Author: bryan

We returned on Sunday from a whirlwind road trip to Texas and back. We had been hankering for a road trip for a while, but we didn’t make it happen this summer, so we decided it might be fun to drive to Dallas and meet at the Hall Ranch for dinner with Leslie’s parents and mine.

The trip down contained lots of interesting moments, such as Sous’s first exposure to snow:

Death Valley:

Vegas:

as well as several more unbelievably gorgeous national parks and general southwest scenery. We made it down to Dallas on Tuesday to commence ranching, cooking, and eating of delicious foodstuffs. I think Sous was really born for the ranch. She chased the golf cart, swam in the pond, played more fetch than I’ve ever seen, and generally wore herself out. Although she only reached a tenuous peace accord with the cows.

The drive back was accomplished in two days. The first day, we drove from Dallas to Blythe, California, some 1200 miles. We thought the second day, a mere 600 miles, would be a piece of cake in comparison, but it turned out that half of Cali was driving from LA to the bay area on sunday (the other half was driving back). But we persevered, and managed to get in by about 6pm to do laundry and collapse in exhaustion.

I’m a fan of barbecue. I think since I left Texas and got more into food, my love has only intensified—both because I appreciate slow-cooked meat more and it’s so dern hard to get on the west coast.

Leslie bought me the Cook’s Illustrated guide to grilling and barbecue last year and I have done a lot of grilling, but no smoking at all. So I decided to try and make one of my favorite Texas barbecue staples: smoked pork spareribs:

I started with the dry rub, a concoction of salt, sugar, and spices that covers the outside of the ribs and is responsible for a lot of the flavor. Here’s a pic of all the ingredients from Cook’s dry rub:

I coated two full racks of pork spare ribs with the rub:

…and let them sit for a while, soaking up the goodness.

Now, technically I don’t have the right equipment for barbecue. In the ideal case I’d have a dedicated smoker, which not only separates the meat as much as possible from direct heat from the coals, but also rotates or moves it to ensure even cooking. A nice smoker is the heart of any good BBQ joint, but it’s just not accessible to the average home cook. There are ways around this of course, with dedicated home smokers or even retrofitted oil drums and old refrigerators, but I decided to go with an even simpler method (the one suggested by the Cook’s guide), which is just to use my standard kettle grill for the smoking, putting the meat as far away from a low bed of coals as possible.

The “traditional” smoke source is, of course, hickory, but that sounded a bit too southern for me. My Texas roots drew me to mesquite instead. Luckily, chips of both kinds are easy to find even at hippie west-coast grocery stores. I soaked them for an hour before I started the coals, so they would combust slowly and give off plenty of flavorific smoke.

After the chips were good and damp, I put them on a low fire on my kettle grill, dialed in the temperature as best I could to about 275F, and laid the ribs on. I added coals as necessary and turned the ribs about every 30 minutes for about three and a half hours.

I should say that 3.5 hours is way, way less time than I could have left them on for. Traditionally, ribs on a full-size smoker might cook at 225F for 8 hours or more… it’s hard to go too long, assuming that you recover the rendered fat somehow to keep the ribs from getting too dry. But, since I was limited to kinda-sorta indirect heat, I did a much shorter time at a higher temperature. The Cook’s recipe tries to mitigate some of the toughness issues this raises by specifying an hour-long rest right after the ribs leave the grill, sealed tightly in foil and paper bags. After the rest, we pulled out the ribs and added some rib sauce imported from Peggy Sue.

How’d they turn out? Well, thanks to the excellent rub, mesquite smoke, and Peggy Sue sauce, the flavor was damned good. Nice and smoky, but still with some real porkiness still coming through… “authentic.” The texture, though, wasn’t quite there. The meat was thoroughly cooked and deep red from smoking, but I think it was just too close to the coals, or maybe the coals were too hot, and so it was a bit chewy and not fall-apart tender like it should be. If I were doing it again, I’d try to plan to double the smoking time, build an even lower fire, and use a drip try to catch the rendered fat so it would stay in contact with the meat.

Coming up next: my more successful adventure with pulled pork butt!

Leslie has posted some pictures from this spring that give some indication of how things have been on a day to day basis in spring of this year. For example, on any given Saturday afternoon you’re likely to find us here:

Now that I’ve escaped from Berkeley, I have free time again. Evenings, weekends–they exist. Almost organically, my desire to do things has been recovering. So I hatched a new project: a MAME box. MAME stands for ‘multiple arcade machine emulator,’ and it’s a project to resurrect classic (and modern) arcade games by meticulously emulating the original hardware that they ran on. It can run everything from Galaga to Street Fighter. At first, I planned to do the whole shebang: a full-size arcade cabinet with a classic arcade monitor. I was inspired by Doug’s MAME cabinet that he built in college.

I couldn’t get over one serious drawback of the full cabinet: it is immobile. Done properly, it’s about 6 and a half feet tall and weighs a couple of hundred pounds. So wherever I built it would be where it stayed. Instead, I decided to build just the control panel of the cabinet, with a computer running MAME inside the control panel enclosure. The finished product would fit easily in a car, and connect via HDMI to existing A/V setups. I batted the idea around until Doug and George surprised me with a set of computer-cut wood pieces to make the box out of. From there, it all came together pretty rapidly. The finished product:

I decided to call it “The Great Wave” because I used Hokusai’s famous woodcut The Great Wave off Kanagawa as the artwork for the top surface. Here’s a description of how we (Doug, George and I) built it over about six weekends at the beginning of the year.

