barbies barbecue fuel

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barbies barbecue fuel

Postby Stone Kamado » 07 Aug 2014, 14:58

I found some people have used barbies barbecue fuel, and they seems to like it. So, I gave it a try. I ordered on eBay. It was £20 for four 5kg bags. It is a wood chips highly compressed to make a huge chunks with a big hole in a middle. I used it for the first time to BBQ mackerel on Weber kettle. As it is not a charcoal, handling does not make your hands dirty. Each piece is really dense and heavy. First impression was good.

1. Lighting up
I used chimney to light. It was lit fine, but smokes that generates are enormous. It does not smell like chemical and is wood smoke, but not a pleasant smell like apple wood chips make. In 10 min, it got fire going well, so I put it in the kettle. Since these chunks were huge, I had to break it to smaller by hitting with tong. It broke easily. I arranged it evenly on the charcoal grate, put grill grate on top, and closed a lid.

2. Heat
It gets very very hot. Thermometer on the kettle lid shows over 250 degree C after 15 min. With the same amount of normal charcoal, I have never gotten this temperatures. However, I could not control the heat very well by closing both bents down to even 1/4. With charcoal, this should decrease temp very easily, but barbies was difficult. It still smoked a lot . I mean a lot. My wife was in the front garden and she thought something was wrong by looking at smoke coming from back garden!.

3. Cooking
I used grill grate to cook fish as it prevents flare and burning fish skin. However, oil from fish still caused a lot of flare up. This was probably partially attributed to the high temp Barbies generated. As I said, I could not control it very well. Smoke still kept going a lot. I mean a lot! At the end of the day, fish was completely smoked. I mean really really smoked.

4. Result
Completely failure. Usually smoke gives nice flavour, but usually the wood chips for smoking are used to smoke fish/meat. Barbie is made from recycled wood and its smoke does not give a nice flavour. No one in the family including myself liked it. It was also smoked too much as well.

Conclusion
Although it burns very well with high heat and easy to handle with your hands clean, I found that it is not suited to kettle BBQ cooking. If it is normal open fire BBQ which a majority of british BBQs are, it may be fine. But more advanced cooking i.e. indirect cooking with a lid closed, this is terrible. You cannot control how it burns and the smokes it generates completely destroy the food taste. I still have three and half bags left, but i will never use it again. They are not recommended.
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Re: barbies barbecue fuel

Postby keith157 » 10 Aug 2014, 09:19

Babies sell both charcoal, compressed as you describe with the central hole and fuel for woodburners. I wonder if they sent you the wrong item as the charcoal I have is quite light and not what I would describe as dense. I used it both for grilling and long slow cooks with none of the problems you mention
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Re: barbies barbecue fuel

Postby gazz_46 » 10 Aug 2014, 23:52

keith157 wrote:Babies sell both charcoal, compressed as you describe with the central hole and fuel for woodburners. I wonder if they sent you the wrong item as the charcoal I have is quite light and not what I would describe as dense. I used it both for grilling and long slow cooks with none of the problems you mention


Same here....

Can't have been the restaurant grade charcoal it's almost paper light and crumbly, burns very evenly with almost no smoke. I really liked it not sure if they stopped making it? Similar stuff I have used was from London log co. "E-char" much heavier and harder texture but again nothing like the stuff mentioned.

Quite pricey and came boxed at 10kg happy with both types.
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Re: barbies barbecue fuel

Postby Stone Kamado » 17 Aug 2014, 15:44

Thanks, guys. I think you are right. I thought it was charcoal when I ordered. It described as they were in the paper bag. But it came in the plastic bag :o So I suppose they might have sent me wrong one. They might have stopped making charcoal one too. It now make sense though that what I thought about people' experiences and mine are different. Well, I recently bought six Big K restaurant charcoal 15kg bags to replace them. I will stick with them from now on.
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