Wood vs Charcoal: What’s Best for Your Parrilla Grill?

When starting out on your Parrilla journey, understandably, you may have a few questions about navigating this new, stylish BBQ. We’ve found one of the more commonly asked questions is whether you should use wood or charcoal when cooking on your parrilla grill. So let's walk through that.

 Keep in mind, now that you have your parrilla (congrats by the way), you should protect it. We have Flaming Coals custom-sized covers to keep your investment fresh for years to come. Grab your Parrilla 885 cover or Parrilla 610 cover here. Now let's keep going...

Our Preference

Personally, I prefer to use double-split Ironbark, but you could also use Red Gum and still get a great result. Whichever you use, you just have to ensure it’s been seasoned and dried. Anything that hasn’t been properly dried, will be difficult to light and you won’t generate the same level of heat.

Traditionally, the Argentinian Parrilla Grills use hardwood splits and burn them down to embers in a brasero, you’d then spread those embers across the bottom of the cooking area. You can keep your fire to one side as it breaks down in the bottom of one of our units, or, if you’re after that more traditional experience, we also have the Deluxe Double Parrilla BBQ, which has a centre brasero to light your fire.
 

Alternatively

 
If you can’t find any dry wood, you can use some natural lump charcoal as a substitute, like the Flaming Coals Lump Charcoal. When you’ve got the charcoal burning just add some flavoured wood chunks to help get more of that smokey flavour you’d have gotten if you’d used the wood.

Getting it going

To light the fire you just need a few firelighters and kindling. Building them in a grid or pyramid fashion will promote a healthy amount of airflow to really get that fire going. When you have some nice flames, you just need to place your splits on top, being sure to still give space for the fire to breathe.

Otherwise, if you’d prefer to use charcoal or didn’t have the wood on hand, we recommend using the Charcoal Starter Wand to get the charcoal up to temperature nice and quickly.

When your charcoal is heated or your wood has burned down to coals, break them up and spread them across the bottom of your cooking area, and you’re ready to get cooking!

For other tips and tricks, be sure to keep an eye out for other blogs and videos on the best way to make the most out of your Parrilla Grill. 

Check out our range of Parrilla BBQ

Check out our range of Smoking Wood 

by: Caleb Braker