Be Excellent To Each Other

Joans' first attempt at using the Sous Vide. We're already planning on getting the next meat in there, it was amazing!

Because we don’t have an oven I don’t really get much opportunity to bake. Even my bread machine broke, because why not?

Anyway, my friend bought me some flour, yeast and baking powder, knowing flour is like gold dust, because my Ma has sent me this link the day before: https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/whats- ... u-18227008

Warburtons crumpets are my actual favourite thing.

Anyway, I didn’t have a silicon egg ring, and my frying pan is too bowed to put a cutter on it, so these are more like pikelets than crumpets, but omg they are awesome.

Obviously this is pre-toasting. Just having some now. They are heaven. My friend also bought over some (real) butter. Omg.

They look amazing!

We bought ourselves a pizza oven as an anniversary present during lockdown since we couldn’t get out anywhere. It was such a good purchase, pizza night is my favourite! Anyone else got one? We went for the Ooni Koda which runs off gas since from what we read, the flavour benefit from using wood fired was very minimal. It honestly tastes like pizza you’d buy from a wood fired pizza place, it’s so tasty!

I plan on building one in my garden soon. I have been planning this for roughly five years...

Although our regular oven has a "pizza" setting which does quite a good job.

We use the pizza oven for the Weber master touch and it does an excellent job. Crispy bases, not crunchy bases.

I want homemade pizza now!

I made some mini doughnuts today. No yeast as we can’t find any anywhere. Just plain flour, baking powder and natural yoghurt. Piped and snipped into oil, deep fried until golden-brown, then fished out and rolled in sugar. I might try making a glaze next time.

@sdg that looks amazing!

@grim... I've been going to build one for at least that long, too. At least you've built your smoker!

@mr chonks What you have there are yum-yums. Looks tasty

Edit: Hmm, Google disagrees with me

@mr chonks nom nom! I resorted to Austrian yeast off Amazon. It's desperately expensive but much less so than others, and actually smells and tastes like yeast when you use it, unlike normal instant yeast!

So that justifies it somehow.

Oh, and @grim... If you think you need better or more cost effective charcoal, I highly recommend Green Olive Firewood Company's restaurant grade pure-oak. Its really good and also cheap, if you buy it by the 180kg pallet (12x15kg bags which I've been selling some of on) - works out £1/kg near enough, the smallest chunks are about the best size you get in big k, next to no dust, the biggest chunks are big, burns hot and long. I use less per grill or smoke than I did Oxford charcoal, which is worse by every metric except choice, and was my favourite until I got silly one day... And £1/kg if you buy enough to get free delivery...

Hmm, that's interesting, cheers. I prefer briquettes as they're more predictable (Heat Beads are my favourite), but at £1 per KG I'll certainly check out a bag or two.

My pizza oven was £250 and it’s fantastic so if anyone fancies treating themselves before they get round to building one, it gets an upvote from me.

Myp, those donuts look so tasty! If you are able to go out, Morrison’s are selling yeast at their bakery counter or local bakers will probably be doing the same. We got ours from the local baker, and flour.

This was my pizza tonight.

I can't find it on their website. Is it this stuff?

https://www.greenolivefirewood.co.uk/lu ... 2kg-bag-x1

Edit: @bikNorton

I can't cook on briquettes or gas, I'm guaranteed to fuck it up or take 4x longer. It's weird.

With good charcoal there's an AWFUL lot less ash.

Ah the fuckers, they've redone things.

I bought two of what this used to be: https://www.greenolivefirewood.co.uk/ba ... 2kg-bag-x6 but it *was* 15kg bags of she-oak, not the vague wording they use now, and for less money in the multibuy.

"NEW professional 12kg bags" the sneaky fucks.

AND it was free delivery over a certain amount, which is why I did a x2 order.

They've apparently downgraded their webhosting too, Christ that's a slow site now.

That's made me annoyed enough to think about sending them a strongly-worded email!

And there'll be no more selling bags on obviously, I've only got 67kg left!

I have sent them an email! A 66% price hike while being way less specific about constitution is nuts. (They do still offer free delivery for >£150 orders though)

Damn. I envy anyone with a pizza oven. My pal has a bar in a town that outlaws smoke. So he got an electric pizza oven that looks like Bender's head. The pizzas are amazing.

How. What.

I may have exaggerated a tad. I mean it's in a smoke control zone.

So...

My friend obviously didn't read the rules.

But the point is: there are some magnificent electric pizza ovens out there.

Apparently I should get in touch when I need to reorder to get the best possible price.

Oh, and they promise it's still all she-oak. Dunno why they wouldn't leave that in the website bumpf?

We made pizza outside yesterday, it was amazing! Don't think I'm quite ready to invest in a pizza oven, however.

Um... That looks like a pizza oven.

Looks like something from East of the Works to me.

Or, if I can stop auto correct fucking with me, War of the Worlds.

I have got in touch with the green olive dude to see what voucher code I get, as I sold two bags to my boss today. Only 30kg left! That's only, like, 5/6 cooks! Too close for comfort!

Perhaps it is a pizza oven belonging to someone that isn't flis, so the original post means "we made pizza in [someone's] oven, and it was great, but I'm not sure I'm ready to buy one for myself"?

Ah, that would make sense.

10% discount to £18 per 12kg bag. 50% more expensive but still way under half what Oxford charcoal want.

I'm about to commit BBQ heresy in this thread. STRAP IN.

I generally only ever use either the instant light bags of charcoal briquettes from the supermarket (or the bags of briquettes that are next to them, usually Zip brand) and I constantly find that they don't seem to actually "ash over" evenly and the cooking time certainly doesn't last as long as I think it probably should be (the instant light bag I used last weekend, for example, says "up to 2 hours" but I got barely 30 minutes out of it)

Much of this is almost certainly down to my technique, but presumably a lot of it will also just be the shitty fuel?

Here's another quick Q for the BBQ experts here. I get the idea of cooking direct vs. indirect, but I can never seem to get indirect to actually do anything. This is the BBQ I have:



I stack my briquettes on one side and spread them out a little bit, so I've got direct cooking on the one side and indirect on the other side - but it never seems to get anywhere near warm enough on the indirect side to do anything useful, as evidenced by me putting food there to cook and it just not cooking.

On the assumption I'm just being a colossal bellend, what should I be doing instead?

First question - are you closing the lid?

Yes, although subsequent research just now makes me think I'm just not leaving stuff long enough, and that because my fuel is dropping temperature too quickly it's not hot enough to really get stuff going.

I should probably invest in a chimney starter.

It sounds like all of your problems lead back to “shitty charcoal”, tbh.

On a grill like that you *really* need to make sure you get the draw working right, open the exhaust a bit more than the intake, at least until you're sure the heat is coming out of the right end.

A cheap chimney starter will do just fine and run you about £15. Heat beads are your Chef's fuel of choice but they are a little pricey and are hard to find right now. There's a place in Shrewsbury called "The Range" which will probably have some decent stuff - no idea if that's near you or not. Go for briquettes, they last longer and are more predictable. Some form of natural firelighter is handy too if you don't have newspaper and kindling (or an Advance Fire Station) handy.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/BBQ-Barbecue ... Swr15e0sVp
See?

Chimney starter on the way, along with a thermometer for me to add to the drum (as there is no thermometer built in)

Can't wait to see how I manage to fuck something up!

Don’t forget to set the return to home.

I made a foray into the world of baking, which is not my comfort zone at all. Smoked garlic butter pretzels!

Holy shit, they look and sound amazing. Did you follow a recipe?

No photos, cause we ate it all, but this is superb.

https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/chi ... izo-paella

I have a quick question re potatoes. If I:

1) take some potatoes (ones you might use for jacket potatoes), chop them up into chips and bake them in a try with a small amount of oil (just covering the bottom of the empty tray) and

2) I cut some baby new potatoes in half and boil them in water, then when cooked, I melt butter (more likely butter flavoured margarine) over them.

Aside from the fact that the new potatoes have more skin area for the same weight, is there that much difference in how healthy/unhealthy these would be?

Depends how much butter or oil you’re using and which oil.

Just enough to cover the bottom of the tray (I'd say about 15ml) and butter wise a large knob, but I'm leaving the excess melted butter behind.

When you say "healthy", what are we talking about here? Most / least calories? Nutrition?

Top tip! If you're making your own oven chips, add them to some simmering water for 5 minutes. Take them out, dry them off and let them cool before adding to the fat. Otherwise they'll be burnt black on the outside and raw in the middle.

https://www.slimmingworld.co.uk/recipes/syn-free-chips

These are decent, but take a bit of practice.

Baking potatoes will be fluffier than new potatoes and will feasibly absorb more of the oil when cooking. But the overall answer is I think that there's too many variables and it'll barely matter, just eat your chips.