• I cook so that Vanessa, my wife, does not have to.  She is a great cook but does not enjoy cooking.
• I cook for self-defense.  How so?  Ever found a finger in your chile at Wendy’s or a clump of human hair in your hot dog?  Me neither, I plan to keep it that way.
• I cook to try new things.  Lets face it you can only get so much variety in local joints, especially in a little town.  If I want good food at a reasonable price I will have to be making it myself.
• I cook because its a challenge.  Once in a while a dish comes up or someone asks me to make something I have never made or even eaten and its a challenge to get it right.
• I cook because well fed people are happy people.
• I cook because it relaxes me.  I sit at a computer all day and think about food, when I finally get home cooking is my way to wind down and relax.
• I cook so that when I work out I have something to think about…whatever shall I have for dinner after I am finished abusing my body?
• Finally, I cook because I like to eat.

Why do you cook?  Why don’t you cook?  Let me k now I look forward to hearing from all of you!

With that out of the way, lets get down to it, rarely do I write about anything other than food and in a strange far out way this will be related to food.  For quite sometime now my passion for technology and food have collided and I have been working on building out my Digital Cook book and working on and iPad app to accommodate it.  Recently while I was out of town the server on which the majority of this application resided bit the dust or at least the drive with the data one did.  As a person who should know better I have no excuse, but, none the less the data was not backed up.  There was one copy of the database and the data in it.  Fail.  With options running out and not wanting to pay to have the data professionally recovered I took a last ditch effort to recover the data myself.  Much to my surprise it worked.

Thankfully when I built the machine I used identical drives I had laying around.  Because of this I could swap the platters from one drive to the other and that is what I did.  I took the platter (the CD looking thing that lives inside a hard drive and holds all the data) and installed it in the working drive, after removing its platter.  I then tore into my network attached storage chassis, removed the drive in there and plugged in my Fraken-drive.  Bam, disk spun up and Windows recognized it.  Pulled my data off and let out a squeal of delight.  All of my hard work has been saved.  As a by product I have some pictures and videos of the process someone is bound to appreciate.

Moral of the story is BACK UP YOUR DATA.  I will be doing that first and foremost on my new server configuration to avoid the sense of panic upon realizing you have to start over.

I will be keeping in mind the how simply the addition of Whipping Cream brought boxed Mac N Cheese from barely edible to near enjoyable.

Well when I went out to place the cheese in the smoker there was a faint wisp of smoke trickling out of the smoker and so I placed the cheese in the smoker and walked away.  I came back about a half an hour later only to find that the temperature was percisely where I had left it however, the smoke was no longer happening.  It appears that the temperature controller maintains such tight control on the smoker temperature that the element is not left on for a long enough period at 100ºF for smoke to continually be made.  Noticing this I bumped the temperature up to 110ºF and again had some smoke and left it to do its magic.  Once again I returned to find no smoke, however, at this point I lowered the temperature back to 100ºF walked away and came back 1 hour later to retrieve my cheese.

And to my surprise the cheese did have a light smokey flavor, not like I had hoped for but none the less a smokey flavor.  So my attempt was not a complete failure, I have reaffirmed that the temperature controller works really well, however, I have a little smoker problem to deal with.

All in all this was a success and while I contemplate ways to make a smokey 100ºF smoker run, I will munch on my lightly smoked cheese.

I love meat, juicy, tender fall off the bone type of meat and a while back I decided I would like to be able to smoke meat without using my Weber Kettle grill as a make shift smoker. So in a possibly less than ideal state of mind I decided that I would like an electric smoker, really I just wanted a smoker but found and electric one on Craigslist and bought it without thinking about it enough.  I ended up with a Brinkmann Gourmet Electric Smoker. Once I got it home, I cooked up some mighty fine grub, but noticed Brinkmann really gives you no method to tame this beast.  It can cook up some wicked fish or BBQ with the risk of the fluctuating temperatures murdering a otherwise perfectly acceptable piece of meat, so I stuff it back in the corner of the garage and bought a charcoal version of the same from a friend, then a propane conversion kit for that to make impulse smokes a little more possible.

