Henry Ford helped popularize charcoal briquets | Hacker News Reader

Henry Ford helped popularize charcoal briquets

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22 pointsRickJWagner41 comments

> there are plenty of backyard barbecuers that would rather do their grilling over hot coals, specifically charcoal briquets.

Better yet, lump charcoal. My kamodo-style grill has a porous ceramic body, and using briquets does nothing but ensure that everything you cook on it afterwards will taste of lighter fluid -- but even on the weber, lump's far nicer.

It seems that if what you're cooking tastes of lighter fluid, perhaps that's because you're using too much lighter fluid? Unless you are talking about briquettes that contain a petroleum-derived accelerant, in which case I can only point you to the ones that do not.

the use of any fluid is not necessary and is absolutely out of convenience or ignorance of better methods. a sibling comment mentioned a charcoal chimney. like many, i grew up watching the grill get started with using lighter fluid, so it was taught without explicitly being taught so it is something most people never see.

i've since switched to solid wood chunks instead of charcoal. my backyard provides me plenty of kindling, and i find the wood chunks easier to start that way

Right, my point was that lighter fluid choice is orthogonal to briquette vs lump charcoal. I'll also second (third?) the chimney suggestion; they get the charcoal hot so quickly without fluid.

Or not letting it burn off, or something. I occasionally use lighter fluid (despite owning a chimney starter) because it's just plain fun. It makes my inner cave man cackle with glee because I made fire! When I do use it, I practically drown my briquettes in the stuff so as to get a nice big FWOOSH, but I've never ever had it affect the taste of my food.

No reason to use lighter fluid with briquettes. All you need is a chimney and some sort of fire starter (newsprint works and you can buy little bundles that burn like nuts and start the coals every time).

My favorite is to cover a wadded-up paper towel or two with a splash (or spritz, in my case) of vegetable oil. Dirt cheap, using things I already keep stocked in quantity in my kitchen, and even more reliable than those crappy $10/pack starter blocks.

Definitely want to find a similarly cheap source of actual pure charcoal, though.

I use egg cartons, newspaper/packing paper, and paraffin wax to make homemade starter cubes. It's cheap as dirt since the only thing you have to buy is the wax which is very inexpensive, and extremely effective.

You basically just wad up the paper into the egg carton cups and pour enough wax to hold it together (althernatively you can dip the wadded up paper in the wax then stick it in the cups before it solidifies). Cut a carton cup out of the carton, place it under the chimney, light it, and let it g.

We go through... a lot of eggs in this house, and I have other uses for waxes as well (such as waterproofing, candlemaking, and sealing wine bottles). This is genius, I'm stealing it.

...or so I'd like to say, practically speaking the minimal prep work of "grease a wadge of paper towel and spark it" is more realistic for my degree of laziness.

Ah I never considered adding some cooking oil to my paper!

I do like the pre-made ones because I live on a windy hill so the fact that they are overkill helps them not go out while lighting.

This is an excellent use for oil that is going rancid or that had been used for frying. Tastes bad but burns just fine.

I use dryer lint and corrugated paper-board. The dryer lint catches fire if you sneeze in its general direction and once the corrugated paper board is lit, it burns very hot because the corrugation acts as a natural chimney.

Dryer lint is likely to be plastic particles rather than natural fibers, depending on the materials you’re washing. You may not want to use it indoors or to prepare coals for cooking.

I tried drier lint. My issue was that it smelled _horrible_ as it burned. I doubt this matters very much for the food, since the starter is long gone by the time you start cooking, but I just don't want to be around it. Newspaper/brown packing paper is plenty cheap and available for me.

Along with other issues stated, I already keep my dryer lint as an emergency tinder supply for survival situations (or the occasional campfire mishap).

I've seen a few listicles on the theme over the years, but I wonder if some dogged academic has ever gone to the trouble of seriously cataloguing the various American traditions that are essentially just wildly successful corporate marketing campaigns targeted at prior generations. Charcoal grills, diamond engagement rings, green bean casserole, the Pledge of Allegiance, chocolate-chip cookies, etc..

I'd hope that we also have at least a few that were straight-up parody/mockery of the corporations, in the same spirit as the expression "pie in the sky" entering the popular lexicon via a leftist parody of a Christian hymn [1]. Perhaps someday an Nth cousin M-times-removed of Guillermo del Toro, Hideo Kojima, or Stephanie Sterling will be moved by the spirit of tradition to utter something like "we gather here today in the halls walked by our forefathers, to proclaim as they proclaimed, 'fuck Konami'"

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Preacher_and_the_Slave

Don’t forget the guise of Father Christmas!

Wait green bean casserole was a marketing ploy by Big Bean?

I've always wondered what it actually is when it crops up in American media, usually when Thanksgiving is getting ruined.

Edit: Not Big Bean, Big Soup wanting to sell onion soup mix! Just like a traditional dip in my country: https://www.maggi.co.nz/recipes/original-kiwi-dip/

I'm not tipping anything towards Henry Ford, who helped popularize antisemitism in the US.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/34/19200522...

Same goes for IBM!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

This book has been fairly and as far as I can tell, widely debunked, and if you've read it, the holes in the arguments it advances are obvious and manifold.

Also, the complete lack of documentary evidence doesn't help - it even overstates the importance of tabulators in the holocaust.

Lump charcoal is better in any case.

Disagree. As do many professional pitmasters

https://amazingribs.com/more-technique-and-science/grill-and...

Yeah. Briquettes are basically bottom of the barrel coal powder, sawdust and other additives mixed with a binder.

Yeah, you would never find, rocks, metal, nylon rope, or PVC in lump charcoal [0]

https://amazingribs.com/more-technique-and-science/grill-and...

Based on the difference in reception of my two comments in this chain, I don't think people realize that this was a sarcastic comment with a link to examples of exactly those things being found in bags of lump charcoal, shopping with a broader comparison of the properties of the two.

In my own personal experience, having cooked with both, I prefer lump charcoal lit with a chimney. I've never found rocks, metal, nylon rope, or PVC left behind in my Weber.

But well, that's just like, my opinion, man. The article opens with this disclaimer: "One has to be careful about generalizations here because each brand is different."

I have indeed not cooked with all brands of briquets nor all brands of lump charcoal, so same disclaimer applies to my opinion.

Obviously anyone is allowed to like what they like, and it's not that hard to produce good food when you grill/BBQ/Smoke on almost any fuel you prefer, but there is a lot of FUD in these comments about Briquettes. They provide a clean, consistent, repeatible heat, for a very low price.

This topic, like so many that touch on food in some way, gets bogged down in weird superiority complexes. I People can't just let people have different (usually read "wrong") opinions when it comes to food.

You'll note that one person expressed their opinion on lump. I responded with my contrasting opinion. Only one of those two comments got downvoted.

-edit- In case it wasn't clear, I don't think lump is bad. I prefer briquettes because they produce good, consistent, results (for me) at a low price. My link was meant to push back on the idea that lump was somehow "better/higher quality" than briquettes. I'm sure that one can buy cheap, poor quality briquettes that are bad in all kinds of ways. But obviously it's also possible to get bad quality lump (even if that is not representative of all brands).

The bad things a person did do not cancel out the good. One should appreciate the good things a person did even though they disapprove of the bad.

It should cancel out the credit, though. If a bad person does good things, they’re still a bad person.

They do when weighing up a person's overall contribution to the world.

If you're one of Hitler's personal heroes, that carries a lot of weight.

Ford also allegedly had a stroke upon seeing film of the concentration camps.

He's a mixed bag, generally - he had the engineers problem, he presumed being good at one thing, would make him good at and give him expertise in other things.

A phenomenon frequently encountered around here. :|

Your list of people you admire is going to be pretty damn short if the criteria is “never espoused something horrible”.

And I wonder if people who have a record of your life will look back in 2023 and condemn the views you held?

There's a spectrum of horror when it comes to beliefs. And how much suffering they are related to is important. And I can discern "considered horrible now, but culturally normal for the time".

Something like Hemingway's misogyny is gross, but culturally common at the time, and no-one who read his books tried to murder all the women. Not that he's a personal hero.

Ford buying a newspaper just to warn people about the International Jewry that started WW1 wasn't culturally normal outside of certain far-right groups.

And most likely the future will judge my beliefs a bit, I support the rights of women to access abortion. I'm sure in a few hundred years, abortion will be viewed as a crude intervention only practiced because our medicine was so primitive.

Or my belief that human rights are more important than animal rights.

> WW1 wasn't culturally normal outside of certain far-right groups.

That's absolutely not true. Anti-semitism was prevalent in the mainstream in the early 20th century. Not all that different than racism against blacks.

Hell, look at surveys in part of Europe. Anti-semitism is a sizeable minority now. Imagine what it was like a century ago.

I'm disappointed the article neglects to mention the use of actual coal in Kingsford briquettes. I imagine charcoal alone would not be energy-rich enough to get the temperatures.

Anyway, the environmental permit applications for their plant in West Virginia (close proximity to coal) are available online and make for interesting reading: https://dep.wv.gov/daq/permitting/titlevpermits/Documents/Ma... https://dep.wv.gov/daq/permitting/titlevpermits/Documents/No...

For example, one can learn that their VOC emissions are in excess of 100 tons/year or that they can use 80,000 tons of coal per year. I guess folks that are willing to saturate their food in vapors of lighting fluid wouldn't care about a little bit of coal...

Not an expert here, but I imagine they shove a bunch of wood briquettes into a barrel and seal it shut and then put it in a coal-fired furnace. The wood smolders but there’s no oxygen so charcoal is formed. No coal or coal vapors going in here. Thoughts?

I’ll add - you don’t need fluid! Newspaper or shopping bags and some canola oil works every time.

No, the briquettes have actual coal in them. I was surprised too. I’m switching to lump charcoal when my kingsford runs out.

“That char is then mixed with ground coal and other ingredients to make a charcoal briquette.” [1]

“Technically, charcoal briquettes aren't actual charcoal, but a combination of charcoal and other ingredients molded into easy-to-light lumps. Kingsford Charcoal, for example, by far the most popular brand in the US, is made up of bits of charcoal, coal, starch (as a binder), sawdust, and sodium nitrate (to make it burn better). For the same reason that SPAM is cheaper than a whole ham, briquettes are cheaper to make than all-wood charcoal.” [2]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingsford_(charcoal)

[2] https://www.bonappetit.com/test-kitchen/cooking-tips/article...

I had to look it up myself but even the brands with less fillers still include lots of fillers and that’s the only way you can do it

Wow thank you! Ive been partial to lump but eager to try out a snake method with briquettes. I think I will skip that now.

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