Firewood is the key to backyard barbecue success
Editor’s note: This is the fourth column in a Barbecue at Home series in which Reid provides how-to advice on becoming a proficient backyard pitmaster.
For the aspiring backyard pitmaster, there are three basic fuels used for cooking and flavoring meat: gas, charcoal and wood. Though we occasionally crank up the gas or charcoal grill to cook steaks or burgers, real-deal barbecue is cooked with wood logs (“sticks”) in an offset smoker (“stick burner”) with a firebox on one end, a cooking chamber in the middle and a flue or chimney on the opposite end.
Your choice of wood will determine the success of your backyard barbecuing efforts. Here, I will describe the products and techniques I use to acquire and prepare the wood necessary to cook great barbecue at home.
First things first: What kind of wood, and where do you get it?
The wood used for most Texas barbecue is oak, specifically post oak. It imparts a pleasing flavor to the meat and is relatively easy to work with.
Because Houston is a barbecue-mad city, there are lots of places to find firewood for cooking ( just Google “firewood for sale”). Though it’s tempting to use those convenient packages of firewood you see at Home Depot or H-E-B, I prefer to source mine from dedicated firewood distributors.
I go to William’s Firewood, which provides firewood to some of the biggest operations in Houston, such as Pappas BarB-Q, as well as mom-and-pop joints including Gatlin’s BBQ.
William’s also accommodates backyard pitmasters. Pull up to the gate and tell the attendant what kind of wood you want, and he’ll lead you to the correct pile. William’s sells wood as “sticks,” i.e., 18-inch-long sections of tree trunks that have been split lengthwise into four to six pieces (same as what we use in fireplaces).
Tell the attendant how many sticks you want and he’ll help load them into your car or truck. Ten to 20 sticks will fit in a large trunk and is plenty for a backyard barbecue. The standard cost is $2 per stick.
Another important factor in choosing firewood is “seasoning.” This refers to the moisture content of the wood. Recently harvested wood has a high moisture content and is considered “green.” You definitely don’t want to cook with green wood as it burns slowly and fitfully and produces an acrid smoke.
Allowing wood to age for weeks or even months results in “seasoned” wood that is dry and produces a clean fire and smoke. William’s sells only seasoned wood, though it can’t hurt to ask the attendant for the most seasoned (driest) wood available.
Once you get the sticks back to your house, load them up in a firewood rack (available at Amazon or Walmart). You never want
to store your wood directly on the ground because of potential rot and critter infestation.
Even though these sticks of wood are already split, they are usually still too large to fit in your backyard smoker’s firebox.
To properly size the sticks, I’ll further split them in half using a special kind of axe called a maul, available at any home-improvement store. To be sure, splitting logs with a maul can be literally backbreaking work — make sure you wear appropriate safety gear.
In splitting logs, you’ll end up with a pile of wood chunks and chips — collect these in a bucket, as they are used for kindling when you start your fire. Also, the “bark,” or outside layer of the wood, will often come off, which is fine — de-barked wood is prized by many pitmasters as cleaner-burning.
Now that the sticks are thinner, I’ll cut them to length so they fit in the firebox. Using a table-top miter saw, I’ll cut 4 inches off the end of the stick. This leaves me with a 14-inchlong stick that fits comfortably in the firebox. The 4-inch-long blocks will be used for feeding the fire once it gets started.