Caution- When selecting wood chips for smoking know the wood source!

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN $3.99 WOOD CHIPS FOR SMOKING AND THE SMOKINLICIOUS® BRAND

listen to our blog regarding wood chips for smoking

If you’ve ever looked at the wood chips for smoking products available at most discount retail stores, you’ll notice that they seem to have consistent pricing in the $3.99 or less bracket. Yet, you look at the SmokinLicious® brand and come up with a price that’s close to twice the cost. What’s the deal with the price difference?

There are many factors involved in determining the retail price of wood chips many of which I’m sure the average consumer hasn’t considered. What exactly are you paying for when you select a specific wood chip brand?

Let me give you some insight.

Wood Chips for Smoking- Let’s Start with the Raw Material

The raw material is by far the largest cost factor with selling wood chips for grilling, smoking, and cooking in general. I’ll make the comparison to cotton purchased by a t-shirt manufacturer. There are grades of cotton. Higher grades of cotton go into more expensive cotton clothing. Purchase a $5 t-shirt and you’re guaranteed a lower grade cotton was used. This means you likely won’t get more than a year of consistent wearing and washing out of that $5 t-shirt!

The same is true for wood chips. There are 8 different grades of wood or lumber for purposes such as cabinet making, flooring, construction, and pallets. Only one culinary wood company specifically purchases raw lumber material for cooking wood manufacture only. That would be SmokinLicious®.

Other companies will do one of three things; have a primary business in one of the areas listed above and use the waste product for producing the wood chips, or, purchase another company’s waste product to market as a wood chip grilling and smoking wood, or, have the company with waste product package a private label brand of grilling and smoking chips and deliver to a centralized distribution warehouse for the brand, something commonly done by equipment manufacturers who feel a need to offer a wood chip to go with the equipment.

Cleanliness of the Manufacturing Process

Another key factor in cost is the handling of the material during the manufacturing process. Now I understand that we are talking about wood and not a food item. However, if you are using a wood to add flavoring to food through smoke vapor from burning wood, then I see the wood as an ingredient. As with any ingredient, I would prefer to use something that is clean and pure since I will be eating this.

Since I’ve already pointed out that many companies use materials that are labeled as waste wood, you have no idea how the waste material was collected, stored, moved, and processed. You also don’t know what’s in that waste wood (treated lumber pieces, a mix of woods, some softwoods) or how old that material is which directly affects the moisture level. Remember, moisture is needed to smolder the wood and produce smoke vapor.

SmokinLicious® is the only culinary wood manufacturer that is Kosher certified, attesting to the steps taken to ensure the culinary products are clean, clean stored, and preserved.

Wood Chips for Smoking- Varieties and Availability

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WHY WE WON’T SELL PRODUCT ON AMAZON ®

SUMMARY:

We have been an online shopping source since 2005! We promote quality products and living wages for our employees! Producing a list of food safe woods, bark-free cooking wood only from the heartwood of a tree! Our internet online business brings “fresh” products to you! Which is why we won’t sell product on Amazon!

listen to our blog

I won’t deny that I am just as guilty as the next person when it comes to wanting more out of every 24 hours I can get. This is the main reason why I am an internet shopper. I rarely frequent an actual retail store aside from a wholesale club to purchase office supplies and the occasional trip to the grocery store.

I also won’t deny that I am an avid Amazon.com shopper! Just about everything you can think of, I have purchased: clothes, specialty paint, make-up, kitchen supplies, food products, small appliances, area rugs – like I said, just about every category they offer.

So why aren’t SmokinLicious® products offered for sale on Amazon.com?

“Negative” Feedback Services

Today, there is literally a service for anything and everything. That includes services to pay individuals to post negative reviews on a seller’s product and services. Let me be clear. SmokinLicious® certainly has had negative issues arise from time to time in the past 13 years. When they occur, we have our own procedure in place for remedying the situation which often results in great appreciation from the customer and a brand loyalty relationship developing. However, when negative feedback occurs when selling on Amazon.com, it can take a little as .0008% reported issues of the total products sold to kick you out as a seller! Kicking you out means you’ve lost all the inventory costs you started out with as Amazon.com ties up your account.

Open Market for Copy Cats

As anyone who has been in business for themselves can attest to, you spend months working on verbiage for your products, photo imagery for a gallery, and unique header descriptors to bring attention and get you sales. The last thing you want is someone stealing your work and posting to a seller’s listing on Amazon.com. That can and has happened! When it does, you are obligated to show proof of ownership of all content if you want to bring issue against an Amazon.com seller.

Worse yet, the other seller may be allowed to continue to sell a product that looks exactly like yours but maybe lesser quality in similar packaging! Plus, it is easy for your photo to be high-jacked and replaced with another image to cause high percentages of returns. Remember, there is a return option that states the item “does not match description,” allowing the buyer to make the return easily while you get a demerit from Amazon.com.

Sinking Price Margin

By far this is the number one issue for my brand to use Amazon.com. For a good majority of shoppers on this site, they are price driven in their choices. Imagine SmokinLicious® Grande Sapore® wood chips going against the company that sweeps wood shavings off the floor from their flooring or cabinet making business, placing them in a cheap plastic bag, and slapping a simple label over the bag. That company can afford to list the price at $3.99 a bag when they have no extra costs involved for the material, just the cheap packaging. We are not in the market to compete on price. We are in the market to compete on quality and purity of product. That’s it!

