Just curious as to how you guys would go about it. I'm throwing around the idea of bundling up some of my nicer wood species for smoke wood and selling them. A couple of questions: - what size? I have mostly 16 inch stuff split between 2-4 inches thick. Im not too familiar with smoking besides on a pellet smoker, but I'm thinking 3 or 4 inch long stuff would be best? -how seasoned? I see lots of guys on BBQ forums say they smoke with unseasoned/wet wood and others say you should only smoke with seasoned wood. What species? I have a lot of silver maple, mulberry, some cherry and little oak. Ive read that silver maple is a lighter, more mild smoke. I'd probably sell it cheaper than the others. Mulberry is the easiest for me to get of the others. The cherry I have is the only cherry tree I've seen in my county so that would be a limited time deal. Any other input is appreciated, thanks!
Just curious how you split yours and how time consuming vs what you would need to make it worth your time? I have just got into smoking in the last few months. Bought a few bags of chips but I'm too frugal to continue to spend 4$-8$ depending on species for a at best 5 pound bag of chips. I hand split a fresh cut round of Ash and took the bark/sap wood off and only saved the heart wood. Ash is low moisture to begin with so at its 24% or so fresh cut moisture it was about perfect and gave a nice mild smoke similar to cherry or apple with just a little less sweet. I had it chunked to about 2x3x5 chunks and so far it seems to work well. From what I've read if wood is too wet it can give off tastes as it fights to smolder through the wet and kinda creosotes the food. I hand split everything and the next time I go to make smoker wood I think I may cut some fat cookies at about 4-6 inches and that would eliminate me having to chunk up longer splits once squared to the 2x3 splits. For the money I will save over time I may buy a Estwing Fireside Friend splitting hatchet to split my fat cookies. At store prices about a 5 gallon bucket or 2 of smoker chunks would roughly pay for the hand splitter. Maybe once I have the fat cookies and the hand splitter it may speed things up, but as my first attempt went with 16 inch splits made with an 8 lb maul and then 3 lb hammer and splitting wedge to break splits down to size, and finally running small splits through the radial arm saw so they weren't too long, all that effort was ok to do for myself the first time but it wouldn't ever pencil out to sell. I'm really curious how much faster the fat cookie method would be.
I would not sell silver maple as smoker wood. I sell mostly apple and Hickory and a small amount of oak for smoker wood. I haven't tried to sell cherry as smoker yet. I should its the majority of what I have right now. As for size I sell 3gallon buckets cut into 5"×5"×5" chunks. That are semi-seasoned like oak, hickory 1yr. Apple 6 months
Unseasoned wood is not the way in my experience an unseasoned split of cherry made sum black smoke ruined my bbq one time tasted like a fire in a bad way
Ive gotten really good results with seasoned red oak, cherry and crab apple and sum other species of apple that looked damm near rotted when we cut it down inside was all hard beautiful pinkish colored wood…i got a cord of hickory i cant wait till its seasoned
I'm following... I have a buddy that is pretty into smoking. I have apple, beech, hickory, cherry and sugar maple that I could turn into smoker wood for his use. I just need to find out if he uses a pellet or regular smoker. If he uses a pellet smoker, would I have to process it into tiny pellet size pieces, or could I chunk it and he could add it on top or somewhere to get great smoking wood flavor? I'll find out what kind of smokers he runs.
