CHAPTER 6
Fuel
When it comes to grilling steak, the fuel source is a seasoning, so you should have some idea about what you want out of your fire when you get started. Do you want a hot fire or a more mellow one? Do you want it to be short and intense or long and slow? Do you want a lot of smoke or just a little? All of these questions will impact the kind of fire you want to create and what you want to burn, which makes understanding your fuel sources critical.
Of course, what we’re really talking about here is charcoal and wood. Gas burns clean and adds nothing of itself to the taste of the meat (thank goodness).
Charcoal is amazing stuff, the go-to heat source of the American grill, the flickering fuel of Fourth of July picnics and poolside barbecues. It has many wonderful qualities, which we’ll get to in a bit, but wood is fuel for the soul. After all, it powers Franklin BBQ, and the smell of slow-burning oak is the smell of warmth and happiness and dinner. Each fuel has its place and purpose, but whichever one you go with requires learning and practice. This chapter will help get you familiar with both and set you down the road toward mastering your cooking fuel.
Charcoal: Great Bags of Fire!
Every time we grab a bag of charcoal at the store, we fail to consider that we’re actually buying an example of one of the most important and oldest human technologies. It’s not known exactly when early peoples starting producing charcoal, but it goes back at least tens of thousands of years, if not longer. The earliest example of charcoal being used was over thirty-eight thousand years ago by Cro-Magnons, who adopted it for both drawing on cave walls (they liked to draw beef cattle) and for fire. Around 4000 BCE, charcoal was the catalyst of the Bronze Age: an everyday fire is not hot enough to melt copper, but charcoal along with a forced airflow can reach temperatures in the 2000°F range, the level needed to melt copper.
If you’re so inclined, you can do as the ancients did and make your own charcoal, which is not a bad money-saving idea if you have lots of extra wood lying around. Early humans learned to pile wood into a mound and cover it with earth, leaving only slight air intakes on the bottom. They’d light the pile, get it burning, and eventually seal it. Inside, the wood would keep on burning, though slowly and at a relatively low temperature. After several days of smoldering and when the mass had cooled, they’d uncover the mound to expose a pile of dry, crumbled charcoal, much like what we see today when we purchase a bag of lump charcoal. The process isn’t too different nowadays; it just takes place in large metal kilns that do the job more efficiently.
If you’re scientifically minded, you might wonder what’s going on inside that mound or kiln to create charcoal. It starts, of course, with the wood, which at a molecular level is composed of long chains of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. When wood is burned, first it dries out, as the free water inside it boils and then disappears as steam. When you hear a fresh piece of poorly seasoned wood hissing in a fire, that’s what’s happening. Burning along with the water are volatile organic components of wood that, when heated, combine with surrounding oxygen to produce combustion. The products of combustion are light and heat, water, and carbon dioxide. After the wood is completely incinerated, all that’s left is the mineral content, which we call ash.
The process of making charcoal involves restricting the combustion so all the carbon doesn’t burn away. This is accomplished by limiting the amount of oxygen that reaches the fire. In a fire, the carbon and oxygen molecules in wood combine to become carbon dioxide. If you restrict the oxygen flow, the volatile components and water burn away, leaving mostly pure carbon and minerals, or charcoal.
Charcoal burns much hotter than wood precisely because it’s lost all that water, as the energy required to vaporize water is considerable. This is also why charcoal burns without much smoke and without much flame when compared with wood.
The biggest drawback when it comes to charcoal? A yield of charcoal weighs only in the neighborhood of 25 percent of the original wood from which it was made. That is, it takes a lot of wood to make only a little charcoal. An article titled “Peak Wood and the Bronze Age” in the public policy magazine Pacific Standard describes how charcoal contributed greatly to the deforestation of the island of Cyprus, a center of early bronze production: “Some 120 pine trees were required to prepare the 6 tons of charcoal needed to produce one copper ingot shaped roughly like a dried ox hide and weighing between 45 and 65 pounds. One ingot, therefore, deforested almost four acres.”
The future of charcoal production may lie in looking beyond wood: after all, charcoal can be made from pretty much any organic substance. Some chefs, like Dan Barber of New York’s Blue Hill at Stone Barns and Adam Sappington of Country Cat, in Portland, Oregon, fashion charcoal out of animal bones in an effort to reduce waste. They then cook the very meats over those coals. Charcoal made from coconut (see this page) is big throughout Asia. No matter what the charcoal is made from, however, it’s going to give what it does—speed, heat, and consistency. Those are great, but to get the most out of a fire, you have to roll the process back and start with wood.
TYPES OF CHARCOAL, FLAVORS, AND SMOKE
Given how many different brands and types of charcoal exist, choosing what to use can be a bit of a headache. Lump or briquettes? Mesquite or oak? Everyone has his or her preferences, but it’s worth remembering that charcoal is nearly pure carbon. That’s wood stripped of every substance that made it distinctive. People talk about the unique character of smoke that comes from different charcoals, especially those made from different woods. But unless it’s improperly made charcoal that still contains some of the compounds of the wood, the small amount of smoke you get from the coals of various woods will not be terribly dissimilar. There can be differences based on the density and composition of briquettes, of course, but pure lump charcoal is pretty much just charcoal. We’ll get to that in a while, when we discuss the different kinds of charcoal you can buy.
Charcoal Briquettes
The charcoal briquette has a somewhat surprising history, going back to camping trips taken by automobile magnate Henry Ford and such buddies as Thomas Edison and Harvey Firestone. More like glamping, these affairs involved a large retinue (including a chef) conveyed in a cavalcade of automobiles, one of which was outfitted as a kitchen. A Michigan real estate agent named Edward Kingsford was invited along in 1919 to discuss timberland with Ford, who needed the wood for Model T construction. Shortly thereafter, Kingsford would broker a huge tract of Michigan forest to Ford.
Logging the forest and milling the car bodies out of the timber left much behind in terms of sawdust and wood scraps, which Ford, ever thrifty, hated to see go unused. So he decided to employ a technique invented by University of Oregon chemist Orin Stafford to put sawmill waste to use. Stafford found that by combining sawdust with a bit of tar and using cornstarch as a binding agent, he could make a light, portable fuel, which he named “charcoal briquettes.” Edison designed a briquette factory next to the sawmill, and Ford was suddenly in the briquette business.
Unfortunately for Ford, the briquette business was not as robust as the car business. He would have to wait some twenty-five years for briquettes to come into fashion. The Great Depression and a world war didn’t leave a lot of people in the mood for cooking out. In 1951, another group bought Ford Charcoal and rebranded it Kingsford, after the man who sold Ford the land. But the product did not take off until an event in 1952: the invention of the Weber grill, which soon made backyard cooking a national pastime and created a demand for little bags of charcoal.
Nowadays, there are many brands of briquettes on the market, and they’re all made roughly the same way they have been since Orin Stafford first introduced them. However, that process has been refined. The reason some people stay away from briquettes is the additives used along with the pure charcoal. For instance, the recipe used by Kingsford, which still makes the country’s best-selling briquettes, includes wood char, mineral char and mineral carbon (both extra heat sources), limestone (to improve the look of the ash), starch (binder), borax (to help the briquettes slip out of their molds during production), and sawdust (to help the briquettes ignite). Although seeing ingredients like limestone and borax might make you balk, they’re both naturally occurring minerals. All in all, despite the laundry list of additives, none of them is terribly concerning. But still, it’s hard to get away from the thought of cooking on all those substances that have nothing to do with wood, especially when there are other, cleaner options.
Those options are briquettes labeled “all natural,” which contain nothing but char and 4 to 5 percent binder made from vegetable starch. If you care about such things, why not use all natural? There’s really nothing to lose. And if you’re in the common situation of needing to add more charcoal to an already hot coal bed to extend the length of a cook, a fresh briquette that lacks additives is preferable to one full of additives. So we always choose all-natural charcoal.
Some really great all-natural charcoal briquettes are out there. B&B charcoal, based in Texas, makes some of the best around. Stubb’s briquettes are very good, too, as are Kingsford Competition all-natural briquettes. Royal Oak is another good-quality, popular brand.
The advantage of briquettes over lump charcoal is precision. If you’ve practiced and paid attention to your charcoal use, you more or less know exactly how much heat you can get out of one briquette, allowing you to manage your coal bed to whatever the desired temperature and to know how many more briquettes to add when the fire needs more fuel.
The last thing to say about briquettes is to ignore the kind known as “easy lighting” or “self-starting.” These arrive saturated with some sort of lighter fluid, so all you have to do is strike a match and throw it onto a pile of them and they’ll ignite. The problem is that lighter fluid is petroleum based and gross, which means you definitely don’t want it coming anywhere near your food. Lighting a batch of charcoal in a chimney (see this page) is easy and effective, making lighter fluid–soaked briquettes unnecessary.
Lump Charcoal
When it came to marketing this stuff, maybe they could have found a better word than lump to compete against the more suave-sounding briquette. Sometimes this charcoal is called “hardwood charcoal” or “charwood,” both an improvement on “lump.” Whatever it’s called, it’s a different, simpler form of char than briquettes: the original, basic, ancient form of charcoal, made solely from pure wood burned in a sealed chamber. No need for binders, accelerants, or igniters.
Because it’s pure carbon with no additives, lump charcoal should theoretically burn hotter but shorter than briquettes. That said, it’s difficult to compare the fires from both types of charcoal because lump is so varied in size and shape. Even if you weighed out the same exact amount of both lump and briquettes and then burned them, you’d probably get different results each time you did the test. If the pieces of lump are big and awkwardly shaped, the resulting coal bed might be hotter, as more air would likely be able to move through the stack. On the other hand, if the pieces are small and include a bunch of dust from the bag, the fire might be cooler because less oxygen can penetrate the mass.
Some claim that lump gives more flavor than briquettes, though in theory this shouldn’t be the case. After all, if the charcoal is properly made, there will be little to no actual wood left in the material. So whether the original material was mesquite or oak should make slim difference. In practice, however, sometimes the wood isn’t completely carbonized, meaning some wood compounds are left to burn and provide a bit of smoky flavor. (If you truly want smoky flavor in your meat, this whole question is moot: just throw a little actual wood on the coals and you’ll get as much or as little of the smoke as you need.
Lump charcoal does have a couple of drawbacks, both of which arise in lower-quality products. It’s not uncommon to find bits of foreign objects in bags of lump charcoal, such as nails, staples, cords, shards of plastic, and the like. First, you definitely don’t want these things to be cooking into your food. Second, their presence suggests the wood you’re using may not have been pristine logs in the first place, but rather some sort of reclaimed or treated wood from who knows where. Another issue with lump charcoal is that, because of the irregular shapes of the pieces, it tends to have a lot of useless dust in the bag. That’s because lump charcoal can grind down against itself in transit and in the store. This dust is useless and can even have the effect of inhibiting combustion if it gets into you coal bed.
If you’ve never splurged on a small package of expensive but amazing Japanese charcoal, or binchōtan, you should consider playing around with it, as it’s amazing stuff. For instance, it clangs like metal when you bang it together. While it has an eerie whitish gray cast like a White Walker, it in fact burns really, really hot and maintains that heat for hours and hours. And if you don’t need a 900°F heat source for a full five or six hours, you can submerge the coals in water, let them dry for a day, and use them again.
THE BOTTOM LINE: LUMP VERSUS BRIQUETTES
This is always the great question. You want a lively, somewhat erratic fire that may get really hot but not last long? Go lump. It’s perfect for searing steaks. Or do you want something more mellow and consistent that will burn longer and with some predictability? Go briquettes, which are the best anchor for longer-cooking meats.
Here are a couple of other suggestions to help you get to the heart of this debate. When you choose a brand of charcoal—lump or briquette—stick with it for a few months or even a year before you try something else. Get to know its trajectory and heating curves. Note its behaviors. Does it light easily and come quickly to temperature? Or does it start slowly and then maintain a very hot plateau for a long time? Or maybe it reaches a peak and then comes crashing down quickly? Once you have confidence you understand the way that choice behaves, you can stay with it as your go-to charcoal or endeavor to learn a new one.
Another option in the never-ending debate of lump versus charcoal is to completely ignore the question at hand and change the rules, much like Captain Kirk did when he undermined the Kobayashi Maru test on the original Star Trek. Why choose one when you can also mix the two charcoals together? Load a chimney half full with your favorite all-natural briquettes and then fill the other half with your chosen brand of lump hardwood charcoal. This way you get the stamina of briquettes in a dense coal bed. But you also get the flair of lump with its searing highs, and its irregular-shaped pieces will contrast with the briquettes to keep the coal bed well aired without too much ash.
Made using a process that goes back centuries to the Edo period (or perhaps much longer, as the record isn’t clear), binchōtan takes its name from a single artisan, Binchū-ya Chōzaemon, who perfected the process. Today, binchōtan is still made by artisans, as its process requires much more nuance and technique than Western charcoal. The finest is said to come from Kishu in Wakayama Prefecture, an area in the southern part of Japan, south and west of Osaka. The wood used for traditional binchōtan is called ubame oak (Quercus phillyraeoides), a native Japanese species with heavy, shiny leaves and a diminutive stature. These trees don’t grow like twisting, gnarled, massive live oak trees. Rather, their branches are relatively thin and wiry, making them not much of a building material.
