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In KK Bread Making Tips and Tricks, @Pequod posted about his new Brød & Taylor Sourdough Home, a temperature controlled chamber for ideally maintaining a sourdough culture. That is a long and interesting thread, that devolves into speculation about my cannabis use and so forth. The Komodo Kamado forum has great advice from some very serious cooks, and sometimes that advice draws in visitors who decide to stay and buy a Komodo Kamado, and become valued compatriots. So I thought it would be worthwhile to start a new thread focused on the Sourdough Home. I bought one immediately. The short-term payoff is being able to feed one's starter less frequently without inducing a refrigerator coma, then get it nice and warm for making bread. My first bread this way was a technical flop but the best tasting bread I've made in years. This makes it clear that the long-term payoff is learning to bake with better controls. Sure, people have made wine for centuries before electronics, but they had access to stable temperature caves, and they adapted their methods to reliable conditions. Modern wine is arguably better, in part because one can control conditions precisely. I'm convinced that one can learn to make astounding bread by learning how to use the Sourdough Home to control conditions. The Sourdough Home is not silent, and even in sleep mode a brighter light source than all of my other LEDs combined. If you live in a studio apartment, you'll likely end up pitching it out the window. An internet search reveals that a 3/4 liter "743 Weck Mold Jar" with a wooden lid is an ideal starter container (Amazon). Remove the silicone lid seal, so gases can escape. I like mine. After briefly searching for a bread proofing chamber, I realized that dough for my single loaves should fit in the Sourdough Home itself, if I could find the right container. I got lucky, and found the Airscape Glass Coffee Canister (Medium 7-Inch) with a two quart capacity. It exactly fits the Sourdough Home, with a similar wooden lid and a silicone seal one removes. It looks like a matched pair with the Weck starter jar, as shown in the photos. I've never had much luck with refrigerator dough rises, but the Sourdough Home allows for intermediate bulk proofing temperatures. My goal now is to adapt the idea of Desem bread (as detailed for example in The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book; we already grind our own flour) to the possibilities of this equipment.  

I've made countless experiments over the years, including attempts to adopt ideas that have worked for others. I keep coming back to cast iron. One can find arbitrarily small cast iron pots with effort. The most common mode of failure I've experienced is a breach, where either the lid displaces or a space opens between the lid and pot. Now convection burns the wood in the way we're trying to avoid. Thin steel deforms easily. An unsecured cast iron lid usually stays on, but smoke pots can tip as the fire shifts. I don't care how small the chances are here, I would find it unacceptable to lose a cook, particularly if it's for an event where others are depending on my BBQ. The flour paste seal for a cast iron lid is easy once one establishes a routine, and reminds me of the romance of using questionable pots in Moroccan cooking. I've never actually seen my three 1/8" holes clog, even though my wood could be in contact with the holes. A single hole would probably work, but one never wants to build a bomb, and three holes is not a liability. Do the holes need to face down? This was based on watching how one makes charcoal, where the exhaust becomes a self-sustaining flame at temperatures well above low & slow. Dunno how important "down" is, but down is better than up, and I have to point the holes some way. (I came up with the smoke pot idea after some ill-advised experiments at making charcoal...) If I had investors for a state-of-the-art BBQ restaurant in Manhattan, I'd design a method of heating wood in external chambers, and feeding the gas produced to a modified standard gas oven. I'm surprised that no one has tried this. Usually when people are unhappy with smoke pots, they're having trouble getting them going. I like starting my fires with a weed burner propane torch. For low & slow one wants a fire in one spot, so the fire doesn't run away. If one lights that spot under a smoke pot, one can arrange to get the smoke pot going too. This is fire tending, not fundamentally different from any other form of fire tending. One learns with practice. I don't give up. Alternatives? A mandatory PSA is required here, not all metals belong in a smoker. Galvanized metals in particular off-gas toxins one doesn't want near food. The poster kids here are Alaskans that fermented in seal skins for centuries, then saw Homer buckets and said "Why not?". They died of botulism, Alaska contributes a big slice of the pie chart for botulism deaths in the US. Never break with tradition without understanding what one is doing. Long ago, others followed my smoke pot experiments by building "pipe bombs", stainless steel threaded pipes with caps, with multiple holes along the bottom edge. These were expensive, but avoided the flour paste lid sealing ritual. For a bento box one would want a smaller pipe, bringing down the expense. Could one use other metals? See above. Texas oil rigger BBQ recycled job-site drums. I'd just go with stainless steel, to be sure. With several holes and ordinary wood as filler, I can't imagine sufficient pressure building to create a bomb. On the other hand, in math we observe that lack of imagination isn't a proof of anything. It was popular at my high school to pack match heads into a similar pipe, for a homemade pipe bomb. I had two classmates who kept one hand in a pocket for their senior year. I knew someone later who used better materials for an experiment at the end of a street. They survived uncaught and uninjured, but were astonished at how many nearby houses lost windows to the explosion. A reasonable design principle is that you can never design something not to break, but you can and should design how it breaks. Would pipe caps really need to screw on, or could one rig something that slid together, perhaps with enough overlap that there was no need for flour paste? Try multiple ideas, with care!

Thanks @MacKenzie The ragu di corte turned out super tasty.    

I forgot to respond to this point about olive trees being expensive.  Mine was free!  A friend gave it to me many years ago because she thought it needed to be in a greenhouse.  It was taking up too much space after a couple of years and so I planted it outdoors in the garden.  It hasn't looked back and keeps reaching for the sky.  Our escapologist cat used to tut at my husband whenever he pruned the tree to keep the kitties from using it as a bridge to the outside world.   What's even better than home grown olive wood?  Single varietal smoking apple wood chips, that's what! I had a good giggle, thinking about labelling up bags of apple chips with the name of the variety, the tree's pet name and selling them at a premium to people with more money than sense.  

😍

look what i found in my trash today. my neighbors olive tree 😂 i don't think this does well in jungle weather..

Yesterday loafs for friends. I’ve been eating a little less bread as I’m trying to keep my weight down due to BP issue 😵‍💫 But I typically feed my starter once a week and keep it in the fridge. These are just my standard loafs, nothing fancy.

Those muffins look almost as sad as the ones my wife typically buys. I made these to show her a real muffin. Problem is…I think I just signed myself up to a new weakly (not misspelled) duty. 😳 

Or perhaps just keep the "warding off evil spirits" project separate from the "cooking food" project...

@Tekobo, WOW! My mouth is watering.