Now You're Cooking With Wood

©Professor Salt

Splitsville!

​This Labor Day weekend, you're probably planning on doing something involving an open flame and some meat (or at least s'mores). Where do you get good firewood in this county, where we cut down all our fruit orchards decades ago to build subdivisions? At The Woodshed in Orange. Why not just cook over a blazing inferno of wooden pallets or the generic firewood on sale at the liquor store? Because they're made of pine, and pine smoke doesn't taste so good. With manufactured lumber products, there's a good chance they're treated with toxic chemicals that resist rotting. Burn up the pallets for pep rally bonfires, but don't cook using wood from resinous trees like pine or eucalyptus.

The Woodshed sources their woods from orchards in California's Central Valley and as far away as Oklahoma. You can rest assured that if you buy a sack of their red oak, that's really what you're getting. Buying logs of some unknown wood species from some random landscape guy is generally a bad idea if you plan on cooking with it.

The Woodshed carries the widest selection of culinary firewood in Orange County, and sells to restaurant chefs and hardcore BBQ enthusiasts who insist on cooking over a live, wood fire. On a recent visit, mountains of logs were being split and stacked into neat cords of grapevine, cherry, white oak, red oak, pecan, olive wood, hickory, citrus and alder.

For the charcoal grill fanatics, conveniently sized wood chunks produce long-lasting smoke. Gas grill fans can use smaller wood chips in a wide range of flavors, all produced on-site. They even had chunks cut from used oak wine-barrel staves. If that doesn't flavor up your Oscar Mayers, I don't know what will.

The Woodshed
1015 North Batavia Street
Orange, CA 92867
714 771 2626