Woods like Alder are milder and more suited to things like fish, particularly salmon, and shell fish. Whichever wood variety you choose, they all have something in common. Due to their density, all these woods are in the category of hardwoods. Hardwoods burn slowly so they are well suited for smoking food as they do not need to be replenished very often. It is important to open your smoker or grill as little as possible to keep the smoke trapped and maintain those smoke flavors. Wood should be kiln dried.
Pathogens like fungi and bacteria cannot survive the kiln drying process. Pathogens typically reside in the bark of the trees and bark cannot remain intact when kiln dried. The burning of bark can also add some undesirable flavors to your food, so I always recommend cooking with clean, bark-free wood. Using wood when grilling or BBQing instead of charcoal is easy.
Since our earliest antecedents were scavengers of animal carcasses left behind by predators much, much higher on the food chain, their ability to cook the Pleistocene equivalent of roadkill meant they could kill bacteria in spoiled meat, make it easier to digest and reap more developmental benefits from the food. Vegans may be the more highly evolved primates of the modern age, but archaically, cooked meat made us what we are.
Steak over a wood fire — Photo courtesy of Elizabeth Heath. For millennia, cooking anything, whether it was a woolly mammoth steak or a pot of medieval gruel, meant cooking over a wood fire.
And well into the 20th century, grilling meant grilling with wood. But with the post-WWII migration to the suburbs, backyard barbecuing officially became a thing. Charcoal briquettes — a joint-effort invention of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, no less — caught on as the clean, space-saving way to fire up those newfangled Weber grills.
Size and type will depend on what I am trying to do. For a slow smoke I will use a slow burning hardwood for coals and add small pieces of fruitwood or Hickory on the coals for flavour. If I am needing a quick hot fire birch with no bark works good.
The bark creates all the dirt smoke and bitterness. Birch is far too hot and quick-burning for a barbecue. Even hardwood oak, maple, etc will have too much flame and not enough heat for good grilling. You need a fuel that burns long and with a lot of radiated heat, which is why charcoal is the classic fuel.
Wood is fine it is just a lot less practical. Wood takes a fair while longer to make coals and is not entirely as hot as charcoal. That being said it does stay longer so if you want a more gentle longer lasting fire it may be better.
Charcoal is in essence just half burned compressed wood anyway so you are not loosing anything substantial by just using regular wood. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more.
Is wood a good alternative to charcoal for bbq fuel? Ask Question. Asked 6 years, 4 months ago. Active 2 years, 5 months ago. Viewed 35k times. Improve this question. Kaushik Kaushik 7 7 gold badges 13 13 silver badges 22 22 bronze badges. Birch is not one of your better fire woods. It burns down awful fast. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. Cindy Cindy What difference will chunks make?
As birch is a softer wood, it burns quicker than hard woods, so small pieces and chips would not be as desirable. TFD Smaller pieces of wood burn away more quickly, while big pieces leave behind coals more easily.
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