3 Amazing Tips for Cooking Food with Firewood
People love to cook food over the real fire! Whether on a gas grill, smoker grill, a fire pit, charcoal grill, or even their own fireplace. Cooking with fire is fun, and it creates unique, delicious aromas and flavours that enhance many foods. One of the best ways to cook is over a real hardwood firewood fire. While good smoker and charcoal cooking can surely give you some sweet char-broiled wood flavours, there’s nothing like a real wood fire. There’s something romantic and very primitive about cooking on a real wood fire.
But nowadays most people don’t know about the advantages of cooking on real wood because technology has made things a lot easier for us. Between grills and gas stoves and easy to light the charcoal, cooking with fire is easy, quick, and hassle-free. But there’s something extraordinary about building a real fire and then using the heat for cooking your grilled meal perfectly. Sometimes people don’t want things to come quick and easy.
So for all of those people who want to cook on fire, those who want to get a bit more primitive and a lot more delicious. Here are some tips by Buy Firewood Direct on how to cook food with real firewood on your grill, fire pit, or your fireplace. It takes some time, and it takes some effort to get it right, but you will love the results!
#1 Choose Good Hardwoods
For excellent wood cooking, you need good firewood which burns long hot and gives off amazing aromas. Don’t skimp when buying firewood! All of the smoky, grilled flavors that you get in your food comes from the wood, so if you use cheap quality wood, your results won’t be great. So what is cheap quality? First of all, avoid softwoods.
Softwoods burn quite easily and hot but don’t burn as long and they don’t develop long-lasting embers at their core. Softwoods, for instance, pine, also tend to be resinous and many give off sharp smells which, while they’re not unpleasant, but they don’t pair well with food. Though you can use softwoods to help get your fire started, what you really should do is make sure that the majority of your firewood is well-seasoned hardwoods.
Hardwoods are denser than softwoods and burn longer and hotter. Though they take longer to get started, the extra effort is totally worth it. Many types of hardwoods make great fuel for cooking; some of them produce delicious flavors and aromas. Oaks is a very famous hardwood, which is known for its rich smoky aroma. You can also opt for fruit and nut wood as they tend to have a milder, sweet fragrance. Some of the best choices are almond wood, oaks wood, applewood, pecan wood, and pear wood if you can get them. Mesquite and hickory are also hardwoods that make excellent fuel. If you probably live on a vineyard, old grapevine cutting makes an excellent wood for quick fires.
#2 Build Your Fire Ahead
As mentioned earlier, starting a hardwood fire can take some time to get going. Additionally, it’s best if you cook with embers as much as possible. So, it’s good if you give your fire a chance to burn down as much as possible before you start cooking on it. This can be time-consuming, and it depends on how much food you’re planning to cook and how big your grill or fire pit is. It can take several hours to build a fire, keep feeding the fire to build up a core of embers, and then let the flames die down before you start cooking.
Pro Tip: It’s more preferred to do this type of wood fire cooking on an outdoor fire pit.
#3 Cook with Embers
As mentioned earlier, when cooking using real firewood, cooking over the hot ember is much better. Wondering why? A new fire, which has just been started, will give off much heat. Plus, there will be large flames coming up from the firewood. Even if you lay a grill grate across this young fire, you will not get as much as radiant heat needed. This will be a disaster for grill cooking! Your food won’t cook on the inside very fast, and the outside will catch fire and get burned in no time!
To avoid this and get the most of your firewood, you should start early. Red glowing embers will give off enough heat to cook, and they don’t have big flames too. If you’re cooking in a large grill or fire pit, start your fire early and keep adding wood for some time to build up a deep core of glowing hot red embers at the bottom.
Then let the top wood burn down until you barely have flames left, there should just be a big, deep pile of red embers. These embers can give a lot of heat, and because they don’t have flames, they are less likely to burn your food. Once you see a big deep pile of red embers, you should only lay your grill grate across and start cooking your food. If you’re cooking a lot of food and heat starts to die, stirring the embers with pokers will help the woods get more oxygen and increase the heat for some time. If you really need more heat to cook, you can add more firewood to the side and only push it under the cooking area when the wood has completely burned down.
Wrapping Up
Cooking using real fire is one of the best experiences one can have. If you love cooking, you should definitely give a shot to cooking on a real fire; it’s really amazing. The tips, as mentioned above, will help you get started with cooking using real firewood. These tips will take your grill cooking to the next level of fun and flavour.
Remember always to be safe when using fire! Follow all the necessary fire safety measures to keep you and your family safe. CIAO!
Thank you,
Glenda, Charlie and David Cates
