Along with the sole, Mom made a whole freshwater bass roasted with veggies. This style of preparation is common on the Cayman islands. Instead of pumpkin — Cayman squash — she used a butternut squash from my garden.

The result is a moist and flaky fish that is flavorful throughout.

All in all, an amazing meal enjoyed with the family and a friend!

One of the problems with the Chemex coffee maker is that it is utterly useless for making more coffee than you plan on consuming in one sitting simply because it does nothing to keep the coffee warm! We have guests coming in over the holiday break and I want to be able to make a pot of chemex, pour it into a thermos, pour some more hot water over the grounds (if you use enough grounds, this works great!!) and then our that into the thermos, too.

On the recommendation of one with a clear caffeine addiction, I picked up the Thermos Nissan 51 Ounce Stainless Steel Carafe pictured at left.

It does a brilliant job! I made coffee at about 10AM this morning and it was still hot — not burning hot, but hot enough — after 5pm in the afternoon! Better yet, the coffee maintained its flavor just about as well as one could expect! The caffeine addict that recommended the carafe indicated that pretty much all of Thermos’s Nissan line are top notch, too.

I tried putting the Chemex on a Bunn Warmer — was enticed by the name, obviously — but the combination of a hot bottom plus sides that shed heat rapidly meant that the coffee quickly turned ultra-nasty flavored. Yuck. The Bunn will prove useful; it turns out it heats water to pretty much the perfect temperature for brewing certain kinds of green tea that don’t tolerate boiling water without yielding bitter flavors!

One reason I started this weblog was as a means of taking notes such that I could use google to index my brain. Another reason, though, was that others would comment on my various postings with ideas, refinements, suggestions, and criticisms. This posting is in response to just such a contribution.

Shortly after writing the turkey fryer article, a comment hit the moderation queue suggesting that I give rice oil a try for frying a turkey. Specifically, the comment pointed to the California Rice Oil Company.

I emailed the contact on the post to ensure that it wasn’t spam and, in so doing, the company offered to send me a gallon of rice oil for review.

I’m not entirely certain how I have entirely missed rice oil in my cooking explorations, but I have. And now that said company introduced me to the oil, I’m never going back.

It is a fantastic product. Better yet, it also appears to be one of the healthiest oils around (see the references).

I love to fry foods and, with the turkey burner or deep fryer, I can fry outside without stinking up the house. A common misconception is that fried foods are greasy & unhealthy. Starting with a good quality & healthy oil, neither is actually true if the fry is executed properly.

In general, the key to frying is to get the grease or oil hot enough that the waters on the surface of the food boil quickly and either seal the food or cook whatever batter or coating is on the food rapidly. Too low of a temperature and it will be greasy.

And that is what I find most amazing about rice oil.

Olive oil has a ridiculously low smoke point of 360℉. At or near that temperature, olive oil will start to smoke and, more importantly, it will start to break down, both changing flavor and greatly impacting the nutritional elements in the oil.

Canola, Peanut and Soy all have smoke points around 450℉, much more reasonable for frying. But all have nutritional deficits or somewhat questionable manufacturing practices (for example, Canola oil is largely produced from genetically modified crops).

Grape seed oil has a very high smoke point of 485℉, but is not balanced across the fats and is very expensive.

Rice oil has a ridiculously high smoke point of 490℉. The pan in the picture was at somewhere north of 450℉. I have never cooked with an oil that wouldn’t be smoking or changing flavor at that temperature!

First up? Tater tots.

I started with frozen [organic] tots and fried them for a few minutes in the very hot oil. The result was a tasty tot and the oil imparted a light, slightly nutty, flavor.

Delicious. And at that heat, the tots fried quickly and were crunchy on the outside, steaming hot on the inside and not at all greasy.

As much as it is important to use the heat of the fry to boil off and sear the outside of the food, the goal is to also gain a seal that will hold the heat in to effectively steam the insides, too.