The wood is harvested in mountains and brought to nearby stone kilns. The branches are generally crowded upright into the kiln, and a fire is started using the same wood. Then the kiln is mostly sealed up, to keep the temperature lower than what is used to make conventional black charcoal. This slow, methodical burning is monitored by the producers for up to a couple of weeks, as they examine and smell the smoke emerging from the kiln. When they can tell that most of the volatiles have burned off, they increase the heat massively and seal the kiln for a short time, which purifies and protects the carbon left in the wood without destroying it. At the right moment, the kiln is opened and the glowing, almost neon-orange branches are raked out (using really long rakes, as it can be over 1800°F inside) and instantly smothered under a mixture of damp sand and ash to cool them down quickly. This dusty ash covers the oak, giving it its distinctive white cast.
The result is a product of almost pure carbon, far purer than our black charcoal. Besides its role as a heat source, binchōtan has many other uses. For example, it’s a great water purifier: just drop a small piece of it into a pitcher of water and it will instantly start burbling the water through its negative space, filtering out the impurities that stick to the vast, microscopically porous surface of the charcoal. It can do the same filtering magic for the air in a room.
Because of its long life, you see it used at yakitori grills in Japan, as a handful of pieces can last an entire six-hour service. Also, because they’re practically pure carbon, binchōtan coals burn with almost no smoke. Jordan loves nothing more than ducking into a little Tokyo bar or izakaya, ordering a draft beer (the Japanese major labels like Asahi and Yebisu taste so much better over there) or a Hibiki with a cube, and then sitting back to watch the cooks grill skewers of everything from pork to chicken skin, closely above the glowing-hot binchōtan coals. There’s no smoke, and the meat is so near the heat that the evaporating meat juices are captured and spritz back up onto the meat. It doesn’t create flare-ups, just vapors of oils and other compounds seasoning the meat. Of course, fatty beef will create flames, so be careful. When cooking beef over binchōtan this way, most chefs use very thin slices that need the ultrahigh, clean heat to sear the outside but leave the inside nice and juicy.
One additional note about binchōtan: It’s hard to light, as it takes long, intense heat to get going. The easiest way to do it is to light a chimney half full of regular charcoal and place the binchōtan above that for twenty to thirty minutes. And, as mentioned, if you don’t need sustained high heat for five or six hours, you should submerge the binchōtan in water, dry it, and use it another time.
Charcoal made from coconut shells hails from Southeast Asia. Its fans love it for a number of reasons: It burns hotter than American charcoal and with very little smoke and ash, and it burns for a long time (though not binchōtan long). Some say the vapor it does emit has a sweet smell. Made from the spent hulls of coconuts, it’s more eco-friendly than other forms of charcoal, as the process recycles a natural waste product—no trees are cut down. It’s more expensive than conventional charcoal, but half the amount gives the same heat for the same length of time.
To make the charcoal, carbonized coconut shells (after about a day of cooking in sealed pits) are ground into a powder, which is mixed with starch (usually from the root of the cassava shrub, also the source of tapioca) and a little water to bind it. Perhaps the cassava starch is what produces the sweet odor. This mixture is extruded into thick-walled tubes and then baked again to remove the water. The result is very dense, heavier than conventional wood char. Like charcoal making everywhere, coconut charcoal doesn’t seem to be a particularly highly regulated industry, so quality varies from brand to brand and sometimes even within single brands. When not well made, coconut charcoal can feel messy because it produces a ton of ash while still fetching prices well above conventional wood charcoal. So, if using it, pay attention to its performance and demand better if you think it’s producing too much ash and burning uncleanly.
Coconut char is perfect for grills operated by street vendors in places like the Philippines, Malaysia, and Thailand. These cooks, who transport portable grills on the backs of their bicycles and motorbikes, are ready to whip up a fire at any time and grill narrow strips or skewers of meat. Only a small amount of charcoal is needed to fire these grills, which makes dense, hot, long-burning coconut charcoal the perfect solution. Because of the cost and large amount of space required, it’s not economical to think about firing the vast cooking surfaces of American-style grills, unless you’re grilling a variety of things over a period of an hour and a half to two hours. However, coconut briquettes have been embraced by some American cooks doing long or overnight cooks on their home grills. The lack of ash and the extended cook times make the briquettes ideal for a low-and-slow approach.
Wood: Hug a Tree Today
Enough about charcoal. Even if charcoal has been a species-altering technology (much as the cow was a species-altering animal), using it will never be the equivalent of cooking with wood. When Jordan asked Victor Arguinzoniz, a chef who cooks everything on his menu over wood and whose restaurant, Asador Etxebarri (see this page) in the Basque Country of Spain, is one of the greatest in the world, to name the most important factor in cooking a steak well (and he makes a great one), his answer was simple: “Use only wood.”
You’d have to be blind to miss—as backlash in the wake of molecular gastronomy and the advent of sous vide—that one of the biggest restaurant trends in the last ten years has been the construction of wood-fired hearths. They seem to occupy a central space in every other fashionable restaurant opening these days. Chefs such as Francis Mallmann of Argentina and his rustic, remote mountain hearths and campfire coziness have captured the imagination of a new generation of chefs and diners alike.
Fire has a powerful pull. No other fuel offers the savory, smoky, spicy flavor of wood—not to mention the primal sense of warmth and community, romance, and mental and physical engagement. The smell of sweet wood smoke causes people in the area to snap their heads up when they catch a whiff. The crackle of gently burning wood reminds the ears that this fire is its own living thing. It’s also a beacon of civilization and safety. Jordan remembers as a little kid backpacking through the mountains of Washington with his family and feeling terrified by the vastness and loneliness of the peaks, forest, and night sky towering above him. But once his dad or his uncle got that fire crackling, all fear, isolation, and forlornness lifted away, like smoke to the stars. Yet given all the wonderment of fire, most of the time we content ourselves to cooking over charcoal. Why?
As any good scout working on a merit badge knows, a good wood fire is a commitment, and not a small one. Not terribly different from a great affair of the heart, a fire-stoked affair of the hearth brings pleasure but also pain. Indelibly etched in Aaron’s brain are thousands of nights spent around a fire. At this point, he has probably spent more time tending fires than doing anything else. The sound of the crackling, the smell of smoke, and that jumpy light are as comforting as cracking open a beer. He’s fallen asleep next to fires more times than he can count. (He’s not that good at counting, probably because he’s also lost so much sleep staying up to make sure the fire keeps going.) He constantly smells like smoke and can’t always shower it out of his hair. But he likes to think that cavemen might have been a lot like that, too, except they didn’t have shampoo.
An energetic, blazing fire isn’t easy to create—it takes planning and time—and can be just as difficult to control. It has a mind of its own and often the muscle to defy you. It can be dangerous and wasteful. It’s a commitment of time, attention, and physical engagement. It’s an agreement that you and everything you’re wearing will smell like smoke until the next shower and washing. It’s an acceptance that you’re going to get slightly dirty and will have a good bit of cleaning up and ash removal to do. Furthermore, wood can be expensive, and you go through a lot of it in the effort to create and maintain a good coal bed.
But we all know it’s worth it—every grimy smear of ash on the brow, every shower you have to take to get the smoke out of your hair, every singed eyelash. Wood fire makes it up to you by creating the most delicious meals and offering memorable experiences that bring people closer to one another and to our own natures.
CHOOSING WOOD
Remember, steak is the ultimate piece of ingredient-driven cuisine, and the fire is a key ingredient, so think of wood as you would any crucial component of a dish. You should choose it with the same care you choose the meat. Follow the same guidelines as you would for smoking: hardwoods over softwoods, good seasoning over green, and sourced from healthy trees over sick.
Hardwoods come from deciduous trees (ones that shed their leaves annually) and produce some sort of nut or fruit. Examples include oak, cherry, maple, hickory, apple, almond, and many more. Softwoods are conifers and are to be avoided. They have needles instead of leaves and include cedar, pine, fir, spruce, and redwood. Hardwoods have a much slower growth rate and much higher density than softwoods and thus cost more. They also have a resistance to fire that makes them slower and more even burning.
Of course, nothing is ever that simple. Some softwoods are harder than hardwoods. Balsa, for instance, is technically a hardwood, but anyone who’s done arts and crafts knows that it’s way softer than pine. Of course, you never want to cook with pine, as it has highly flammable resins that, when burning, give off a noxious, sooty smoke that’s the last thing you want landing on your food.
ASADOR ETXEBARRI
Plaza de San Juan, 1
48291 Atxondo, Bizkaia
tel: (+34) 946-58-30-42 • asadoretxebarri.com
It is no surprise that we talk a lot about Spain in this book, seeing as it boasts a legendary carnivorous nature and is home to the greatest steak culture in Europe. Across the country—but especially in the north in Basque Country—are hundreds of little asadors, grills that specialize in steak. Unfortunately, the secret is out on the greatest of them, Asador Etxebarri (etch-a-bar-ee), in the small town of Axpe, about an hour outside of San Sebastián in the foothills of the Pyrenees. In the 2018 version of the The World’s 50 Best Restaurants, Etxebarri clocked in at number 10, which is absurd considering it’s open only for lunch except on Saturdays, and there’s no fancy cooking, no spherification or gelification or foams or even sous vide. Rather, Etxebarri is one of the most primitive restaurants anywhere—everything is cooked only on wood coals. This is chef Arguinzoniz’s way. A quiet guy, he grew up in a farmhouse that lacked electricity, so everything was grilled, everything kissed by smoke. Eventually, he bought an old, run-down restaurant in the center of town and started cooking the same way.
But Arguinzoniz’s culinary ambition soon grew, and he began to devise little mesh baskets in which to cook things like tiny eels and caviar over fire. He built a collection of mini-grills, each with a Santa Maria–like raising and lowering cable to control heat. And he purposed two ovens in which to keep a constant supply of wood coals at the ready, one for oak coals and one for coals made out of grape vines. After each service, the grill grates are scoured back to perfectly clean stainless steel. Victor wants no lingering bitterness from char passed on to his ingredients—whether langoustines, tuna, or porcini—all of which are impeccably sourced to display a purity and vibrancy we rarely if ever experience. Seasoning is only salt, olive oil, and delicate smoke. It’s not unreasonable to compare Victor’s mastery of the grill to Mozart’s of the musical note or Serena Williams’s genius with the tennis racket. Each dish gets its own little mound of coals, perfectly calibrated to cook with absolute precision. Items emerge from the fire vibrant and fresh, with the line between raw and cooked hard to comprehend. It is as if they still bear some energy, some lingering soul from when they were alive.
The savory finale of each meal (before the smoked ice cream) is a txuleta, or rib steak from a superannuated, locally raised dairy cow, sometimes fifteen or eighteen years old at slaughter. Tender, juicy, and intensely beefy, the steak bears only oil and some crunchy crumbles of sea salt. For most who taste it, it’s the best steak they’ve ever consumed.
SEASONING GRILL WOOD
Seasoning is the amount of time a log has had to dry out. It’s perhaps even more important in grilling than in smoking. In an offset barbecue pit, if you’ve got a raging fire of 750°F in your firebox, including a poorly seasoned log every now and then is not going to make a decisive difference. However, if you’re grilling and burning basically one log at a time, green wood can drive you crazy. First, the wetter the wood, the worse the smoke. Then, evaporating all that excess water in the wood costs energy and will keep the temperature of your fire down. For complete combustion and the good fine smoke you want, you need well-seasoned wood.
As always, when you go out to the wood pile, you’ll find logs of varying weights and shapes. Hopefully, most of them will be cut to pretty much the same size. Pick up several different pieces in your hands. Some will weigh more than others, often considerably so. You’ll be surprised that two similar-looking logs can feel so different in heft. The idea is to get a sense of the ranges and choose something in the middle. If the log is too heavy, it’s not well seasoned. Leave it on the pile for another few months (or years, depending on the climate). If it’s too light, the wood is extremely well seasoned and will go up like a match, which lends an unpredictable and charged quality to any cooking fire. Use that piece in the fireplace in winter or throw it on early in your fire and let it burn down before cooking.
(Note, too, that much of the prepackaged firewood sold in grocery stores is kiln dried, a process that speeds up the seasoning. It’s good for getting your living room fireplace hopping, but most of it is overseasoned for grilling purposes. We don’t recommend it.)
TYPES OF WOOD
Any hardwood can be great for grilling if you age it long enough. That said, different species of hardwoods tend to display different characteristics. They are subtle, for sure, but if you work with one kind of wood for long enough, you do get to know it. As with charcoal, we recommend that you commit to a type of hardwood for a few months or perhaps a year. Even without trying—you don’t need to keep a journal or a spreadsheet detailing your experiences—you’ll develop a keen knowledge and sense for the wood.
