Which Charcoal Burns Hottest?
This post originally appeared on The Hampton Smoker
Cooks Illustrated have done their usually thorough head to head testing to determine which charcoal burns hottest. Let’s see what they found out…….
What’s the Hottest Charcoal?
Conventional wisdom dictates that hardwood (or “lump”) charcoal flames up fast and furious, while charcoal briquettes burn low and slow. For that reason, most of the outdoor-cooking guides in our library (including our own) recommend briquettes for barbecue (cooking ribs and briskets) and hardwood for quick, direct-heat grilling (cooking burgers, steaks, and chops). Two dozen grilling gurus couldn’t be wrong, right? We headed to the test kitchen’s back alley to find out.
We filled 6-quart chimneys with either hardwood charcoal or briquettes. Just before lighting the match, we outfitted the cooking grate with seven thermocouples — wire probes that feed temperature data to an attached console — and set about recording heat levels at five-minute intervals. We ran the tests a dozen times and then analyzed our data.
The results were startling. In every test, the briquettes burned as hot, or hotter, than the hardwood. In the grilling tests, the fires produce nearly identical heat for about 30 minutes-enough time for most quick grilling tasks. From there on, the hardwood coals quickly turn into piles of ash, while the briquettes slowly lost heat.
As we’ve always contested, slow-cooking a pork shoulder for eight hours would be a high-maintenance affair with hardwood. Our briquettes took nearly three hours to fall below the 250 degree mark; in that time we’d have to refuel the hardwood fire twice. The slow, steady descent of the briquettes is perfect for this job.
So what about our old assumptions? Hardwood is, in fact, the hotter-burning charcoal, at least when comparing charcoal pound for pound. But most outdoor cooks measure out charcoal by volume (filling a chimney), and a 6-quart chimneyful of briquettes weighs more than twice as much as the same volume of hardwood.
And briquettes are cheaper: Filling a chimney with lump charcoal costs about $2 compared with just $1.37 for briquettes.
Photo from www.lazzari.com