Worked beautifully.

With the Tots, I also made some pan friend chicken thighs.

For a coating, I used a mix of bread crumbs, flour, salt, pepper, and some random spices (ginger & dried lemon peel being the key ingredients). The thighs were soaked in soy milk with bourbon for a bit (no, really, soy milk & bourbon — works beautifully), then thrown into a plastic container and shaken with the dry coating mixture.

Into the oil they went, to be fried for a couple of minutes on each side. In the future, I’ll put a wire rack on the bottom of the pan to prevent the chicken from sitting on the pan as it had a couple of slightly burnt spots.

Like the tots, the result was a piece of chicken that was crispy on the outside and juicy on the inside without being greasy at all.

Amazingly, the oil came out clean. If I had a container handy, I could easily have filtered the fairly abused oil — it was hot for quite a while — and reused it again, likely more than once!

I have since stir-fried with the oil and it performed spectacularly well. I used a cast iron wok on top of the turkey burner and was able to cook at a much higher temperature than ever before. The results were delicious and I’ll write up my stir fry recipe soon (as it is stupid-easy and results in food that even my picky son devours, veggies and all).

Surprisingly, the rice oil also works well as a dressing oil. It can be used to dip bread, maybe adding a little fresh rosemary and ground parmesan, quite nicely. The oil also makes for a good base for vinegar-and-oil salad dressings, though the lightness of flavor means that you need a lot less vinegar to balance the oil.

All in all, a great product. I fully admit complete ignorance in not having discovered or tried it before. My thanks go to the California Rice Oil Company for both making me aware of rice oil and for sending me some to try!!

Just found yet another use for my turkey burner. Roasting chile peppers! Worked flawlessly and was a heck of a lot easier than a plumber’s torch.

This kind of gas burner is just incredibly useful for anyone who enjoys cooking. It is designed to be able to heat a pot of grease up to the 350°F necessary to deep fry a turkey (which I have never tried). Thus, the burners put out a truly awesome amount of heat!

Note: The Underwriter’s Laboratory will not certify turkey fryers at all. Why? Because people are stupid and need to be protected from themselves when using powerful tools. When frying, it is terribly easy to cause a grease fire. So, fry away from your house and use the nifty good-eats style turkey crane. And have a grease friendly fire extinguisher on hand.

Or just do what I do and don’t actually fry turkeys on it!

You can find the burners at any decent hardware store. If you do, make sure it has a few features (all of which the burner at left has — except the pot):

Flat Top Surface

The top of the burner should be flat. This is critical if you want to put something on it that is burgerbigger than the burner (like a grill). Yes, I was hungry when I wrote this.

Cast Two-Piece Burner

The burner, itself, should be two pieces of cast iron held together by a bolt through the middle. The burner will get stuff spilled on it and it will rust or corrode. The two piece design makes it trivial to take it apart for cleaning. A wire brush on an electric drill makes cleaning trivial.

Adjustable Air Vents

This is needed to be able to tune the flame. Not just for maximum heat output, but sometimes also for maximum flame height.

Long hose with valve on or after regulator

The gas coming out of the tank is relatively high pressure. The burner’s secondary regulator will take care of regulating down to something more reasonable. The valve after or integrated into the regulator is critical because the pressure off the tank, while high, will change considerably as the tank empties. That and it is nearly impossible to make fine adjustments on the high pressure side of the line.

Stainless Steel Pot

If you get a kit, try to find one with a stainless steel pot. It will last longer and corrode less than aluminum.

Stable Design

Some burners have legs that go straight down or are relatively tall. Stupid. Ideally, you want a three or four legged burner with relatively wide set legs. If three legs, they should spread quite wide for stability (like the one to the left).

OK — so you have the beast of a burner. What can you do with it? I’m sure there is more — comments welcome — but these are just some of the things I have done with mine:

Crab Boil

Well, duh!