Alder
Most famous as a vehicle for salmon, alder is hardwood carrying a mellow, slightly sweet profile that goes well with fish. Jordan has cooked with it a bunch in the Pacific Northwest, where his family’s from, and knows that alder also sets a good fire and can be used effectively to gently season steak. When camping out in the San Juan Islands in Puget Sound, you can find seasoned alder, build a fire, and grill local oysters over it before throwing on some local coastal-raised beef. The wood has a sweetness that goes well with salt. Put alder with the more delicately flavored cuts like the tenderloin. It’s also better with steak that hasn’t been dry aged too long, as the funkiness from aging clashes with the sweetness of the wood.
Apple
As you’d expect, this classic fruitwood has a bright, fruity, and somewhat sweet character. It’s even more subtle than alder, though, and its flavor might get crushed by beefier cuts. Use it on delicate cuts, like tenderloin, or on thinner cuts that spend less time on the grill.
Cherry
A wonderful and fairly rare fruitwood for cooking, cherry has a delightful floral sweetness that we associate with other fruit trees. But there’s something else, a little more depth and richness that allows it to work well for both pork and beef. With beefy steaks, it can handle the heavier, more richly flavored cuts, like New York strip, bavette, and flat iron.
Hickory
A specialty of the Midwest and the South, hickory can be counted on for relatively strong flavors, but also for strong and long burn times, which makes it a great foundation for a fire. Aaron has only good things to say about cooking with hickory; it’s his second choice after oak. Hickory may be a little sweeter than oak, but it burns just as consistently. The flavor it imparts to the meat gives a sense of depth and umami, a rich savory note, and an abiding sweetness. It’s great for the rich, beefy cuts, like ribeye, porterhouse, and strip.
Mesquite
The controversial wood—some love it, some hate it. More than any other kind of smoke, mesquite can always be recognized. It’s usually not Aaron’s first choice—it doesn’t have that softness or sweetness of oak. Mesquite is a hardwood that is indeed very hard and very dense. Aged mesquite is a different story, though—it grills great! It just takes a long time to season properly. Mesquite tends to burn quickly and hot, which is why it’s popular for charcoal. (Also because it grows in inhospitable places, often as a pest, choking out grasslands for grazing.) Its massive root system makes it hard to remove, and its thorns can cut through anything, including car tires. It’s an ornery wood with an ornery flavor. Used in too great an amount, its harsh, peppery flavor will dominate any ingredient. That’s why you don’t want to smoke things over it. However, carefully used in short-cooking situations, such as flank or skirt steaks, mesquite can be acceptable.
Oak
May the smell of oak be with you. Even just saying “oak smoke” sounds good. (Aaron likes to joke about coming up with some sort of fragrance line based on oak, like Oak Smoke Joke!) Post oak is the signature wood of Central Texas, and it’s the sweetest, richest, cleanest-burning, straight, easy-to-handle wood there is. It’s perfect for everything. You can almost never go wrong with any good old oak, however. Red oak, white oak—use anything but green oak. Actually, live oak needs a few years of seasoning before its character is rid of a somewhat intense herbal greenness. Of course, the Central Texas favorite post oak continues to be a blessing. It not only burns beautifully but also offers a lovely balanced flavor. In general, oak brings some undertones of vanilla to a profile steeped in spiciness and sweetness. It’s more savory than fruitwoods, but more high-toned than hickory.
Pecan
The pecan is actually a part of the hickory family and closely related to the walnut. The wood has a delicate fruitiness to it, with some hints of nut and spice. It tends to burn long but fairly cool and without too much smoke. In the fall, when the pecan nuts hit the ground, some people even throw spent pecan shells into their fires before putting on the steaks to add a spicy, sweet tinge to the smoke.
Grape Vine
Now that nearly every state is producing some sort of wine from grapes, it means nearly everyone has the opportunity to get grape vines for cooking. This is a woody substance, but not from a tree. Using vines is a good way to reproduce some of the flavor of a good steak cooked over fire in places like Tuscany or rural France. Jordan once stayed for a couple of nights in a three-hundred-year-old stone house in the town of Panicale, Umbria, in Italy. The house had a big, old fireplace and was close to a great Italian butcher. He couldn’t resist trying to do a bistecca fiorentina, the great steak of Tuscany, so he bought a huge, two-and-a-half-inch-thick porterhouse from the butcher and then drove up behind a nearby winery and grabbed a trunkful of old grape vines piled behind a stone barn. Back at the house, he built a roaring fire out of the vines. When the flames died down, he threw on the steak and cooked it until almost burned on the outside. The coals burned out before the steak was done, and it was still raw in the middle. But he didn’t mind, as that’s the way the Italians eat it anyway. And when you wash it down with some local, tannic Sangiovese, it tastes great.