For the brand SmokinLicious®, we are all about quality, safety, legitimacy, and value! Our goal is to enable anyone around the globe who enjoys wood-fired cooking to do without having to think about the cleanliness and type of wood. We’ve selected the safest hardwoods to cook with, stripped them of all the impure bark, reduced the wood to just heartwood so you have the fillet of the tree and dialed in the moisture so you have success at the grill, smoker or plancha every time. You’ll find us online 24/7 to fill your needs in North America, the UK, and soon, in South Africa and New Zealand.

I hope you gained a better understanding of SmokinLicious® and why we do what we do! Leave us a comment and subscribe to get our latest articles and information on recipes, techniques, and the science beyond the fire, smoke, and flavor.

Purchase products:

Wood Chips: Grande Sapore®, Piccolo®, Minuto®

Wood Chunks: Double & Single Filet

More Related reading on “What Wood for Smoking” and other great smoking and grilling tips and techniques

Additional reading:

-THE SMOKINLICIOUS® STORY

-HOT TREND MAY NOT BE THE SAFEST BET

-WHAT’S IN THE SMOKINLICIOUS® WOOD CHUNK BOX?

-IT’S A MATTER OF PRIORITY! DON’T PUT US LAST!

Dr. Smoke our reasons on WHY WE WON’T SELL PRODUCT ON AMAZON at this time

“You are what you eat” is a saying that is truer today than it was years ago!

‘YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT’ APPLIES TO WOOD COOKING

Summary of You Are What you Eat

Healthy eating recipes, eat smart with Bark free cooking wood, cooking wood as a food ingredient is a clean eating basic. Responsibly sourced wood and only using heartwood Hardwoods avoids what woods are toxic to humans. Please remember you are what you eat when it comes to smoke flavor in food and your sourced wood.

We’ve all heard it, likely from our mothers. You are what you eat. If you truly understand the meaning of the statement, you know that we extract necessary nutrients from the foods we ingest to energize and stabilize our bodies. The nutritional content of what we eat determines the composition of our cell membranes, bone marrow, blood, and hormones. Every day we lose cells which is why the foods we consume are so vital to our body’s health.

Like Any Other Food Choice

If you’ve been a follower of my writings then you are aware of the stress I put on recognizing the wood used to cook foods is just as important an ingredient as the cut of meat, choice of spices, quality of oil, etc. There has been a lot of focus on the origin of food and how important it is to source locally both as a means of supporting local business and to control what you’re putting in your body. From our perspective, you want to know that the wood used for cooking is sourced close to the growing area. This ensures that there is knowledge about how the wood is processed before it gets to you and it assures the freshest product.

Minimal Processing

Just as with the clean food concept which focuses on minimally processed foods and as direct from nature as possible, SmokinLicious® holds to the same approach. Sourcing wood from forest regions (direct from nature) that are in close proximity to our manufacturing facility, provides us with the unique advantage to process into the various cooking products the hardwoods harvested that meet our strict criteria: 100% bark-free (we don’t allow any bark-on product to cross our threshold), 100% heartwood (no outer cores of the tree cross our threshold), harvested hardwood that is less than 6 months of age (ensures this is still a “green” product), chemical-free (no pesticide or growth enhancement techniques employed), and in raw state to allow us to process it into a suitable cooking wood size.

The Risks

If you love foods that are cooked with wood, then you should know a few specifics to keep you on the path to health and long life.

Hardwoods only!

• Softwoods or coniferous woods should never be used for cooking as they have elevated sap levels and more air in their cell structure. This causes them to burn fast, produce lots of sparks, and unpleasant flavors that are not ideal for flavoring foods. These include pine, redwood, cedar, fir, spruce, hemlock, larch, cypress.

Toxicity Risks:

• There are many known toxicities in certain species of wood with softwoods containing the highest risk. Other woods have the potential to cause sickness and in some cases death if a person’s system is already compromised. Most of the risks are associated with the cooking process rather than the ingestion of the actual wood-fired food. But know that if a balance of the wood-tar creosote is not found, then the ingestible risks of the food heighten. One of the best means of obtaining a balance is by starting with hardwoods that are considered safe for cooking, are clean, are bark-free, and derive from the inner cores rather than outer of the wood, where more impurities lurk.

Cooking Technique Influence Risk:

• At some point, I’m sure you’ve read about heterocyclic amines (HCAs) and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). These are the chemicals that form when meats, poultry, and fish are cooked using higher temperature methods like grilling. Why does this pose a health risk? Because these chemicals cause changes in DNA and when you change DNA and they are metabolized by specific enzymes in the body, you can increase the risk of cancer associated with these compounds. There is no definitive link between HCA and PAH exposure from cooked meats and cancer in humans. There is no way to differentiate between other exposures to the chemicals from the food exposure.

HCAs are found to only be associated with meat cooked at high temperatures. While PAHs can be found in other smoked foods. Remember, PAHs are also in cigarette smoke and fumes from car exhaust. A recommendation is to remove any charred portions of meat, continuously turning meat over the high heat source, and avoiding direct exposure of meat to the open flame to reduce exposure. Here’s a tip that can also reduce the risk of forming HCAs – marinate your foods for at least 10 minutes.

Purchase products:

Wood Chips: Grande Sapore®, Minuto®, Piccolo®

Wood Chunks: Double & Single Filet

More Related reading on this subject

Additional reading:

-Food & Smokehouse Processing Double Standard?

-TO BARK OR NOT

-COOKING WITH WOOD YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE TO THINK ABOUT YOUR SAFETY

-HOT TREND MAY NOT BE THE SAFEST BET

Dr. Smoke- As we promote a healthy diet enjoying different foods please remember “you are what you eatII” !