![]() ![]() While you'll get cooking faster and with more heat, the fire will also not sustain itself as long as with briquettes. That super hot fire comes at a cost with lump charcoal. These are two characteristics you want when slow cooking meat, and while you can cook low and slow with lump just fine, it'll likely take more refuels and a little more watchful eye on the temperature. Still, the reason I switched to using mainly Kingsford was that briquettes gave me a longer burn time at more consistent temperatures when I was first starting out with smoking years ago. I'll preface this section with the fact that I have not done a recent proper test cooking low and slow with lump. You can reach these higher temps with briquettes, but it will require more fuel. This is great for anything you want to get a nice sear on like steaks and pork chops. So this means you can cook hot and fast with less charcoal using lump. ![]() When doing the same with the briquettes, the highest point the thermometer got to was 500. When I first poured the lump out onto the charcoal grate and covered the grill, the hood thermometer quickly shot up to 575 degrees. It's also worth noting that Kingsford briquettes produce a fair amount of off-smelling smoke during this process-a by-product of the additives that help it light better-while the lump charcoal lights up nice and clean with little smoke. #Briqs coconut topping full#My full chimney of lump took only 19 minutes until it was blazing hot and ready to go, while a chimney of Kingsford required 29 minutes to reach that same state. So the time from initial lighting until the charcoal is ready to cook-that's when it's covered in gray ash-can be important. While a gas grill just needs to be turned on and preheated for a five to ten minutes, getting a charcoal fire going takes time and energy. One common qualm with charcoal grills is the time to get them lit. The amount of these unusable bits of lump charcoal varies from brand to brand, and the bag of Cowboy I tested had very few small pieces, so it's worth trying different brands to find the best value. In bags of lump, the charcoal comes in all different shapes and sizes, some that are so small that they fall through the charcoal grates, creating waste. Since briquettes are manufactured, each one is the same shape and size, making every piece in the bag usable. So instead I'm talking simply about the fire power that comes in each bag, and in this regard, briquettes offer more burn for the buck. ![]() This is somewhat subjective as the value of using natural wood over a processed product is a personal choice that skews perceived value. Constrast that to the one twenty-pound bag of lump charcoal (Royal Oak is the common in my neighborhood) that sells for $20 and you'll quickly get an idea of the comparative price difference.Ĭost is just one factor though, there's also the measure of value. In Queens, NY (where I live), I can pick up two twenty-pound bags of Kingsford briquettes for around $17 at Home Depot. At the store you'll likely see that briquettes will come in much less expensive, pound-for-pound, compared to lump. The first question you'll be presented with in your charcoal choice is cost. Unlike the pure lump charcoal, briquettes are manufactured wood by-products compressed with additives that help them light and burn consistently. Lump charcoal is the product of the process in its purest form-pieces of wood burned down to be chunks of charcoal.īriquettes, on the other hand, are kind of like the fast food of charcoal they're cheap, reliable, can be found on almost every corner, but you really don't want to know what's in them. Charcoal is made by burning wood in the absence of oxygen. After receiving a bag of lump charcoal from Cowboy Brand, I decided to take this edition of Meat Tips to go through the different qualities of charcoal and pit briquette against lump and see how each fair within each category.īefore we can get into specifics of how each charcoal preforms, it's good to have a little knowledge of what this stuff is in the first place. It's much more of a gray area for me, as I see the ups and downs of both and have reasons to pick one or the other based on the application. It's a fiercely debated topic in the grilling world with die-hard loyalists who will go to all lengths to defend their fire source. It's a common occurrence that I'm poised with the question of which form of charcoal-briquette or lump-do I use an why. ![]()
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