Got Wood? Baxter's Original

I love to smoke ribs with peach wood.  So when Baxter’s Original offered to send me out some chunks of of Georgia peach wood to try out I jumped at the chance.

But how does a person review wood?  Well, let’s see…

The first thing I noticed about the wood chunks I received from Baxter’s is that the wood looked “fresh.”  I don’t mean it was “green” or unseasoned.  It looked fresh.  When purchasing chunks of wood through the normal resellers like Home Depot, hardware stores or other resellers the wood often looks old and dirty.  The Baxter’s wood has the appearance of of having not been left out in the elements.

Now I don’t know with any certainty that new wood burns any differently that older wood,  but I suspect that just like anything with a flavor that, if it’s left out, it looses it’s flavor.  If you are properly smoking your ribs, or any other meat for that matter, you want just a whiff of sweet blue smoke.  By having fresh wood, I believe, you will get a cleaner smoke flavor in your final product.

One thing I did notice is when I lit my Weber Smoky Mountain the smoke became the desired sweet blue smoke much quicker than it has done with store bought wood.  I normally give the WSM 45 minutes for the smoke to calm down and I was able to put the ribs on 30 minutes after lighting the coals.

The pricing for the wood from Baxter’s is pretty much the same as you would pay in your local BBQ store.  With the shipping it’s going to be a little higher, but quality products are the key to successful low and slow BBQ.  So, I’ve got to think it’s worth the little extra cost.

I also received a few bags of wood dust.  I use wood dust in my ProQ Cold Smoke Generator and it was a fantastic treat to find cherry, apple and peach wood dust.  I decided to give some cherry wood dust a try out on some Chicago style sausages from Morant’s Sausage House.

I used the ProQ in my Little Chief to cold smoke the sausages.  Unlike the wood chunks I was able to see an immediate and obvious difference in how the cold smoke generator worked with the Baxter’s wood dust.  The wood dust was finer and lit much easier than the previous brand of wood dust I have been using.  The finer wood dust seemed to burn a little faster than I had been experiencing with other dusts.

Some pictures of the rest of the sausage cook:

After the sausages had smoked for 6 hours in some wispy cherry smoke I grilled them up on the weber.

A couple smoked and grilled sausages with onion rings and tater tots.  It was a great meal.

I used this meal as a chance to give the Big Sid’s Famous BBQ Mustard that I received in my Olympic Hockey bet winnings.  The mustard had a mild mustard flavor with a little sweetness that complimented the cherry wood smoke and seasonings in the sausages.