Lekto Restaurant Grade Lumpwood Charcoal

As before I’d like to start off by saying thank you to Lekto wood fuels for sending me some of their hardwood charcoal. Upon taking delivery I opened the biggest box and found three bags of charcoal inside. Each weighing in at around 4kgs. This made storage and use much easier than than using the 15kg bags I’m used to. Once I had done my favourite trick of opening the bag by unraveling the string in one go (see my instagram reels) I had a look at the charcoal. On first impression I thought the pieces were fairly small - especially compared to my normal “go to” charcoal. I emptied the bag out and starting to select some of the pieces for my cook, which was the Christmas turkey. I built up the charcoal as I would normally and lit. I used one natural firefighter in the middle of the pile and was pretty impressed how quickly the charcoal took to reach temperature. Also something to note is how little smoke was produced as the charcoal caught. I’ve had some charcoal before that produced so much smoke my wife came outside to see if everything was ok!

Anyone who read my blog at the time will know I had planned to cook the turkey on the rotisserie but I couldn’t get the bird weighted right on the skewer so I gave up and cooked indirect. After a couple of hours I noticed the temperature has started to drop off. On further inspection there really wasn’t a great amount of fuel left so I topped it up and finished off the cook. Everyone who was patiently waiting was very pleased with the meal. The subtle smokey flavour coming through the meat whilst not being overpowering.

I have since used up the other two bags in various ways. I’ve found that Lekto restaurant grade lumpwood charcoal is best used for quicker cooks as opposed to low and slow cooks, I think this mainly due to the size of the pieces. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I cook a lot more hot and fast meals than I do low and slow. Things like kebabs, sausages or burgers and even whole chickens do not require huge pieces of charcoal and the smaller pieces seem to light a lot quicker which is another plus.

I cooked a lot of food using the 12kgs of charcoal and as always had a lot of fun in the process.

Find the charcoal here