LWP charcoal lighting help and questions

[Pipbrit]

Hi All

I've recently been getting into barbecuing, and have brought a weber smokey joe premium. I wanted a one touch premium, but not allowed to have one until we get the patio sorted in the garden!

But the smokey joe is brilliant. Ideal for cooking for two people, and something that I can just pick up out of the shed and get going, and have cooked lots of things with great success, such as ribs and pork belly. I got it with a portable chimney starter and some weber premium express lumpwood charcoal. Its been so good I've been cooking with it everyday

The question I have is using charcoal. The premium express charcoal has been really good using newpaper and the portable chimney starter, I can get it up to temperature in 15 to 30 mins everytime. It was really useful for a quick cooking session. I have however run out.

After spending hours absorbing information on this forum I decided to order some restaruant grade lumpwood from liverpool wood pellets. It arrived a couple of days ago and after cooking with it twice, I seem to be having problems getting it started, and it takes ages to get up to temperature. I'm using newspaper and the chimney starter as before, but i'm struggling to get it lit, and when it does it takes ages for it to get to the point where its ready to use, it can take up to 45mins to an hour! Once its ready there are no problems cooking with it

So I my questions are:

how do you guys light the LWP restarant grade charcoal? Is there something I'm doing wrong?

Can you recommend a quick lighting and starting lumpwood charcoal? the weber stuff was good, but not at £10 for a 5kg bag! I can use the LWP for long slow burning, but i need something that's quick and easy to light and can be ready really quickly for cooking stuff like chicken, steaks etc. I'm contemplating some big k non-restaraunt grade lumpwood charcoal for this job.

Thanks in advance!

[YetiDave]

I use LWP charcoal pretty much exclusively and have never had any problems getting it lit - a few sheets of newspaper and the whole chimney's blazing in about 15 minutes. Are you getting any smoke coming off the charcoal?

[Pipbrit]

I get lots of smoke off the newspaper, but not much off the lumpwood. It does spit a crackle a little bit when its lighting, the weber stuff didnt do this, but once its up and running it doesnt and its fine!

To light it, I follow what I've read on here and elsewhere, I use two sheets of newspaper, roll each one up into a donut shape, put it in the bottom of the chimney starter, fill chimney starter up with charcoal, light paper, put on weber and stand back!

At least thats what i do with the weber charcoal, with the LWP stuff I keep having to add more newspaper 2 or 3 times before i can get it to go!

[YetiDave]

I just scrunch up a bit of paper and light it, put the chimney on top and keep on feeding in paper until I'm happy with how much of it's lit. Could be that you're not getting it going well enough to start off with as it doesn't sound like the coal's got wet - it'd give off smoke if it had

[keith157]

I use the bags the charcoal comes in, it leaves a bit more ash then newspaper but burns longer. If I still have problems, that's where the weber or heat bead fire starters come in.
For quick 20-30 minute grilling I'd go for the cheapest supermarket/DIY store lump I could and save the expensive stuff for longer cooks.

[Tiny]

Keith
As always you beat me to the punch, it is grilling, so it would be homebase cheapest lump for me. I would even go briquettes as frankly it doesn't matter too much for grilling.

Save your lwp for clever stuff.
Cheers
Tiny

[Pipbrit]

cool thanks guys! I'll go with that, and pop down to homebase next time there's 15% off!

I did another light up with the LWP, i topped up the paper 3 times and then i was happy it was lit, it did smoke a bit, but i think it might be because it was re-used from the day before so it had some chicken juices dripping all over it. It did take a while to get going, but what I did notice is that it burned a lot hotter for a lot longer than the weber stuff.

I was cooking some marinated lamb rump steaks on the indirect side of the grill, just out of interest I hooked up a temperature probe next to the lamb just to see what the temperature was on the indirect side. It was up at 180c to 190c for well over an hour. With the weber stuff, if it ever got as high as 180c it never stayed there for long!

I have some spare ribs waiting for the low slow treatment... cant wait!

[NomNomBBQ]

I also exclusively use LWP, ive never had much luck with newspaper to start it.

A 2" lump of white firelighter under a starter on a pavement slab works for me, make sure if theres loads of wind its sheltered. The other thing to be careful of is that there isnt a huge lump of coal at the bottom of your starter, absorbing all the fire. I use the smaller leftover bits from the last cooks charcoal at the bottom of the starter. I also give the starter a shake when its 1/2 burnt to rotate the coal a bit.

I can see everyone has their own feelings on this but I think lifes too short for cheap charcoal, its generally rubbish and too unpredictable. Get a few mates together and order a bulk load of good stuff for the year, I know it works out far cheaper in the long run.

[keith157]

Good points with regards to ensuring plenty of air circulation, but must agree to differ with regards to using cheap charcoal for "quickies" 1/3 of a bag od Aldi's cheapest is under £1 and will cook 4 steaks quite happily (probably not well done though....see tag line).
If you are going to cook more than that then yes bring out the good stuff. If we have friends over I'd use the good stuff even if just for the aforementioned steaks as I wouldn't have to fuss over the bbq.

[NomNomBBQ]

1/3 of a bag od Aldi's cheapest is under £1 and will cook 4 steaks quite happily (probably not well done though....see tag line).

Thanks Keith, out of interest how much is a bag of Aldi charcoal in weight and cost?

The last LWP stuff I bought worked out at just over £8 per 12kg bag, making it ~70p a kilo. I havnt even seen cheap charcoal in the shops for that price. The last deal I noticed was Tescos were doing 6kg of briquettes for £6. Unfortunately there isnt a Aldi/Lidl anywhere near here.