| Charcoal Cooking Information |
| |
For thousands of years millions of
people have cooked using natural
charcoal as their heat source.
Basically charcoal is timber that has
been cooked/burnt, during this process
the naturally occurring chemicals that
are in the timber are burnt off along
with a lot of the smoke.
Natural charcoal is simple burnt timber,
there are no added chemicals, starches,
fillings, accelerators etc, it is
certainly NOT what is commonly sold as
BBQ Fuel or Beads, these are man made in
factories and in our opinion definitely
have a chemical odour and certainly
leave a chemical 'taste' on your palate.
Natural Charcoal has pleasant clean
fresh timber small and subtle fresh
smoke flavour on your pallet, depending
on the method of cooking (no fat) there
may be no charcoal/smoke flavour at all.
Charcoal is used in many filtration and
purifying applications, easy examples
are water filters and in certain
applications it is used in medical
practice.
In simple terms it's a pretty good
natural product!!
Natural 'lump' charcoal (this is the
timber cuts, not compressed types) is
extremely clean burning with little or
no smoke, incredibly consistent in
temperature and burning times, heat and
flame produced.
It is cheap to buy and when used in a
cooker such as a Kamado the efficiency
of the burning is amazing, resulting in
little of the charcoal being fully used
at all.
Charcoal is much more cost efficient for
'long' cooking than gas.
Different timbers produce different
charcoals, each with its own
characteristics, some burn fast with
lots of flame and heat but not as long
in time, others may burn longer but
offer less heat and flame.
Some have strong odours and flavours
others are very subtle, almost 'sweet'
smelling, some produce more ash than
others.
The ideal blend is something between
both the above with a low smoke, low
ash, mild flavour and odour.
Charcoal needs a bit of heat and air to
get it to light and burn on its own, it
also likes to be warmed up or pre heated
before it gets into its best cooking
zone.
It always needs to be kept dry, and
often the rule that 'fresh is best'
applies.
|
