This book is free on these days only – 04/22/2014 at midnight PST until 11:59 pm on 04/24/2014. If the dates are the same that means the book is free one day only.
Do you love the smell of wood-smoked food? A rack of crackly smoked ribs straight out of the barbecue oven?
Or lamb chops and a chunk of tenderloin seared and then grilled over an open wood fire in the wilds?
Want to know which woods go best with which foods? Which are poisonous, and to be avoided? How the different flavours of different woods can lift a great smoked meal to an outstanding one?
“Woods, Fuels & Fires for Outdoor Cooking” answers all of these questions – and more. The book helps you to choose the best wood for any particular application, and to match exactly the right wood to the food you’re grilling or smoking. Introducing you to a range of different woods, it shows you how to use them and how to find them.
In addition to raw woods, it discusses the merits and demerits of wood-based derivatives like chips and sawdust, pellets and charcoal – and makes suggestions as to when and they work best.
A whole section of the book is devoted to showing you how you can make your own, premium quality charcoal – safely, at home, and regardless of how much or little yard space you have available. It explains why home-made charcoal is a better substitute for briquettes than its commercial equivalent, and why it burns hotter and longer. Construction details and plans are provided for making, simply and economically, a scalable charcoal furnace-and-retort assembly out of readily obtainable bits and pieces.
The book explains how, in the same way that differing soil quality and climate are major determinants in the flavour of wines from the same vine stock, so too is their impact on the flavour of hardwoods from the same tree species growing in different soil conditions and different areas of the country.
It also suggests, when wood is not available, how to use substitutes like coconut husk, corn cobs, and dried seaweed, and the special precautions that need to be taken. It characterises wood according to the density of smoke generated, the strength and flavour of the smoke, and the heat and quality of the coals produced.
Armed with the information in the book, anyone can make a good wood fire, and even if you’re a pro, there’ll be tips and suggestions here to help you up your game.
Get it now!
About the Author
Do you love cooking? Particularly cooking outdoors – on the grill, in the barbecue oven, slow-cooking in a cast-iron pot, cold-smoking and air curing a whole range of foods?
So do I!
And next best to cooking itself is learning more about it – and then sharing with my readers what I’ve learned from my own experience, and also from what others have so generously shared with me.
I’m learning every day! And nothing gives me more pleasure than passing on what I learn. Hopefully, many of the tips in my books will be as new, and as useful, to you as they were to me when I first came across them.
Maybe you’re new to cooking and would love to get into it, but (like I was when I first started out) are a tad apprehensive about where and how to begin? If so, perhaps you’ll indulge me if I share a little of my own philosophy with you?
I’m convinced that the reason more people don’t paint, draw, sculpt … whatever! … Is not because they don’t have talent, but because they believe the necessary underlying technique is either so arcane or so complex as to be beyond them.
Generally, this is simply not true! Betty Edwards, author of “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” proved that if people can be persuaded that the technique of drawing is fundamentally simple, most CAN draw – and draw well!
In this respect, cooking is a bit like painting – or drawing! Many who would like to cook shy away from it simply because they feel the technique is beyond them. (The pleasure given by a well-executed painting will last a lot longer than the pleasure derived from a well-presented meal, to be sure, but the opportunity to produce a masterpiece comes around much more quickly in the kitchen than it does in the studio).
My motivation to write books about cooking is something akin, I’m sure, to what motivated Betty Edwards to write her defining book on drawing. If I can impart some of the pleasure and excitement that cooking engenders in me, and at the same time make the underlying techniques easier to grasp – and apply – then I’ll feel pretty much fulfilled.
This is why my books are not primarily recipe books, but focus more on the systems, methods and techniques without which the best of recipes have a real chance of failing. It’s also why I go heavy on illustrations.
I’d love you to share in the pleasure cooking gives me – by sharing in the experiences, both my own and others’, which find expression in my books.
We’ll find even more common cause if you share a passion for the outdoors. While as a committed foodie I have an interest in all forms of cooking, my family and I live in Africa and have a particular passion for the wilderness opportunities it has provided us. We’ve worked out that at one (very privileged!) stage in our lives, over a period of about ten years, my wife Margaret and I spent more than 800 nights with family and friends camping out on safaris, wilderness holidays, canoe adventures – and “riverside living” on a wild stretch of the Breede River in South Africa, with jackals, lynx, black eagles, honey badgers and otters many times our only companions. In all that time less than a handful of nights were not given to eating food grilled, smoked or slow-cooked in the open, over a wood-fuelled fire.
Out of that enduring, lifelong interest my books were born. I really do hope you’ll enjoy reading them as much as I’ve enjoyed researching and writing them. I look forward to meeting you in them.
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