Sawdust charcoal

[SunofTzu]

Unfortunately the charcoal supplier I use has run out of restaurant grade charcoal (apparently the double bank holiday weekend has "sucked the charcoal supplies out of the country")...somebody took the last 5 bags recently even though they were split ...I suspect it was someone on this forum Anyhow, the chap suggested sawdust charcoal which a local Indian restaurant in Northampton (Memsahib) swear by and gave me a box to try. He assured me that no binding agents or other chemicals are used in making this simply high pressure to compress these, anyone had experience of using this stuff (Pringle can to give some idea of the size of these)?

[Steve]

I've used similar stuff before. Unfortunately the results weren't great, but it could have been user error.

It burned really hot, and I mean really hot

I may have put too much in the cooker and I tried to do it minion method too, I just got a strange whiff coming off the cooker, I didn't put any food in it.

Might be worth trying again, but taking the approach of less is more

[Steve]

The stuff I had was pure compressed charcoaled sawdust no additives at all. In theory it should have been the dogs danglies but I felt the fire was being choked for the entire burn time, it never settled if you know what I mean.

[SunofTzu]

Having had a look at the box as Doc suggested and a quick google, this stuff is called Ecofire. It's supposed to be restaurant quality with no additives. I got a new charcoal basket for mine and I was thinking it would probably be wise to season that anyway so I'll try a little of the ecofire briquettes to see how it goes and kill 2 birds. Worse case scenario this stuff can be used for grilling

[SunofTzu]

Quick update as I used some of this fuel yesterday to do some ribs and wings as a test.

First off, I use a chimney starter (as probably most on here do) and it needed a bit of charcoal in it too in order to get enough heat for these sawdust briquettes to start. As Steve suggested these seemed to get really hot in the chimney but once loaded into my Frontier they settled down within 30 mims. They really settled down...I had used a full Weber chimney starter worth of fuel but had to have all the vents full open on my Frontier to keep it anyway near 225F. I suppose I could throw more on than I did but I got the same feeling as Steve that these things choked a bit. Burn time was about 3-4 hrs so nothing extraordinary imho.

In summary, I'm not convinced these are any better than anything like Heatbeads. I'll stick with restaurant grade lumpwood myself for smoking and these will be used for grilling on my Weber Kettle