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This charcoal came to our attention in one of the many "What's The Best Lump Charcoal" posts on Facebook. One individual
responded with Carolina Cookwood. Visiting their website, our interest grew.
Despite the high price, the charcoal looked
very good and we decided that we needed to review it and find out how good it really was.
Before we get into the meat of this review, we need to point out that this charcoal is not
your average lump charcoal. Perhaps we should let the owners explain it to you from a note
they sent us with the charcoal:
"We appreciate your interest in our CRAFTED charcoal. I just want to point out that this product
is designed to smoke. Our process is unique and it's our desire to create a product for the
folks that love that "old school" pit cooked flavor. Carolina white oak makes this happen."
Having used this charcoal, we can confirm that it is indeed a smokey charcoal. Essentially Carolina
Cookwood doesn't cook their charcoal to temperatures in the kiln as high as most lump charcoal
manufacturers. Looking at the charcoal carefully, you can see it hasn't been carbonized to the
same degree as most lump charcoal. You can also smell the smokiness without even burning it.
And you can feel from the weight of the pieces that this charcoal is much denser than many
other lump charcoals. So, if you are one of those poor souls with a spouse who said you could
buy a smoker, but doesn't want to taste any smoke, you'd best avoid this charcoal. Otherwise,
you should find that you can cook with this charcoal and not have to add a lot (or even any)
smoking wood chunks to get that smoke flavor that comes from cooking over real wood fires. We'll
describe the results of cooking with this charcoal later in the review.
Carolina Cookwood charcoal is made from white oak and comes from Blacksburg, South Carolina.
We have provided a map at right for your convenience.
This charcoal is one of the few brands that is sold by volume. This is always problematic
because the weight of the charcoal that will fit into a given volume depends on the sizes
of the individual pieces. Therefore, the weight of any given box is going to vary depending
on the size of the pieces in that individual box. This charcoal comes in a box that says
"1.33 cubic feet" and on their website, Carolina Cookwood says you will get "20-25 pounds."
When we dumped the charcoal out on the ground for sorting and weighing, this is what we
found:
| Large |
10.5 pounds |
51.9% |
| Medium |
7.8 pounds |
38.8% |
| Small |
1.2 pounds |
6.1% |
| Chips/Dust |
0.7 pounds |
3.2% |
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| Total |
20.2 pounds |
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As for the size distribution, as you can see, it is excellent. Just over half the box consisted
of large pieces, and almost 40% of the box consisted of medium pieces. The 3.2% of chips and dust
was Very Low compared to other brands. So, no complaints here.
On to our first test, the lighting test in which we note how many sheets of newpaper it takes to get
a fire established in a standard chimney starter. Carolina Cookwood is quite easy to light, taking
only 2.5 sheets of newspaper to get it started. This is Very Low compared to other brands.
As expected, while lighting, there is a fairly
strong hardwood smoke during lighting. There was a small amount of sparking and no popping.
In our maximum temperature test, this charcoal burned at an extremely hot 1233°F initially, then
settled down to around 1000°F. This was because this charcoal will sometimes burn with a yellow flame, just
like wood, because it hasn't been completely turned to charcoal, and flames produce higher temperatures than
charcoal burning without flames. In either case, these temperatures were Very High compared to other
brands. During the test, there was almost no sparking and no popping.
As for the burn time test, Carolina Cookwood burn time is High compared to other brands. When lighting with
a MAP/Pro torch, there was only moderate sparking and no popping. As always though, exercise care when using
any type of gas torch to light lump charcoal. The fire spread at a moderate rate and again, the smoke had
a fairly strong hardwood smell. Finally, the ash produced by this charcoal was very low compared to other brands.
So let's talk a little more about this smoky charcoal. As we explained earlier, Carolina Cookwood is a pretty
smoky charcoal and it is deliberately designed to be that way. If you don't like smoky flavors, you should
clearly avoid this charcoal. But if you are cooking with a smoker and want the flavor of cooking over a wood
fire, this charcoal will certainly give you that. But how smoky is it? Here are three photos of our large
Big Green Egg cooking a pork butt using Carolina Cookwood. The first was taken when the fire was starting,
and the next two were taken one and two hours later:
As you can see, this doesn't look any different than cooking with other brands of lump charcoal, but using
smoking chunks. But how did food taste when cooked with Carolina Cookwood charcoal? We did two things.
First, we cooked a chicken breast and second, we cooked a pork butt.
To grill the chicken breast, we just got a thin layer of lump burning in a Big Green Egg MiniMax and cooked
the chicken breast indirect at 350°F to an internal temperature of 165°F. How did it taste? It tasted
like it had been cooked over a wood fire. The smoke flavor was there, but not overpowering, just what we wanted
from cooking over fire.
To cook the pork butt, we cooked it in a pretty standard manner, indirect at 250°F in a large Big Green Egg
cooker until it reached an internal temperature of 195°F. (We pulled it a little early because it was taking
longer than the time we had allocated to the task.) The butt was slathered with cheap yellow mustard and coated
with Dizzy Pig Coarse Grind BBQ Rub. We pulled it and waited until the next day (smoked foods always taste smokier
the next day) to add some Western North Carolina
BBQ Sauce from Macs Speed Shop. How was it? For our money, just about perfect. It had smokiness to it, but
to our taste, not too much. Again, it was pretty much like cooking over "normal" lump charcoal with smoking chunks added.
So to sum up this discussion about smokiness, Carolina Cookwood is smoky, but it isn't scary. We thought the
amount of smoky flavor we got from it was just about right.
But now it's time to give Carolina Cookwood a rating. If you look back at the top of this review, you will see that
it got 24 out of a possible 25 stars placing it at number 2 in our ratings. It had a very small amount of chips and dust,
was very easy to start, burned very hot for a reasonably long time and produced very little ash. This is a no brainer and
Carolina Cookwood gets our Highly Recommended rating.
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