First, the box design and woodworking. Doug and George went to an arcade to measure the control panels of a stock Street Fighter cabinet, just to make sure the spacing of the buttons and the joysticks was legit. He transferred the measurements into a Corel Draw design for the top of the board. Here’s what it looks like:

Each player gets six buttons, which is enough for pretty much any game from an arcade or classic console. The two buttons above each player’s layout are for player one/player two start and coin insert. The three at the top are dedicated to navigating through the emulator menus.

The other five sides of the box were considerably simpler, but Doug did put a nice subtle tilt in from back to front for comfort. Designs in hand, Doug and George headed to the Sawdust Shop, a treasure trove of woodworking equipment that you can rent time in by the hour, to actually do the cutting. The precision cutting on the top was done by a computer-controlled CNC router. The material was medium-density fiberboard (MDF for short), a particle board with good strength that is cheap and easy to work with. Here’s the design loaded into the CNC computer software:

Here’s a shot of the machine starting to do the cutting:

After all the pieces were cut, Doug and George presented me with them. The intent was to then hassle me until I got off my ass and finished the rest of the project. Hardly any hassling was necessary, it turned out.

Along with the MDF cutout of the control panel, they had a piece of plexiglass (acrylic) cut to lay on top for a nice, plastic finish. Trouble was, the acrylic chipped when the CNC router bit (made for wood) tried to cut it, leaving a rough edge all around. You can buy router bits made to cut acrylic, but for the price of the bit alone (about $40), I had a new acrylic overlay custom laser-cut by Pololu custom laser cutting. These guys were great. Even with the time to look over the design and give me a quote, I had the finished piece in my hands within a week.

With all the pieces of the box in hand, it was time to think about the controls. I bought my pushbuttons and joysticks directly from Suzo-Happ, manufacturers of American-style arcade equipment. These are the controls you remember from your youth, if you ever visited arcades in the US–big, beefy joysticks capped with bat-shapped plastic handles a clicky, indestructible-feeling buttons.

Despite some quite lengthy arguments that Japanese-style arcade controls are superior to American parts, I find that the Japanese parts feel flimsy and don’t offer the same satisfying feedback. Also, I intended the control panel to withstand pounding on from drunk and/or infuriated players, so the delicate precision of the Japanese controls seemed like a bad way to go.

The buttons themselves use small microswitches (the white things with the prongs attached to the bottom) to close an electric circuit when you press them. To use them to control the MAME software, you have to translate the opening and closing of the circuit into a keyboard button press. Building MAME cabinets is common enough that a company, Ultimarc, has sprung up specifically to provide circuit boards that translate arcade control signals into keyboard button presses. In particular, I used their IPAC VE board to connect all my controls via USB to the computer running MAME.

The last big piece to consider was the computer that would fit inside the box and run MAME. I didn’t have a lot of space to work with, so I was restricted to looking for very small-form-factor boards. I ended up going with Intel’s DG45FC, a mini-ITX board about 8 inches to a side that had integrated video with HDMI out. To keep power consumption low and noise down (and to save money), I paired it with a low-end but still speedy 45nm Pentium 5200 dual-core chip. I got an ITX power supply to mount elsewhere in the box (more on that later).

With the parts decided, Doug and I headed back to the wood shop for another day of construction. The control panel is cut out of 3/4″ MDF, which is pretty thick, and I thought it made the joysticks sit too low. So, we started out by routing out half the thickness of the board around the joystick mounts. It was my first experience using a router, which seems to be the solution to pretty much every wood working problem. Not pictured is the trickiest routing task we faced that day: cutting a 1/16″ slot all around the edge of the control panel to install T-molding for a nice finish to the edge. Doug had to handle that one.

Next, we drilled holes in the bottom of the box to mount the motherboard. Here’s a test of the fit–the fan gives away how tiny the board is:

After cutting holes in the rear panel for the power supply and cords, we loosely assembled the box to prepare to glue it all together.

We covered all the mating pieces with standard wood glue, squared them up and clamped them. One of the nice things about renting time in a big wood shop is access to an unlimited supply of clamps. We may have taken things too far.

We let the box set up while we got dinner, then picked it up and drove back to Oakland. We got in at 9pm, but we had too much momentum not to start working on the electronics of the control panel immediately. We sandwiched a print of The Great Wave between the MDF and the laser-cut acrylic. We tacked it in place with two buttons, then trimmed away the excess from around the edge and each button hole.

Next, we bolted on the rest of the buttons and the joysticks and drilled holes to mount the keyboard encoder.

Fueled by mexican beer, we dove into stripping, crimping and soldering the signal wires for all the controls. Doug brought his Metcal soldering iron, which made the whole thing a breeze.

By the time we went to bed, all the wiring was complete.

Over the next week as the last parts arrived, I painted the box, installed the hinge to hold the control panel on, and added the T-molding around the edge. Here’s a picture of the interior of the final, assembled box:

The one cable you see leaving on the left is the HDMI cord that carries audio and video to the TV. I rigged up an extra green button for the power switch of the computer. Here’s one more shot of the box, from the back. You can see the cutout for the power supply, which also provides hot air exhaust for the enclosure.

…is the first joke t-shirt I have seen in years that I can imagine wearing: