Creative Chefs Are Crafting Custom Charcoal You Can Buy

The lengths to which chefs will go to customize the dining experience are astounding: fermenting their own soy sauce, burning vegetable scraps for ash salt, curing fish charcuterie — it’s all in a day’s work developing complex flavors and reducing waste at some of the country’s most innovative restaurants. Well, add another inspirational item to the list: custom charcoal.

Lychee fruit is a sweet star in applications like cocktails and sorbet, and at three-Michelin-starred restaurant Benu in San Francisco, 2012 F&W Best New Chef Corey Lee makes house charcoal from an unexpected part of the lychee plant: the branches of white lychee, burned low and slow for days.

“This centuries-old process results in an artisanal charcoal that burns exceptionally clean and at the highest temperature,” explains the page on the website where you can buy your own lychee wood charcoal for grilling. It’s one of the ways the Korean-born chef fine-tunes every aspect of his luxe and ever-changing tasting menu, showcasing dishes like barbecued quail with from-scratch XO sauce.

Applewood is the charcoal of choice at Northern Spy, keeping New England foodways alive in Canton, Massachusetts. “I suppose I have always had a need to figure out how to make many of the inputs I use in the kitchen in order to feel like I fully understand them,” says chef-owner Marc Sheehan. “As we cook with wood, and I oftentimes consider the flavor produced by the fire to be an ingredient in a dish, it just seemed natural to learn about the different fuel that we cook over.”

Sheehan always wanted to cook with flavorful applewood — “We are named for an apple, after all” — but found its usefulness limited since it burns at quite a low temperature. Instead, hot-burning oak is his real workhorse. As he was slowly working his way through a large supply of it, Sheehan started to experiment with producing applewood charcoal. “I would be losing the flavor produced by the applewood during its transformation, but gaining another clean, long-burning fuel source to use in the kitchen.”

While it sounds ambitious, Sheehan was shocked at how easy it is — especially for someone tending a cookfire for long stretches anyway. “We pack large applewood chunks into sealed metal containers with a few small holes punched in the top. We then place the containers in the center of a fire and allow the wood to cook in the sealed container for four to six hours,” he explains. “Any moisture or gases present in the wood burn off and are released via the small openings in the container. After the wood stops cooking and has cooled, we are left with charcoal.”

He loves to cook pork or brook trout over the resulting charcoal, as it has “a really subtle sweet flavor that is kicked up when fat or juices drip down on top of it.” It’s also a more sustainable use of his resources. Northern Spy cooks fires up the hearth every night it’s open, but not every night is equally busy, “and it sometimes felt irresponsible burning a ton of fuel for not a lot of covers,” he says. “So the ability to use the heat from our necessary cooking fire to make charcoal during slower services felt less wasteful.” Buy a bag for yourself at the host stand or online.

Sheehan traces his inspiration for housemade charcoal to a stint working at Tarrytown, New York’s Blue Hill at Stone Barns, where co-owner and 2002 F&W Best New Chef Dan Barber credits his lightbulb moment to a chance encounter with a farmer who supplies the pioneering locavore restaurant.

“About 10 years ago, I was in the kitchen straining stock, which we make with all the animal bones and parts that don’t go into other sausages and charcuterie,” Barber recalls. “One of the farmers walked through the kitchen and said he thought we could do more with the bones — which I thought was pretty funny because we’d been cooking those bones for six hours, extracting everything we thought we could. But he was right.”

Suddenly the bones that Barber considered “spent” helped him unlock another level of nose-to-tail cooking: bone charcoal. Using a special low-oxygen carbonization machine that never technically ignites, “We started out with animal bones, then began experimenting with shellfish shells, corn cobs, and other scraps from the kitchen. Each base behaves differently. The bones give a dense, mineral heat; shells lend a slightly saline quality; corn cobs burn hotter and faster.”

Bone charcoal has become an important cooking tool for Blue Hill — not just as another fuel source but as a direct ingredient. “It led to bone-char cheese (cheese dusted and preserved with bone ash) and even to making our own bone china for the dining room.”

In addition, it’s now a crucial element of the restaurant’s storytelling and food education. “Using the bone charcoal as a cooking medium helps us explain whole animal utilization to our guests,” Barber says. “We get to show, not tell. When guests see the bone charcoal at the grill, it clicks for them.”