Beermaking

The burner does a wonderful job of quickly bringing a large volume of water up to boil.

Charcoal Lighter

I like using a chimney starter, but no longer have a consistent source of newspaper to stuff in it. I simply toss the chimney starter on top of the turkey burner and it’ll get the coals up to temp in short order and a lot less smoke.

Cooking in a Wok

You can find a really large cast iron wok for less than $30. The turkey burner spits enough BTUs to generate the extreme heat required for proper asian stir fries and the like.

Seasoning Cast Iron

Properly seasoning cast iron requires taking a high heat oil up to its smoke point in the pan. This can be dangerous as it is quite easy to go too far and end up with an oil fire. Even if you don’t end up with a fire, it is stinky and using a turkey burner gets the stink out of the house. Which brings me…

Get the Mess & Stink Out of The House

A number of open-pan recipes — usually involving frying — will often leave a bit of a funk in the house. Or they just darned messy. The turkey burner works great as a high-heat stove burner. If your pan is too small to fit without fear of falling in, toss a grill on top of the burner, under the pan. Obviously, this works very well for deep or shallow frying.

Skinning Chile Peppers

Toss a grill on the burner and fire it up with a nice tall flame that comes through the grill. Roll peppers around in the flame until blackened on the outside, then toss ‘em into a paper bag and fold over the top and let them sit for 10 to 15 minutes. If done right — it isn’t hard — the skins will wipe off with a towel.

I’m sure I’ll discover tons of other uses over the coming years.

I used to be a complete french press fiend. However, the combination of the tedium of cleaning with the potential, now largely considered true, of increased cholesterol pushed me over to drip. (Espresso is like a pet snake — awesome when I get experience someone else’s but I ain’t gonna deal with that crap on a daily basis).

I tried a couple of electric drip pots but they pissed me off. The first featured a carafe that would drip coffee all over no matter how you poured and the second was optimized towards ensuring maximal grounds in your coffee cup.

Disgusted with technology, I decided to go the luddite route. Simple as possible. Carafe. Filter holder. Filter. Done.

In looking around, the Chemex Coffeemakers kept popping up. Gorgeous, simple design. Given the raves I read about the chemex coffeemakers, I decided to give one a try (like the one at left) and, also given reviews, decided to compare Chemex filters with a gold plated reusable coffee filter.

End result?

The Chemex + the Chemex filters produce the smoothest cup of drip coffee I have ever had. Flat out delicious. Start with a really good bean, freshly ground, and the Chemex consistently delivers an amazing cup of joe.

Frankly, I don’t believe for a second that it is the Chemex, itself, that is imparting such quality to the coffee. It is really the filter and the Chemex is just a gorgeously designed carafe to carry it.

In particular, the Chemex filters are a surprisingly heavy paper that seems to do a brilliant job of filtering both the really fine bits of the ground beans (which the metal filters let through), but also the oils and other nasty bits that contribute to the bitter flavors (and, potentially, cholesterol).

Frankly, coffee through the metal reusable filters flat out suck by comparison.

I have since bought a second Chemex for the office and have picked up a couple of Chemex for friends who have been amazed by the quality of the resulting coffee.

Again — the filters do seem to be the key (as long as you are brewing into a non-reactive vessel). The filters can be found online and at both esoteric hardware stores and your more obsessed coffee shops (Barefoot Cafe, for example — awesome place, coffee obsessed).

Highly recommended.

Update: I’m not interested in “fixing” french press or espresso. Espresso is too damned fiddly and I don’t want that many tubes, pipes, pumps and boilers between me and my coffee in the AM. The Aero-Press is an awesome contraption but, again, not interested. French Press with a filter sounds double-plus-fiddly & annoying.

No, I’m not trying to convince anyone that drip is superior, just that the Chemex filtered drip is superior to other drip.

I will, however, be perfectly happy to test drive a cup of coffee in any form, if you want to demonstrate the awesomeness of your extraction device & beans.