While it’s not easy to find large chunks from thick grape vines (because few are removed each year), vines are pruned of their long canes annually. Most trimmings get stacked up and thrown away. But if you see some or know someone with a winery, don’t let them go to waste. Make sure they’re well dried, though. They’re cut off living plants in the winter, so if you collect them in February or March, bundle them up, and store them through the summer and into fall, they should be ready to go. A handful of dried grape vines thrown on the fire can add a vibrant, peppery spice note. Think of them as seasoning for the fire—add them to another wood, as they are too thin to make a decent fire or create coals on their own.
SOURCING GRILL WOOD
If you want to grill over real wood coals, it’s good to buy in bulk and store the wood at your house. If you’ve got a shed or a covered area, all the better. If you need to stack it on the side of the house, that’s fine, but cover it with a tarp in case of showers. You’ll want the backlog (no pun intended!) because you’ll find yourself going through a lot of wood, and you don’t want to have to worry about running out of it.
Finding a good source is necessary. Most areas, even urban ones, are served by a number of firewood delivery services. These are usually companies that are also in the tree trimming and removal business. Much of the time, the landowners just want the wood off their property, so it becomes a free commodity to the sellers. However, wood sellers have to have their own property where they can stack and age it.
Do a little research to find the most honest, reliable companies. For instance, if there’s a restaurant you like with a live-fire grill, ask the manager for the source of the wood. Perhaps that firewood vendor would be willing to supply you, too. If people are selling wood on the side of the road, ask how long they’ve been keeping the wood and what shape the wood is in. For instance, if you live in a rainy area and the wood hasn’t been aged long, it may require more aging before it’s optimal for using in a cooking fire.
It seems the price of a cord of wood (128 cubic feet, or a stack that’s four feet wide and high and eight feet long) has gotten more expensive over the years. We remember a time when it was $75, but in many places now it often runs between $250 and $450. (In Napa, where Jordan lives, it can go over $500 for a delivery—and that doesn’t include stacking; a truck drives up and the wood is just dumped in a massive pile in your yard.) And this depends on the type of wood. Softwoods like pine tend to be significantly cheaper than hardwoods. Of course, always spend the extra bucks on the latter.
CUTTING WOOD DOWN TO SIZE
So you’ve got your firewood delivered and stacked. It’s been aged for a few years by the time you bought it, so it’s good to go. Now you just need to have it in usable sizes for whatever your grill setup is.
The equipment you’ll want is an electric saw and a maul. You could cut your wood down with a chainsaw, but that can be clumsy and dangerous. A better idea is a miter saw (more of a finesse instrument) or chop saw (a bit burlier). These are both saws with circular blades that rotate quickly and can be raised and lowered by hand to cut through whatever’s in front of them.
A quick word of warning: These things are dangerous if used carelessly. Always do your wood cutting earlier in the day, and never under the influence of alcohol. Make sure the saw is well anchored and that the log is comfortably and stably resting under the blade. If the wood isn’t secure between the base and the side of the saw, there’s a real danger it could kick out violently as it is being cut, putting everything at risk. Please be careful!
Firewood usually comes in 16- to 18-inch lengths. For Aaron’s signature setup in the PK (see this page), he likes to cut that down to a 12-inch log, so a whole log fits snugly in the grill. Then the 4- to 6-inch leftover pieces can be used as small logs for making the base fire in the PK or in another grill.
The 6-inch pieces need to be split so they’ll burn faster and more evenly. As always, the tool of choice for splitting wood is a maul, not an ax. This is because we are splitting wood along the grain. (An ax is for chopping wood against the grain; a maul is for splitting it with the grain.) The maul is the lovechild of an ax and a sledgehammer. It is much heavier than an ax, and the point is to use its own weight to crack the wood in half. Once the blunt edge finds the grain in the wood, it effortlessly snaps the wood in two. You can get mauls with 32- or 36-inch-long handles, but if all you’re doing is splitting little pieces of firewood into smaller sizes and kindling, a 16- or 24-inch handle will be easier to maneuver.
Once you’ve sourced your fuel—whether it’s a quick bag of charcoal you purchased that morning or some perfectly seasoned wood you bought from a reliable source and cut down to the ideal size, it’s finally time to get lit—er, get your fire lit. Since you’ve perhaps gone to the trouble of buying well-sourced meat, dry aging it to perfection, and seasoning your hardwood for a year or two, a lot is riding on the success of this fire. In the next chapter, we’re going to put it all together and end up with something extraordinary to eat.
