The difference between charcoal and charcoal briquettes

Matmail: Why does charcoal burn? Isn’t it already burned? Or is it only mostly burned? What gives? — Bryan Coon, San Diego

Charcoal is simply carefully cooked wood. Mankind figured out this one many centuries ago. The heat-producing part of fuel is carbon. Increase the relative amount of carbon in your cooker, and you can roast that haunch of mountain goat or yak fillet and can get out of the kitchen in half the time. Wood is about 50 percent carbon (coal is 90). You can up your wood-based carbon by reducing the wood’s hydrogen and oxygen content. It’s still done pretty much the way it was centuries ago. Logs are baked slowly at very high temperatures in a low-oxygen oven. This drives off most of the liquids and leaves the carbon. ,

Unlike charcoal, the irritating, ubiquitous charcoal briquette is made from roasted wood scrap, quick-lighting chemicals, and binders compressed into a little cake. It has less snob appeal than true charcoal but a thoroughly American heritage. The briquette was invented in the 1920s for Henry Ford, as an auto assembly line spinoff. Henry pondered the problem of how to squeeze a buck from the scraps of steering wheel and dashboard wood that were ordinarily thrown away. His crack staff answered, “Cook it, smash it into a lump, and give it a fancy name.” For many years, you could buy charcoal briquettes only at Henry’s car dealerships. Eventually the operation was turned over to a relative, E.G. Kingsford, and the rest is hamburger history.