Charcoal of the Future?
Ever since Henry Ford and his brother-in-law fired up briquettes of sawdust, charcoal has been produced from industrial waste. Whether dust from the saw mills or scraps from furniture factories, we have relied on someone to turn this useless leftover wood into fuel for our grills and smokers. Now there comes a different kind of charcoal made from the husks and shells of coconuts. Technically referred to as extruded coconut charcoal, this material can be formed into virtually any shape to serve most any purpose from charcoal logs to briquettes for cooking. Coconut charcoal burns hot and clean, imparts a mild flavor, and produces a mild, sweet, but unique smoke. Coconut charcoal is huge in Asia where is is produced and is making its way into Europe and North America
An excellent example of this type of charcoal is Kingsgrill charcoal briquettes. These square briquettes are designed to burn evenly and efficiently and are self starting. Now I know that I have said that self starting charcoal is bad, but this “quik lite” doesn’t use petroleum chemicals to get is going. Instead each, dual layer briquette is infused with an all natural, organic lighting substance. You can literally place a match (wooden) on top of one of these briquettes and get it burning quickly. In fact these are ready to go in about two minutes. The lighting is actually pretty fun because these have almost a fireworks level of combustion when they first start out, cracking and popping (and producing a good amount of smoke) to get going. Once burning these briquettes glow orange and put out a substantial amount of heat. With a burn time around an hour and a half, these are not the sort of charcoal you would want to use for smoking, but these are excellent for grilling. If you see a box of this charcoal I encourage you to pick it up. Not readily available right now, but I predict you will be seeing a lot of coconut charcoal in the near future.
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Comments
Thanks, Derrick.
Here is a more in-depth review of this product:
http://www.nakedwhiz.com/lumpdatabase/kingsgrillbricks.htm
I want to understand why is coconut charcoal not good for smoking? I just bought a bar bq smoker and I liked the idea of smoking with something new like the coconut brisketts…. Please replay soon.
True extruded coconut charcoal is great for smoking. The problem is that you can’t really find it in the US. You used to be able to get it from Kamado when they brought it in from the Philippines, but for various reasons, they have switched to a vastly inferior product now that contains enormous amounts of ash. The Kings Grill briquettes also produce a lot of ash and so are great for a quick grill, but not suitable for sustained cooking in some types of cookers.
Dear All,
Quick / Instant Charcoal Briquettes are divided into “liquid fuel impregnated/dipped” and non-liquid fuel impregnated.
Liquid Fuel Impreganted (usually kerosene) are considered fast light, but still takes time of more than 10-minutes to rady to BBQ/Grill and in some products you still need to pour additional liquid fuel to get the charcoal burns faster.
A KingsGrill product is a non-impreganted liquid fuel, and therefore the volatile material (or non-charcoal material) is added in a quite significant amount to get the fire spread very quickly, and the remaning ash is quite a lot but consist of mineral (plus ash) which could be used as a fetilizer when mixed in the soil or other adequate growing medium.
We ourselves is the producer of quick light type of Coconut Charcoal Briquette which is Eco & Environment friendly (its even carbon cycle) product, and we call our product is Instant Light type (www.instant-bbq.com).
For those who did not like much ash, then you could try a Normal Light (regular) Coconut Charcoal Briquette which is burns hotter, smokeless, sparkless, odourless and last for approx. 3-hours grilling time.
Hi All,
Indonesia is the Archipelagic state that has big and small islands in a great quantity by thousands hectare plantation of coconut grows and ready to use. The largest one produce Charcoal Briquette in Indonesia are come from Batam Island, they are manufacture and own products like Coconut Shell Briquette Charcoal, Coconut Shell Activated Carbon, Mangrove Charcoal.
Our coconut shell charcoal briquettes are also offered in a simple way of packing. You can find out our “One Minute on Grill” more and herewith we invite you to join us and be our next lucky partners.
If you need more detail information please visit -> http://www.charcoalcarbon.com
Interesting, thanks. I do think it is importnat to open the eyes of many endusers about the high quality of ECO friendly products such as briquettes made on the left overs from e.g. rice, coconut or palm trees. To day the awareness of the ECO friendly products is increasing the only problem being that the price level for high quality products is higher than for low quality. Due to the crisis too many prefer the low class, which is sad.