Well that was all well and good until I decided that there will come a time when I will need more than 1 smoker, or I will want to smoke something (cheese) below the conceivable temperature range of the other smoker or something delicate (fish, and I like smoked fish) and I decided I needed to tame this bright red machine from Brinkmann.  That is when I consulted the Google and was offered up a couple of options.  The first was well so painfully obvious I about smacked myself upside the head, add a thermostat!  An example of this can be found here.  The idea of the thermostat, was well simple and seemed like a good idea, you dial in the temperature and then just leave it set until your food is done or you need to add chips.  Great!

My problem was I wanted intelligent temperature control, I wanted something to control temperature and predict ahead how the element would heat the smoker and shut off the burner before we reached and blew by our target temperature.  So I was on the cyber prowl again and found an excellent tutorial of how to use a PID controller to intelligently control the temperature in a smoker.  That article can be found here.  It was to be the perfect solution at around a $100 it was far more than I had paid for my smoker initially, but it had blinky lights and a couple of temperature readouts and looked like overkill.

Well I had my options and I decided to go the PID route and ended up using the following parts:

• Auber Instruments 1/16 DIN PID Temperature Controller – $44.50
• Auber Instruments 25A Solid State Relay – $15.00
• K Type Thermocouple with 4″ probe – $11.95
• K Type Thermocouple panel mount – $4.90
• A terminal strip from Radio Shack
• A project box from Radio Shack
• A power tool replacement cord from Home Depot
• An extension cord end from Home Depot
• Hole Grommets for cord pass through
• A scavenged CPU cooler for SSR heat sink
• Some misc. bolts to hold cooler on SSR
• Thermal compound for SSR to heat sink contact

All of that came to around $80 when all said and done, and then came assembly which was not hard but after taping up the project box with masking tape and marking out my cutouts.  I grabbed the Dremel, cutout all the holes to mount the required components, drilled some holes in the lid for the cooler to mount to over the SSR and wired the beast up.  In the end I was glad for the panel mount connector for the thermocouple, it will allow the thermocouple to be mounted to the smoker and the controller to be stored elsewhere.  I followed the directions found in this article to assemble the controller, after all I am a programmer not an electrician.  It was really quite easy and when I gave it the trial run and auto tune recommended by the manufacturer I couldn’t have been more happy.

Once the controller was dialed in it had no trouble holding the temperature +/-1°F inside of my garage, external factors may force more deviation from this such as wind or sunshine but I could easily hold temperatures as low as 140°F in my trial and right up at 225°F the temperature remained steady.  My Maverick thermometer (although a little slower than the thermocouple) confirmed the accuracy of the unit.

The only thing that remains to be done is mounting the thermocouple permanently in the smoker body, while this is an easy task, choosing a location that will not interfere with the contents of the smoker remains quite a challenge.

Hopefully tomorrow I will get the chance to smoke something with this new found control over the previously untamed Brinkmann Gourmet Electric Smoker.

What’s smokin’: A 6ish pound pork tenderloin rubbed with Penzey’s BBQ 3000
What’s it smokin’ in: Brinkmann (El Cheapo) Charcoal with Afterburner mod (available at GasSmoker.com)
What’s makin’ smoke: Apple and hickory chunks intermixed

The meat waiting for the smoker:

The smoker with meat inside.  Hank Hill would be proud.

Saucing the loin a little on the grill with a Pomegranate BBQ Sauce.

All done.

I digress so after getting the smoker going in less than ideal smoking weather I popped the fatty on the smoker and let it smoke for 1…2…3…did I mention it was windy…4 hours until the thermometer read 165.

Once it was done I pulled it off, let it rest and then dug in.

All said and done it was worth the effort, my tomato basil fatty has been my first fatty but certainly not my last.  It took a chunk of the day to smoke this fatty over charcoal and bits of hickory and cherry but it was worth it.  It was a culinary delight and an arterial nightmare.

Disclaimer:  While I may rave that this was in fact a delicious meal it would not be right to omit the opinion of my wife, who claims it was good but salty, it was certainly a man meal.

1.The Pork Sausage all rolled out.

2. The bacon weave found out after all was said and done a much easier looking way to accomplish the same thing.

3. Getting the fillings ready to the tomato basil fatty

4. The Fatty ready for the smoker…

It almost looks tasty enough to eat right now, but in the morning I shall throw it in the smoker and try it for lunch.  Check back later tomorrow for an update.

Because of this when giving him his pill in some bread tonight he provided us with some humerous entertainment I thought I would share.